Uh, all right, top of the hour, and I'm pretty sure I'm sharing my screen and recording. And I announced in Slack, I've done all the things. Oh, I think that's your Fathom note taker that's also recording somebody's recording this. So I'll just get started. So this month's state of the business, October of 2024, so the first thing that's worth announcing here is I did a quick look at our pipeline of outgoing contracts and recent receivables anyway. The long and short of it is this, a lot of you have probably seen like a glut of Sentinel one posts. So there's 100 of those over the next six ish weeks to be done. But I also counted up a quick tally of about 100 credits that were allocated last week, meaning we had some backlog with a client who's now getting going on approving content, and about 80 that are either just approved or in the final stages of quote approval. And that doesn't count a bunch of refreshes that'll probably happen for Splunk and then maybe 30 more that are decently likely soon. So a credit is the equivalent roughly of one community blog post. So it's not a guarantee that this is going to translate into 230 blog posts exactly, sometimes clients use them for refreshes or SEO audits, things of this nature, but it does mean that there's a lot of posts coming soon. So, you know, stay tuned for that. If you've been looking for content creation work, there's a pretty good chance you'll have plenty to choose from. So that's always good news. Another thing that I wanted to mention here, because this has been relevant in a variety of context. Lately, we're starting to hammer out a little bit more about how we look at this. So after I've done a deep dive into these AI detection tools, it's just a garbage category of tool, like it's, I mean, I've got that snake oil guy picture here, and that's basically what it is the tools claim to be able to detect generative AI, but all they're really doing is detecting kind of stylistically, how chatgpt writes, and then they're flagging anything as AI generated, if it sounds in any way like chatgpt. Is the long and short of it, you can easily game the tools into false positives and false negatives. They shouldn't be available on the market for anything is my opinion. Anyway, not looking to turn this into a rant, but we understand this. So from the author's perspective, I imagine this is fairly frustrating to say the least. If some tool is accusing you of using generative AI, we have worked with some clients and talked through this with some clients to the point where we have fairly good messaging about how to explain this. A lot of times, I might just record a quick video showing what did I do. Most recently, I showed how I could take AI detector score from 100 to 20 with just a little bit of punctuation after I had pulled the actual text right out of chatgpt. That's a fairly convincing argument that they don't work, but in general, we're finding ourselves able to explain to clients why these are not a reliable category of tools, but also what a good process would include instead. And the thing that you would want to do to have a good process is the term I've seen for this is provenance that you would want to be able to essentially have sort of a paper trail, like if you were drafting a piece of content, you would go in and type a few paragraphs and, you know, probably save, or have it auto saved. So one would be able to, like, observe you putting a post together, and then maybe running Grammarly, or having somebody proofread it, or what have you. That's what it looks like when humans generate content. Rather than if you were doing a draft history of somebody using generative AI, it would be nothing and then a fully baked, grammatically more or less flawless piece of content. So in as much as there is a good process for this, it's just transparency in the drafting process, that's really the only way to possibly address it. And so that's kind of where things stands. It's admittedly murky, because we've institutionally known kind of from the outset that these tools suck, but clients don't. So you get all gamut of client questions. Some clients are saying, you know, how do I know this wasn't generated using generative AI? Others are saying, Oh, I could use generative AI. Why don't we do that? So people have different opinions, and we get a lot of different flavors of question, but we're kind of orienting around some core procedures with this moving on to more cheer. Things, milestones and anniversaries and such. Angela just recently logged six years as a salaried employee, so that's pretty cool. Congratulations and thank you. Angela pays everybody, so you know that's something to celebrate, and also oversees all of the post assignments and basically keeps the operational side of things running smoothly. So anybody who's watching or listening to this has a lot to thank her for. Also, interestingly, Angela was the first person other than my wife, Amanda and me when we started this business seven and a half years ago. So interesting bit of trivia there, as always, if you want to be on the team page and you're not, right now, as long as you're doing some kind of work with us and are in good standing, you know, just ask you can send Gabby a bio and a headshot is what's required, and we'll get those put up. All right, moving on to opportunities. So as I always mentioned here, this is our referral program. If you facilitate a warm introduction to prospect, and we go on to do business with that prospect, assuming we don't already have a relationship with the person, then we will pay you 10% of the first year's revenue with that client, and that is payable in arrears per quarter, and it's payable in the quarter after we've received payment from the client. So if you were to refer an Enterprise Client with like net 90 payment terms, even though we might start doing business with them. You know, say in January, we wouldn't collect money until May, so you would then get paid in that situation. And what would it be July? So it can take a while, because we want to actually clear the revenue in our bank account before we're paying it out. But that is how it works. And I'll say what I always say here, which is, this can be pretty substantial. So just so, especially those of you who are authors out there understand this Sentinel one is a referral client. So you can imagine what the referral bonus on that is going to look like if we're doing 100 posts with them over the course of two months. So that is, you know, potentially the kind of incentive that you could kind of take home with you and think about there is some real money to be made here if you're able to do this. So you know, any idea you have for somebody who might be in need of content or SEO or what have you, please feel free to refer them to us. And this can be a pretty good way to earn a little bit of money, or in this case, a lot of money, every month I'm trying to come up with, like, a different way you could make a referral. So I don't remember when it was maybe, like a month or two ago, we took some content that I had put together and consolidated it and had it published as an ebook called SEO for non scumbags. And I've done a horrendous job of promoting this in any channel. It's just kind of sitting out there. It's free, except I think it's $1 or something on Amazon, where you have to pay for anyway. The The idea here is, at some point I will get around to like, designing a marketing plan and using this as marketing collateral, but this could be a potentially interesting way for you to make an introduction, and the book is well suited. I've listed a couple of personas I can think of here. So tech entrepreneurs and founders and or devrels that are skeptical of SEO. And we actually run across this a lot people saying, like, oh, well, there's good content and there's SEO content. Or like, a DevRel that's being asked to write SEO content and they don't like it. So the book is aimed at somebody like that, to say you don't have to sell your soul to write content that earns visitors. And if you know people like that, just, you know, tell them there's a book out there. If they're interested, they should check it out. It's free, that kind of thing. The other persona might be, if you know somebody who's a marketer, and they're trying to win this person over, or get them to participate in or approve of SEO. You could tell the marketer like, hey, you know, share this book with them. So if you see opportunities like that, tell them about the book and then tell us that you mentioned the book to them. And if they get in touch with us, you know, we would consider that a warm introduction. What's the term I'm using? I'm trying a blank, warm introduction. Yeah. So that could be a relatively easy thing to do, because all you're doing is telling them about a free ebook. So, yeah, that's an idea for making introductions, and that's it. Does anybody have any questions? I don't see any questions in Slack. I am going to wrap it and assume that nobody has any questions here. So that was a relatively short one this month. Appreciate everybody watching or reading the transcript. Up later, and if you don't hear from me sooner, you will hear from me next month. You.
