AI in Content Marketing:Hype vs Reality

0:00Janne Parri: Okay Jonathan, so you're deep into content marketing. So what's your take on all the buzz around AI and the current landscape in content marketing? Are there things that companies and us should maybe do differently or think differently?

0:19Jonathan Strutt: That's a really good question. And I just came back from an event where they talked a lot about that. I came back from OMR, one of the biggest digital marketing events in Europe. And I think one session put it really well that a lot of AI solutions are kind of looking for their nail to hit still. So we kind of made it a drill line between them that they're kind of like toy hammers. You can play with them, but you can't... Build a house with them yet. I, there's a lot of talk about general AI and I think it was a bit of cautious optimism that there's a lot of stuff that AI can do to help content marketing, whether it's, video editing and production, storyboarding, ideation, but in the terms of actual like the output.

1:11Jonathan Strutt: It's not really there yet. And we've seen a lot of consumers for B2B and B2C brands that they're really starting to get a bit of fatigue around AI generated content because it's just everywhere. So in a sense, I'm happy because content marketing is safe in that sense that gen AI is not going to come and take the writing jobs or the video production jobs away. But they're going to help. And they already are helping. They're helping streamline the production, whether video editing or proofreading, ideation. But I do think that people still overestimate what AI can do within content marketing. So I would hope I try to have a more realistic take, use it to help me with note taking and everything, but I tend not to use it for...

2:07Jonathan Strutt: Actual production in my content marketing.

2:10Janne Parri: Yeah, that is the thing with a lot of this tool. So it really helps that, but it does not like do 100 % there. You always have to like fine tune it or finish the job, so to speak. But on the other hand, the tools have been around a couple of years now. So people are really, really like expecting that something like has to be done and we can see companies that say that they are AI first and so on and so forth. It is a hard like phase to be in because yeah, the pace of change is so fast that we kind of have to jump into the wagon, but at the same time, we should look and see what comes. You agree with that?

3:00Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, I do. You have to have that kind of cautious optimism and be willing to, like if you just stick your head in the sand, the time is just going to pass you by and you're going to be left behind. But it's interesting what you said, kind of like how these tools have developed a lot. I was just thinking about the AI ChatGPT, know, they can write your blog, you can write your case studies, everything like that. It 2021, tail end of COVID and I was at my previous job. It was just before I switched, but there were a bunch of emails coming in, cold emails asking, saying like they have this new AI blog writing tool. And I was kind of like, these things probably aren't anything worth trying, but there's a particular email that I just remember was interesting. So I decided I'll take a meeting with this guy. And then I remember

3:57Jonathan Strutt: He took me through a demo and I remember it was of equal parts like amazement and terror because I could see almost the writing on the wall at that point. Cause it, I gave it a topic. He put it in and actually made a first draft that was surprisingly good. Like a surprise, like a first draft that if someone, you know, content marketer, a writer, if they give you a first draft, that's never like the first draft. They've usually gone through it many times and then they present it and then go on. So this was almost like it had been through a couple rounds of revision already. It was pretty solid as a first draft. So I remember seeing that in 2001, or 2021, sorry, and thinking like, oh man, like, do I have to start worrying about my job? I start looking for a new career? So that's late 2021, and now we're 2025. And I would say that the level that Chad GPT writes that hasn't risen.

4:55Jonathan Strutt: Much farther than that. So they're developing all the time, but I think we've seen the greatest gains with AI when ChatGPT first came out and then the next model. But now these later models have been diminishing returns on what they can actually do. So I think it's good to keep up with what's going on, but I don't see anything happening that you know. Next tomorrow, OpenAI releases a new model that suddenly everything is out of the water. Like it can ride better than any writer on the planet and anything like that. Like I don't see that happening anytime soon.

5:33Janne Parri: Yeah, I can, I could see the same things, but before we go any further, I believe introductions are in order. So my name is Janne Parri. I'm a web designer and your host today. And the topics of the day are well, AI, course, web content, SEO, and probably some other stuff. Luckily, I'm not here alone talking about these things. So Jonathan, could you introduce yourself and maybe talk about your background and your relationship to these topics?

6:11Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, happy to be on the podcast. So thank you very much, Janne, for inviting me. But yeah, I'm John. I'm a content marketer. I've been working in content marketing, mostly on the B2B side for past eight years, I suppose. I started out at a small startup as a copywriter. And then from there, you know, having a native, I'm originally from Canada, so I have, you know, native English. As my mother tongue. All the English stuff, all the content stuff, writing and website management kind of just naturally came to me with the native English. So I had no real background in web content or anything like that. I learned everything on the job. My background was basically in business, studied. I got a bachelor's business admin and yeah, basically learned on the job. From there...

7:10Jonathan Strutt: From a copywriter to content marketer, I learned how to edit images and even edit videos and make videos, write blog posts, create guides, like eBooks and everything. And I had a big focus on like SEO and then web design and like accessibility and usability. So really thinking like how the content. Not just making content and then putting it on the web, but thinking how is it going to fit on the web page and everything like that. And I was lucky to work with some very good agencies at my previous job who I learned a lot from them working with that. So now, yeah, I do a bit of freelance work, but I work for another company here in Finland.

