It's Finally Better Than Me

I’ve been coming up with topics and titles for my sites for 15+ years.

One of my first courses I sold taught keyword research.

During the SEO days, SEO drove the process.

Today, ability to get attention drives the process.

It takes time to get good at either approach. You need to learn what works for your site and respective platforms (FB, Insta, X, Pinterest, etc.). It takes time to learn the art of crafting titles regardless of your traffic strategy.

I’ve learned over the years that the title does much of the heavy lifting. You could have two titles for same topic. One gets no traffic and the other crashes your server. That is no exaggeration. Titles are that important.

Which is why I’m particular about every single word in every title.

Until last week, I’d sometimes craft thirty or more titles before settling on one. And that’s with the help of AI. I banter back and forth with AI working on nailing titles just right. It was a process.

Last week something dramatic happened.

The week before last, I had finally put the finishing touches on one of my biggest AI dashboard builds yet... my dream content tracker and title generator system.

Here it is:

This took me a few days to build because in order for it to do a better job than what I had in place, it had to do what my system could do and do it better.

It tracks every topic to avoid duplicates. It tracks by writer, date, status (idea, WIP, published), topic, site and article type.

The Smart Drop

One of my favorite tools for speed is what I called “The Smart Drop.” My writers deliver me titles and draft URLs daily. Now I can copy and paste as many titles/URLs into the Smart Drop as I want in one go. It then automatically adds them all to the database as “Drafts” with writers assigned, titles noted, draft URLs stored and it classifies the article types... all on autopilot in seconds. No more messing around with spreadsheet entries.

Instead, I paste n’ go.

Here’s what The Smart Drop looks like:

Title Generator

Once I was satisfied the content tracking was working well, it was time to test the topic and title generator.

A foundational aspect of the title generator is the AI layer built into the system. What it does is monitor the performance of every single article on my sites. I set dwell time is the main proxy for quality. In other words, articles with the longest dwell time are categorized as “winners.”

The title generator relies in part, on this performance data - harvesting ideas from the better performing articles.

Over time, the system learns what works best and it bakes that into the topic and title recommendation tools.

The first time I gave the title generator a test drive, the results were unlike anything I had ever seen before using ChatGPT or Claude. And believe me, I’ve spent hundreds of hours bantering with AI looking for new topics and angles for my sites so I know what it’s capable of.

Hoping it wasn’t a one-off, I did it again. And again. And again. Every time SOME of the titles generated were perfect. I’m talking angles and wording I never would have thought of that was exquisite. It’s amazing it does it on the first go.

What my custom AI did was not merely adhere to the parameters I had baked into it, but it started filling in the topical nook and cranny gaps with titles so clever that it was immediately clear to me that my system is officially better than me for a task I’ve been doing for 15+ years.

This is a breakthrough.

Does it mean I’ll never come up with topics or titles on my own again?

Of course not. While I’ll rely more and more on my system, I remain the final gatekeeper as to what gets published and every word/image that is published.

Does it mean my system generates only perfect titles? Nope, it also spits out duds. It’s the good ones that are truly exceptional.

Does it mean every article I publish going forward will be a success? No. I’m still the arbiter of what gets published and I will continue to choose wrong some of the time.

What does it mean then?

It means I now have a reliable AI system for uncovering topics and writing titles in ways that on average, does it much better than me. It means I can spend more time on the tasks AI can’t do as well as me.

Thanks to the baked-in self-improvement layer, it means it will get better and better.

The more I use it, the better it’ll get.

=> Learn how to build your own smart content tracker and title generator here (plus so much more) with my S.M.A.R.T. COMMAND CENTER course.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fat Stacks

P.S. Why do I write about this?

Two reasons.

First, yes, I sell a course on it. That alone begs the question so it fails to explain why I spend so much time writing emails and sharing what I’m doing publicly.

The bigger reason is I think there’s real value in showing concrete, visual examples of how AI can be used in an independent real business. In my case, that’s online publishing, but the concept works for so much more.

There are endless ways to use AI in business now, which makes getting started feel overwhelming for a lot of people. My approach is just one path, but it works extremely well for me. If sharing it helps a few other publishers figure things out faster, that’s a worthwhile outcome.