Another Refugee

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now stuck in Rainy old England

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Me too! I'm counting down the days to the shortest day of the year, when we can begin to feel hopeful of a return of the sunshine, sometime in the distant future 😎

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I have other plans, centered around a more traditional online business, powered by YouTube, and absolutely focussing on authenticity and actually BEING in the places we promote, AI is never going to do that and that

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Please keep us posted. There are some excellent AI tools for turning your videos into quality blog posts pretty much instantly. You might as well re-purpose your hard-worked-at videos and fire out a blog post on auto-pilot too.

- Rohan

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@ohnoo_not_her

Cool, was just going to link to my YouTube channel, just wanted to check that was ok here! Just to help flesh out what I was saying, I am not expecting much in the way of results from posting a link here, This isn't an elaborate Forum Spam Scheme lol

https://www.youtube.com/@Yourusacityguide

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Looks really great Steve! Some constructive criticism ... just something that stood out to me. The text is difficult to read on some of the thumbnails. Might be worth adding a thicker text border.

Otherwise, this looks like a great start to the channel.

I have recently watched a YouTuber go from less than 500 subs to 10k in under a year. He's now doing it full time so it's definitely as good a business model as any!

Good luck with it :-)

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[quote data-userid="2132" data-postid="2002295"]

I have other plans, centered around a more traditional online business, powered by YouTube, and absolutely focussing on authenticity and actually BEING in the places we promote, AI is never going to do that and that

[/quote]

Please keep us posted. There are some excellent AI tools for turning your videos into quality blog posts pretty much instantly. You might as well re-purpose your hard-worked-at videos and fire out a blog post on auto-pilot too.

- Rohan

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You see this is the thing with HCU and the whole way Google has destroyed the internet...what would be the point?

Seriously, My site has been demolished, even the minimal effort of using AI to write up a blog post based on my video would be entirely wasted time as nothing posted in my site will rank anywhere.

This is what infuriates me about the head-in-the-sand approach of "you know where" Their entire model is set up to walk people into Google's HCU Death Knell! The HCU update was entirely geared toward killing off all small affiliate sites with little mercy for any good content swept away in the massacre.

Unless there is a sea change approach from Google, small content publishing is dead, yes there are Black Hat hacks like Parasite SEO that will work for a while, but they will get hammered too, eventually.

Sorry for the gloom and hopelessness, as I said I am starting a new site with a totally different approach and those quick wins from AI might help that along as it will NOT be reliant on Google Traffic, as I have no faith Google will return any sizable traffic to small publishers such as ourselves.

I will defiantly keep you all updated

As for the Thumbnail Text, I am currently in the process of using YouTubesSplit Testing on those and will keep refining things to see what really worked and doesn't...Maybe I am just putting TOO much text in the thumbs, but the split testing will show this for sure...

@sgreg Nice and engaging videos, you are the lucky one:)

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@ohnoo_not_her

Cool, was just going to link to my YouTube channel, just wanted to check that was ok here! Just to help flesh out what I was saying, I am not expecting much in the way of results from posting a link here, This isn't an elaborate Forum Spam Scheme lol

https://www.youtube.com/@Yourusacityguide

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Nice work so far. I have a Youtube channel that is bigger as well, my miniature channel, which I am already monetizing, but it is frankly peanuts per month (about 35$ now) . https://www.youtube.com/@everythingverysmall (ad income on Youtube depends on the niche as well, one niche is higher then the other apparently, which is another way from Google to actually say: you're worth less then someone in another niche , ugh)

But, as Partha confirmed to me, it is because of spreading out my info all over socials during the years, that I probably recovered from the HCU update. (this includes Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, some reddit even and Medium).

I am now at a traffic level that is nearing the traffic I had before the sept 23 update, but as a total. A lot of traffic of that is now from Pinterest, some from newsletter and Youtube, and it was a tiny bit from Facebook (where I got banned UGH), and others like Bing and even chatGPT. So I will never get the total traffic back from just Google, that is the past.

The thing is that we need to be everywhere with our blog, and it is impossible to do with just one person or without automation, frankly.

For Pinterest, I am now using AI pin automization, I spend a day or 2 on 2 sites, set everything up, and just will upscale it further in the course of the comming months.

Good luck getting back in the game!
Lizzy