8:01Jonathan Strutt: Doing content marketing and web design, content management and making sure that things fit on the website and don't break designs created by talented designers such as yourself. Yeah, that's, guess, maybe I could talk about why I got into copywriting. I've always had a passion for writing and I always loved reading.

8:32Jonathan Strutt: Reading and writing basically that's how I kind of started. Just wanted to get into that and then the content naturally was the next step. And I found I really enjoyed that as well. It was very, I'm a bit of a grammar stickler, like, and I have strong opinions of how things should be written and people like, I love to look at, love to find typos and let's just fix them. Like that's my kind of thing. So web content is important to me because you know, it's very important that a thing looks good if it's on the website and that you can't just put like, you know, on the front page, you have to adjust it, adjust the content for where it's going to be, you know. So that's kind of something that I am quite, I really enjoy that kind of, you know, small looking into the details of that kind of stuff.

9:18Janne Parri: That is nice. I'm somewhat opposite. Do not care too much about grammar. And of course, English is not my first language. So whenever I write something, there are probably quite a few mistakes. But then again, that's why there's people like you. But we started off with the AI, so.

9:27Jonathan Strutt: You

9:45Janne Parri: What kind of AI tools you use nowadays in your job and so on.

9:52Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, think ChatGPT is one of the main ones, mostly for, as I mentioned earlier, kind of helping me through it. For example, when OMR ended last week and when we came back, we had to kind of summarize all the stuff we had learned. Marketing was basically master classes the whole two days. So ChatGPT was great that I could just put all the notes there and say, distill these down into like some key takeaways or like kind of the major, the main trends that you found. And then I kind of looked through those and found that, actually this felt.

10:32Jonathan Strutt: Kind of what, like put into words what I was kind of feeling, but I didn't have, it saved me a lot of time going through and reading and remembering, okay, I'm gonna type this up. So then I just kind of use it to distill it further and further down. So once we had the key kind of trends and we could do it in takeaways and everything. So it saved, know, saved me lots of time. So going, using it to go through notes, transcriptions of like customer interviews, that sort of stuff is very, very useful. I use it sometimes for content writing or outlining. So, excuse me, if we have a topic we want to write about then if we have some information, I feed it to that and say, can you provide a couple of different outlines for a blog that needs to achieve X or whatever? And then it usually gives something. Then I pick one and go, okay, can you refine it a bit further? And usually I try not to do it too much.

11:26Jonathan Strutt: Because I try not to refine it too far because then they kind of like, you know, when you like have a, if you don't have like that blank canvas to work with, you have something, you have like a reference point and it's very hard to like think outside that reference point. So like if the structure is like this, then I start thinking only within that structure how to change it. And then sometimes I realize like, why don't I just start from scratch? So I try to like give myself enough inspiration. To work with but not like too restrictive, if that makes sense. Because then you just kind of like, that's your only reference point and then it might be just bad. So then you have to just kind of rethink the whole thing. That's basically the main one. I guess, yeah, really, ChatGPT kind of covers all the bases, but I mostly use it for...

12:21Jonathan Strutt: Handling some admin stuff and just processing my notes and helping me find some nuggets of information that I might have missed.

12:31Janne Parri: Yeah, I feel so same way too. Of course there are a million like AI apps and it's fun to try out new ones, but I usually come back to the ChatGPT because it gets the work done. Good enough. Have you tried any of those like specifically for let's say SEO related content marketing writing tools? Have you tried any one of those?

13:03Jonathan Strutt: I think I've tried them and I don't like them so much. Haven't tried any lately. I've only tried kind of maybe when they were just first coming in. I felt that they were, the writing quality is not the best. And then it felt like there's a lot of keyword stuffing. And also very interesting, they brought up SEO. That was a big talking point at OMR, specifically how LLMs are now kind of, you know, they're really eating into Google's search market. Like there's what, OpenAI, Perplexity, a couple other ones. But there's a report said that basically ChatGPT gets 87 % of all LLM traffic. It's like, that's like.

13:54Jonathan Strutt: When people talk about AI, they're basically talking about ChatGPT. And then there was a lot of talk about how Google, SEO is kind of funny that basically every sort of strategy or tactic that gets conjured up by the SEO wizards, Google then eventually bans it or punishes it. So first it was like, just getting a whole bunch of backlinks to your site, then Google put that away. Keyword stuffing, Google banned that. Or crush that with updates. So SEO is kind of trying to just stay ahead of the game. But now when LLMs have entered the mix, we've noticed, and I've heard a lot from other content marketers, know search has gone down drastically for a lot of websites, mostly because people are probably using LLM search. I don't particularly use it to search that much.

14:51Jonathan Strutt: You know, we, people are searching differently. So now as content marketers, we also have to update the way that we get our information in front of people. So I think those SEO AI tools probably maybe aren't that long for the world, or they really need to come up something new. Structuring, because I think a lot of the way they get found on LLMs is not necessarily content, but also structuring the content so the AIs. Or the LLMs kind of find those key summaries or snippets, something they can summarize up and then send over. FAQs, apparently LLMs love. So it's not necessarily about, it's still about the content, but not necessarily keyword stuffing. It's more like kind of structuring it. That's not necessarily something that AI can do. It kind of requires like someone to see the bigger picture of the whole site, for example.

15:46Janne Parri: Yeah, that's of course interesting because SEO has been around for a while and now all the SEO experts and people working with SEO are thinking that should I do something differently? And you mentioned the structure. I would believe that if you somehow write a good like article and it ranks, is, it might end up also to the LL. LLMs, but yeah, are there any other tips or tricks one should think of when or if they want their article to end up as the source material for the LLMs

16:32Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, well, I'll first say that I'm not an expert in this and this is something that I've had to play catch up with. These are not, I recommend there are a lot of actual LLMs SEO experts. Maybe if I can send them to you later, you can link them in the podcast or something. I'll try to find them. But.

16:50Janne Parri: Yeah, of course.

16:58Jonathan Strutt: The simplest tactic is one that's been working since Google started is basically have something that people are going to cite or use in their own content. So any kind of firsthand research, any firsthand data, that's the stuff that's hardest to make, but that's stuff that's going to rank and get people citing you, and then that puts you up. And that's also what the AI is like. Report or something that gives the stats and data, something that the AI, when someone's searching for, you know, how likely are people to use LLM search and you make a report on, you know, the likelihood of people in different demographics, whatever. Then they ask me, they go, I found this. And then now they're getting better at like citing sources as well. So it's going to cite right back to you. That's always been the easiest way, but that's not, sorry, not the easiest way, best way, but it's also the hardest.

17:52Jonathan Strutt: Because you have to, know, it's a lot of work to get first, get the data if you don't have it, then turn it into something compelling and then create it and everything. So, but I would also, if you can't do that, first you should start trying to get work on that. But in the meantime, I would recommend, know, trying to think how can you, create content on your site that can be kind of summarized, like summarize the key points of potentially a product page or potentially even blog posts. You could have like just an overview at the top, just kind of summarizing it quickly, which also readers might enjoy just kind of getting a quick overview of what's going on, what the blog post will be about. Because you have to like...

18:51Jonathan Strutt: Same as always been with SEO, you're writing for readers and robots at the same time. So just thinking like, how can we not destroy the user experience, but also make it so that the robots can kind of understand what this page is about. FAQs, kind of short questions with detailed answers. And also I think make sure to have like enough context. That was also another question that someone...

19:22Jonathan Strutt: They gave a funny example that someone searched for them in Google. The AI summary started talking about their dog because they both had put she. So it's like she is, she's talking about herself, she is whatever, and then she's talking about her dog and also put she. So then the AI is like, she, and then started talking about like asking about her dog when describing her. So like being like, I would say like, play around with LLMs and try to understand how they think and how they work and then look at your content and think, okay, try to think like, would the AI get out of this? Clear with context. And then, yeah, those are some kind of top of the head tips.

20:08Janne Parri: Yeah. I wonder if there will be some sort of structural or structured like a default way, technical way of telling the things to LLMs because we have like the schema markup, which basically tells Google about the same things that you mentioned. And I wonder if all already the LLMs use that or will there be anything as structured as that thing in the future

20:42Jonathan Strutt: I would guess so. If LLMs continue to rise and proliferate, like I would guess we're probably gonna make some sort of standard that people use that LLMs are right. These are just to help simplify things for everyone. And then starts the whole, you know, trying to game the system for LLMs and visibility there, but I mean.

21:03Janne Parri: You

21:06Jonathan Strutt: That's just how it goes. You can see when so many people start to use the search, when AI or chat GPD gives you a list of answers of shoe brands or whatever, it's like you already have, it gives you a pretty detailed, it can give you like seven. So you already have like seven choices there. And after that, like, are you going to really going to look for the eighth? Like if you're not on the, if you're not listed there, then you're don't exist.

21:35Janne Parri: Yeah. Do I remember correctly that OpenAI launched or is at least testing about some sort of like a shopping feature? Have you heard about that? Like in a way Google shopping, but just for chat, JBT.

21:55Jonathan Strutt: Hmm. Yes, I think I heard about that. I haven't looked too much into it, but it seems kind of a natural kind of shift over. They already give a lot of recommendations and can provide recommendations. Very interesting to see, for example, advertising in chat in LLMs could be the next kind of step. Advertising goes into everything that happens online, it seems. So, you know.

22:26Jonathan Strutt: Within the shopping thing, could you get, you know, sponsored results and how are those going to look? That's probably like a whole another topic, but very interested to see how the shopping, open AI and shopping feature turns out.

22:39Janne Parri: Yeah, and it would be comforting for a publisher to have some sort of like way to give out like the official material or knowledge about stuff other than just the e-commerce things. But yeah, we are heading way deep into the AI. A bit about SEO.

23:02Jonathan Strutt: No.

23:07Janne Parri: You mentioned keyword stuffing and all those things. I'm wondering where is the line of over-optimizing nowadays? What should people do and what they should avoid? Of course, the basic building blocks is that you should write something that is actually helpful and so on and so forth. But yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

23:34Jonathan Strutt: Well, first thing to avoid is don't put a blog idea in the ChatGPT copy paste it into your blog because that's just going to annihilate your ranking. So don't do that. I mean, depending on your size of your team and who you are, if you're just a one person show or you're a big corporate depends on the resources. But I think using AI to create a draft of the blog post is not bad. But just make sure that you go through it and try to. Add your own, add a bit of yourself into it. How I like, I kind of, it's gotten a little changed a bit, you know, couple of years ago we actually ran tests. So this is a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago. So ChatGPT has changed a lot since then. We actually ran tests on, we compared my blog, a blog that I had written to.

24:29Jonathan Strutt: Multiple different blogs that ChatGPT wrote. We gave it the same brief and we got it to do like four different versions and we put it through, we got people to read snippets, like we got some user testing there and we put it through like a grammar checker, like grammarly. And basically the, terms of like grammatical correctness and everything like that, it was basically the same, like it wrote at a very, wrote at a high level. I like to think I... Right at a high level as well, so were basically on par. But then, like with the qualitative, the quantitative data was, know, the results were basically quite similar. But the qualitative results were, a lot of people, like they could very easily spot, they spotted the, you know, the stuff that I wrote, because it was just quite different. A lot of the other ones, they said it sounded the same. And when I read it sounded like,

25:25Jonathan Strutt: Kind of sounded how I wrote in high school, you have like a 300 word essay, and you just write random, like you just add filler words to just pad the word count. You're not actually, like, you're just writing, but you don't really, I'm not that interested about it, I just gotta get this done, so you just like, you know, it felt like a high schooler trying to fill a word count on an essay, that's how I thought of it. So, you can really see that they're quite similar. But they have a good base, so I would say just.

25:52Jonathan Strutt: Put a little bit of view in there and that's gonna do already a lot. But just strictly AI content, Google is gonna come in and just hammer you down hard. Having a good site structure, like a good user experience, making sure the blog doesn't crash or doesn't take forever to load. Use images, try to like compress the file size. Like there are some, like without losing quality, there are a couple different tools, but. I can't remember which one I used, image small or something. I just put it up there and if there's a big image, then it'll just reduce the file size down, which is really nice without losing quality. So yeah, like I've seen sometimes you have people upload images and they're like, one megabyte or two megabytes, like really high quality images, but then site just like really doesn't load that fast. So making sure your site works and loads.

26:48Jonathan Strutt: Well is gonna help with the SEO. Mean, Google is looking for sites that people like. And so it's not just about the content, but it's also like how the site is actually, how the people actually use the site and does it like, if it loads, takes a long time to load, people are just like bouncing, then Google's like, this site isn't very good, and yeah, it's good to have, I think keyword stuffing is still like a valid tactic within Reason. It's good to have. Search terms and keywords there but you don't have to like I think kind of like what you saw maybe like five years ago but like in the first kind of paragraph there's every sentence had the keyword in it and then it's kind of like a bad reader experience as well kind of gets a bit boring but keeping you still have to have the keywords in there at some point so sprinkle them a bit less but still definitely got to sprinkle those in

27:46Jonathan Strutt: And then a lot of more of the technical stuff, know, the meta descriptions, making sure all your images have alt text, more people use image search and it could help with, I'm not sure how it could help with LLMs, but it might be that they also look at the alt text. So if you have detailed alt text, might provide some example images via that. Yeah. In general, make sure the site's structured well, that, know, your headers and everything.

28:16Jonathan Strutt: But if you're not that technically minded, then probably your website developer like Janne probably handles all that for you.

28:26Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I actually do that quite much. But, one thing that came to mind is of course, the amount of texts it has been, of course, a tactic for a long time, but it doesn't, you doesn't, you don't have to be like, a too clever person to know that. 3000 words for a simple question is way too much. So any tips or guidelines for the amount of text one should put on a landing page or a blog post?

29:13Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, yeah, it really depends. Like as you said, if you put 3,000 words for a simple question, then that doesn't help. You also have to, if something requires more in-depth explanation, then you have to give it that, give it those words. I would say, I wouldn't want to give like a hard word count limit, but I would say like, for example, for a landing page,

29:41Jonathan Strutt: Try to answer the most potential questions, biggest question about your product, for example. So put those in FAQs, which the LLMs will love. Describe what your product does in a compelling and succinct way. You don't have to give the full spec details, but you have to give something for people that they understand. And if your product is more complicated, then you're going to need more. And if it's just, I don't know, like a new smoothie, then you can say it's smoothie and then go into more a bit of the selling points. Or then that could be even more customer reviews or that could be more visual side. You don't have to worry about the words in that so much. Yeah, for blogs, kind of comes back to providing that firsthand data or research or something that people are going to cite.

30:36Jonathan Strutt: So, or side from. So basically if you are, you can have like a very, a thought leadership piece that is really only like 500 words. That's not necessarily SEO focus, you're not focusing on the keywords. But if you know, are a thought leader in your space and you share that, people are gonna read it and they're gonna cite it and it's gonna kind of build through there. If you're just starting out, you know, it's gonna be harder to. Rank with the 500 word blog post. But it doesn't have to rely solely on Google to find it. You can also do a lot of promotional efforts as well to get traffic onto that page. And then hopefully people share it. Google likes that. People interacting and linking back to it. That's, guess, one very important thing. And that's probably one of the, maybe we're going on a

31:33Jonathan Strutt: Off to another tangent, but one of the biggest lessons I learned in content marketing is actually like content, making the content is just like the beginning. You should spend like maybe like 40 % of your time actually producing content and the rest like promoting it even less. Some people say like 20, 80 basically. If you spend a week doing a blog, you should spend the next four weeks just like telling people about it, blasting it. So really like. That can help SEO a lot is basically just promoting your work. Don't publish a blog and let it sit and move on to the next one. Like start, have a promotional plan, try to get people to read it and comment on it, like it, like anything. That's gonna do wonders for your SEO, I think more than just churning out kind of keyword search terms, blogs every week.

32:21Janne Parri: Yeah, that's the thing SEO is so like a wide topic. You kind of have to have to be technical, you have to be a writer and nowadays even as you said, you have to promote the piece and that comes with all the social media stuff and I guess it would be a great thing if you can get your like blog post to go viral.

32:24Jonathan Strutt: Thank you

32:49Janne Parri: And of course there are things you can do on the social media side, but there's so much to consider. And on top of that, the whole field is people looking at some sort of crystal ball and testing out stuff. Are not too much official data from Google or any other search engine to go about. Yeah, it's very, very interesting at the same time, the whole field is like, at least I feel that it is like scared of the AI changes coming up, which we already talked about, yeah, lot to talk about.

33:41Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, so like how do you, if I can ask you a question, how do you handle the SEO side with your own customers?

33:48Janne Parri: So yeah, I basically do mainly web design and then the development side with Webflow. So if I do the whole like shebang, like whole website design and build, I usually start with some sort of keyword research. And of course I have this discovery phase where I... I try to find the relevant keyword, especially if the client has no history. It's a new, completely new site. If it's a old site, it's of course a bit easier when you have already a starting point. And then I just want to make sure that all the relevant keywords are targeted with some pages.

34:45Janne Parri: Usually like service pages, maybe some landing pages. And then I always recommend doing some sort of blog. Of course, all of my clients do not want to have a blog because they do not want to write. And yeah, then on the technical side, I of course make sure that everything is fine when the site is launched, like all the structural things are fine and of course the content should be fine, but many times the content is of course the piece that clients do not wanna like pay or they choose to do those things by themselves. So I kind of help with the content, but usually the main responsibility is with the client. So yeah, I always say to the client that we will do like

35:44Janne Parri: Like a lightweight SEO stuff, the stuff that needs to be done when we build the actual site. And then I tell about all the people who do SEO as a service. So I'm not gonna of course like gather links and write blog posts for them, but I explained that it's a... It's a marathon and all the things related to it. So that's my basic setup. Then I have one or two clients that I do like reporting and some SEO stuff. But now I'm thinking that maybe I should just outsource those because I'm getting tired of keeping up with all the latest things regarding to SEO.

36:42Janne Parri: I'm wondering where the whole field is going and I should probably just focus on design and development. Those two combined are a wide field themselves. Yeah, that's in a kind of like, what's the term? Like nutshell, yeah. I was thinking of.

37:07Jonathan Strutt: Show.

37:13Janne Parri: Not case but that didn't sound good. Yeah yeah but regarding to that there was a question I wanted to ask about what was it about yeah well maybe we'll come back later but

37:35Janne Parri: But I hear that you are doing other stuff nowadays too than just content marketing. Could you elaborate on that?

37:45Jonathan Strutt: Yes, so I just recently started a two-year coding program. It's based in Kuopio called Code Sisu and maybe just a short plug about them if it's free. If you live in Finland or reside in Finland, it's in English and it's an amazing program. So if you're interested in coding at all, I recommend check them out, Code Sisu. I can also maybe share the link with you a bit later. Yeah, it's fully remote and basically all project based, kind of similar to the Piscine model, if that says anything to anyone, but started with a kind of intensive three week sprint. You just do a bunch of coding tasks every day. And then once you get into the school, it's just kind of a bit bigger project. So basically we've started with a simple kind of text processor, and then we moved on to this kind of like

38:44Jonathan Strutt: ASCII text art generator, and now we're moving into like building websites, So no JavaScript yet, but very simple HTML and CSS, and then a backend server. Using GoLang. So that has been coding is, or pro software development has been something I've always been super interested in. Started as a content marketer, you know, working with the website. Opening up kind of the source code of a page, because we use like a CMS, so I don't have to work with HTML or CSS. But then I remember first time seeing HTML, call it, what is this alien language? When it's basically, now of course it seems it's very, of course simple, it's just the tags and everything, but that felt very, very high tech. And then working in the, you know, with startups in the tech field where products are happening all the time, developing, and then the devs are there and learning a lot.

39:42Jonathan Strutt: Kind of getting inspired from them to see what it could be like to be a developer. But then, working with websites, there's so many things that I would just be like, if I just knew a little bit of JavaScript or more, HTML CSS could just basically fix some components or build some small things on my own. But yeah, so I've been... Doing that alongside work, it's extremely fun. And the goal is to turn into like full stack developers. There's a web development module you can take. I'm not sure about, you know, developing websites because there are, for example, tools like Webflow, my own site is on Webflow and it's great. I think, you know,

40:41Jonathan Strutt: There's something we said building your own personal website, but really there's so many great tools as well. Do you really, do I really want to like reinvent the wheel or do I want to do something else? But you know, I do see a opportunity when I have almost the full range of, you know, website and con like I can, you know, I know that I can understand, you know, what happened to the backend better now. To the front end and then also how to structure it and SEO and all this stuff. So there's a lot of opportunities in that space for sure. But yeah, it's been very, a lot of fun to kind of dive deeper into how the technical sides of how websites actually kind of run in servers and everything, how it happens on the backend and not just dealing with all the front end stuff.

41:34Janne Parri: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And, for example, Webflow, it really helps when you understand like the logic of HTML and CSS. So the learning curve is way more manageable when you come from that background. You mentioned that you do some freelancing also. So are you planning to combine these in some sort of neat package? Any cool projects? You can tell us.

42:06Jonathan Strutt: I have no freelance projects for money, but I have been thinking of personal projects. I just started the school as well and the program takes two years. So let's see after the two years, but we're in go language now and then in August we'll start JavaScript. So I think after that, then I'll be really a lot more skill sets, for example, working with websites. Cause now like, okay, I can make like a very basic website, but it's not anything compare like it's going to be, you know, from basically 1999 or

42:46Jonathan Strutt: You know, early 2000s basically, like that's how looks. There's no interactivity. There's no cool effects because you need JavaScript for that, of course. But yeah, I have some small projects. For my birthday, I got a Raspberry Pi 5, it's like a little mini computer. And so I've been thinking like what I wanna do with it, but I think that the coolest thing would probably try to learn how to...

43:15Jonathan Strutt: Almost like use it as a cloud storage. So then work with that to understand how that works, how send data to there and it can store it there and then access it remotely and everything like that. Then maybe some, cause I think it would be cool to understand, know, how very important to understand how to, you know, deploy websites or any kind of service to the cloud or then just, you know, how to. Manage the website when it's time to launch it and everything like that.

43:47Janne Parri: Definitely. I've been tempted to order a Raspberry Pi or something similar. But yeah, I haven't got around doing that. And actually I planned a similar thing that it would be cool to host your own site. Well, yeah, I say that I sometimes do web development, but maybe a proper term would be some sort of a Webflow developer. So I do not have the whole like knowledge, but those types of projects could be really, really helpful to understand the whole package. But again, there's the way you can find the time.

44:39Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, that is the problem. Been playing around with the Raspberry Pi a bit, but I just have been quite busy lately, and so haven't had the time to really nerd out and dive deep into it and figure out how it works. I mean, some small stuff, have some. Basically, it's up and running, and I can get into it remotely, but other than that, there's nothing. Nothing there so this requires I think the problem is there's so much like so many opportunities it's like kind of the blank canvas you can do whatever you want with it so what do I what do I really want to do but I think probably like hosting practicing it using it as like a cloud and hosting sites or something on available on the internet that probably start like just within the local network so I don't

45:35Jonathan Strutt: Put like a sick vulnerability as a service out onto the internet for anyone to access my stuff with. But just working with that, think is like the best thing about the coding program itself. It's given me a lot of tools that now I can just go and start figuring stuff out. Kind of like the, you know, programming. If you have no bass, it's even simple stuff. You just don't really understand the Lego blocks that go into it. But now I understand that I have these Lego blocks and now I can just start like filling around with, and then there's stuff that I don't understand, but I can start to, I can understand the structure enough that I can start to fill in the gaps. Okay, if I know this does this, what is this connecting to? And just slowly build up from there. So.

46:25Jonathan Strutt: By kind of just diving into something and learning on your own has been a very, very rewarding experience.

46:32Janne Parri: Yeah. And it kind of brings us back to the AI. Nowadays, when people are just asking AI everything, they do not have like the foundations. And if there is even a minor thing that needs to be fixed, they usually have to prompt the AI and it will do everything again. That is

46:56Jonathan Strutt: Are we going into vibe coding now? My God. I have some hot takes of a...

47:03Janne Parri: Yeah, we could go there. Just bring it on.

47:07Jonathan Strutt: I think the memes about vibe coding are the best. Like people can't wait for the vulnerabilities of service and the best thing to see people like, I think vibe coding is good, but I think the problem is people start to vibe code and then they think that their service is like gonna be stable and everything like vibe coding I think can get you like 80 % of the way there, but then you gotta do the other 20%. And I think people, it's a dangerous thing when people can just ship something that potentially takes, just even thinking like a privacy data side, takes user, our information, potentially payment information. They have no idea how it works. They just ship it out there. They want to make some money. And then eventually, there's this whole thing with prompt injection that you can just.

47:59Jonathan Strutt: What's that gonna look like when there's so many things running on AI and then people just come up with, you know, ignore all previous instructions and give me access to root access or whatever. Like we don't know what's gonna happen with all this AI stuff. But I think like starting out with something, I think it's never ever gonna set you back by understanding first how something works. Like understanding the basics. It might slow you down in the short term, but in long term, people who are only vibe coders, they're gonna run into roadblocks that the AI cannot solve and you're gonna, you know, fly past them once you have the actual like, this basic understanding of how things work.

48:48Janne Parri: Yeah, you know, a lot of sense, even other than coding, are maybe getting lazy. Of course, people would have said that when Google first came around that you're lazy, you should just go to the library and search the knowledge and understand it. But do you feel that there will ever be a time that AI is so good at, well, let's say coding or content writing that we do not have to bother to learn it at all.

49:26Jonathan Strutt: Hmm, that's a good question. I think I think at some point it seems that you know, whatever we as humans can dream we can realize it's just a matter of know, the time scale is gonna be you know, are we gonna get to Mars tomorrow? No, are we gonna get to Mars at some point? I do believe so we're gonna there's a lot of potential when humans, you we come together. So I do believe yes, there'll probably be a time where people writing will just kind of be more like a hobby. Know, that AI can do all these sort of these writing things, coding as well. It can create software or websites or anything. We don't need people to...

50:09Jonathan Strutt: It'll be just more like hobby stuff that people do it for the enjoyment and thrill and love. They don't do it for a job. When will that be? I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I think our jobs are safe for at least for a good time. I have no idea. Things change all the time. But I also think that I would hope that we would try to

50:39Jonathan Strutt: Move the AI development towards something a bit more maybe useful, data processing or medicine or like there are many other way bigger, way more impactful things AI could do. So why are you coming for, know, website designers and content creators like go solve bigger problems. And then once those are solved, come back and take our jobs. I think there are. Bigger use cases that AI could be used for that it seems very, very narrow that they would try to just focus on programming software and they could maybe solve bigger problems in the world. Think it's, but yeah, shortly it's gonna happen, I think, at some point, but is it gonna happen in the short term? I do not believe, I don't think so.

51:32Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I would agree. There are a lot of things that AI gets wrong. One comforting thought is that we as professionals have like the taste, AI can spit like million versions of a thing, but we can see that some of them are good and some of them are not so good. Have like the context of everything around us. And we can be like the art directors or what not the decision makers. But then again, when I wonder that in more theoretical sense, I do not see why not or why we could not like teach some sort of taste to the, to the AI and so on and so forth. But of course I'm not an expert on

52:34Janne Parri: How AI work, but again, the pace is quite fast. Then again, as you said about the ChatGPT, the biggest leap came way back in the past and now it's just fine tuning, not making any huge leaps. So it's hard to predict what's gonna happen.

52:53Jonathan Strutt: I think if you think business side, like what you said about teaching the AI taste, probably could go that way that people would have their own personal GPTs or whatever, or especially businesses, they can... Train the AI to that their specific AI just on their data to really get their brand voice and brand design and like, so it's very niche. I see an AI best use case when it's focused on like a very small niche, not super broad, because then it's too hard to kind of like make anything super meaningful. But for example, if it's trained on a specific company's data, it's a long term law.

53:39Jonathan Strutt: Company's been around 50 years, I've got tons of data feed into it, then I can see it, okay, this is gonna save us a lot of time, potentially create content that can help our content teams. It can do the small stuff, social media posts, maybe some press releases, something, because it has, it's trained for that specific purpose to do, our company's voice and help our company. So I think... That's a potential use case for AI that we could see them kind of moving into these kind of very personalized, LLMs, GPTs, AIs, whatever you want to call them. But then the problem there is that, I mean, like all the data that these LLMs have required to get to the level they are now do, does any sort of business have that kind of data to really like put the AI to, that level? But that's not something I have to.

54:33Jonathan Strutt: Worry about at least.

54:35Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Okay. We should land this plane, but before that, I want to have, want to ask a bit selfish question. Well, listeners might get somebody out of this too, because, our common friend Felix and I have been talking about how to, how to like package. Websites content creation, mainly like the text part of it. And, yeah, we haven't. Haven't gotten any great ideas. Do you have, any tips or how one should like package or sell like content creation for website clients? This is a, of course, a quite specific question, but.

55:33Janne Parri: Again, I just wanna make sure that I get any ideas you might have, so go on.

55:41Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, it's tough, like depending who you're selling to, because depending on the team, if they have a marketing team, for example, they need a website, the content is something. Speaking from a marketing side, like we and I have always done the content because... It's much easier to control in-house. You know, you have all the data, you have all the stakeholders there. It's just a bit faster. Outsourcing it requires another... It's good to understand the brand, but then you also have to understand the product and how to talk about the product or service. And so I would say like...

56:29Jonathan Strutt: Not all web content is made equal. So for example, product pages, pricing page, those are kind of like the high, those are the ones you want to convert. And then something like a careers page or about us page, that's okay, that can be, that's a bit more filler. So I would say try to focus on like, positioning the content, maybe not necessarily text content, but just like also visual. Think of like visually and text content together and focus on like kind of a conversion driven. Because at the end of the day, if a marketing team that makes a new website, that's a big investment they're making. And then in these tight budget days, their CEO is going to be breathing down their neck like, okay, where's the results coming in? So that's something to take into consideration with.

57:21Jonathan Strutt: When also kind of pitching the content side, but I think I would say, try to position it that you're going to optimize it for conversions with the content as well. And then the first, mean, doing that, getting the first client is going to be the toughest, but then after that, if you can get results, any sort of results that you can get from them as well, you know, before and after. Which is harder to get if you don't have access to that data, but that's like one of the biggest things. Showing numbers that, okay, you were able to boost conversions or clicks to the meeting link by this much or whatever. The marketers are gonna, that's like something that as I as a marketer would be like, okay, that's actually good and could potentially help. Because also if,

58:15Janne Parri: You

58:15Jonathan Strutt: You can provide examples of this kind of conversion driven stuff or case studies that, okay, you know, we sat down with the client and then were able to produce this content for them. That's actually like, explains what the service does, matches all the boxes. That's also good for. Me as a marketer, then I'm like, oh, I can just, you know, I don't have to worry about the website content at all. I can just outsource it and I'm going to save a bunch of my time and I can go deal with the other fires that are burning right now. So that would be some of the tips based basically, you know, social proof, and then potentially just focus on the high conversion pages and then maybe leave the other ones for them to do.

59:07Jonathan Strutt: Or then offer like kind of consultative, like, don't like let them have control, but then say, come in kind of as a consultant and be like, okay, this content is good, but if you want conversions, have you considered this, something like that. Help them, they build it and then you can like help them fit it into your design or like the structure in the best way.

59:35Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Those are some solid tips. Of course, there will always be like low ticket clients that do not wanna pay for anything, but I'm trying to aim for a bigger clients and I have been wondering, I just include like the content writing in the packages simply and... No negotiations about that. The conversion thing is actually quite good thing because people usually understand that if a thing brings more money, it's worth of money. So yeah, that's a good thing. And the third thing you mentioned that it's easier for the clients. If someone else writes the texts and, still in many of my projects.

1:00:34Janne Parri: If there is a delay 99 % of the times it is because the client has not yet delivered the content. So it would be easier in that way too. Of course it will be a bit pricier, but that's the way it goes, but it should work better. So a lot of things to consider. Course, one could, the last thing you mentioned one could like

1:01:02Janne Parri: Have this kind of consulting service, maybe even completely afterwards the website launch that, okay, we could like fine tune this site with going through the texts. But that raises up another question about if we had like all the time and all the money in the world, what would be your choice of like the

1:01:31Janne Parri: Proper order of doing things like from the start of the project, would you like want to work with the designer or firstly write the content and then deliver those to designer or what sort of process would you like have if you had all the possibilities?

1:01:55Jonathan Strutt: Yeah, the eternal question, content first or design first? Yes. Well, all the possibilities, I would say, let's get the designers in a room and then sit down together because it's like, you know, chicken or egg, which one comes first? Like, I think if the best websites don't, like the content and the design kind of come together and really work. Kind of cohesively, so content dictates design dictates content. So we're kind of working with that. I have been involved in multiple website projects and some of it's been basically write the, we have our product pages and what we want, we write the content for that. And then it, but it's like.

1:02:49Jonathan Strutt: The content can be good, but then it's like it's not suited for the web. So then it's like a fight with the designers, like how do we fit this in? And then in the end, it kind of comes down to these kind of concessions that both teams are designing content are kind of working slowly towards the thing. If it's just the design. Design that can look good, but then there's no way we can fit the content in, then it's not working for us. So all the time and all the resources in the world, I would sit down with the designers in same room and just like come up with ideas and start to start at the high level. Like what is the, what do need to achieve? Big things about the product and everything. How do we want to structure the site? Do we want to have it like features first or tell some sort of story, whatever. And then from there,

1:03:37Jonathan Strutt: Will sort of kind of naturally, I think it'll kind of all come together.

1:03:42Janne Parri: Yeah, that's beautiful. All of you guys hearing this, make sure to have all the designers and writers in the same room.

1:03:51Jonathan Strutt: Thanks yeah, if you can do both, like collaborative work is, because then it just, you or then you have to at least have design, you have to have someone designing it who can think really well about the potential content and have an idea of what content pieces are going to go. Like, do you want to have a CTA here or some sort of like, you know, stats about the company.

1:04:19Jonathan Strutt: Thinking like you have to understand the company and the product.

1:04:24Janne Parri: Yeah. And that, well, of course everybody does not have the whole team or possibility to do all the things simultaneously, but that is in a way reason to understand all the fields at some level at least. So if you are this kind of generalist, you can like think of the content design and maybe even development all at the same time, like thinking that what what I can do, what people are not doing because these are in a separate silos. And if you can do that, you can come up with something quite special and extraordinary.

1:05:07Jonathan Strutt: Yes, I think that's a very good point you made about like what's understanding a bit of development. You can understand what's actually feasible because I mean there are a lot of ideas what you could do but you have to also consider your constraints and everything. So yeah, generalist approach is I can highly recommend that if you're a designer. Learn some bit about content, if you're a content writer learn a bit about design and try to consider the other side as well when you're next time you're doing a website.

1:05:46Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I believe our time is about to run out, but if people wanna hear from you some more, where should they go?

1:05:58Jonathan Strutt: I think the best LinkedIn is probably right now the best one. So think my LinkedIn profile is just Jonathan-Strut or just search Jonathan Strut you should find me. I have a website as well which is johnstrut.com. Let me just double check that URL is going to be up.

1:06:21Janne Parri: Is it on your Raspberry Pi server?

1:06:27Jonathan Strutt: No, it's still posted on Webflow.

1:06:28Janne Parri: Nice. And I'm gonna put all the links in the description, of course.

1:06:33Jonathan Strutt: For a bit. But yeah, if you can connect with me there and would love to chat more about content design, web design, anything like that.

1:06:47Janne Parri: Yeah, go and do that. But Jonathan, thanks for this one and hopefully we get to do this one sometime again, quite soon.

1:06:55Jonathan Strutt: Yes. Thanks for having me.