🐝 The Sting
Learn AI in public. Embrace the ridicule. Ship daily. Share experience and results. Measure.
Things built: 3 People watching: 0 Cashflow:-$20
🤖 🧠 Learning
Teaching myself to teach AI to teach me how to build an SEO optimized directory with AI.
I’ve built websites before, but through wrappers like Wix or Wordpress. More often than not, the templates they provide are too much. They’re great when you know what you want, but by then, the wrappers are what holds you back. Otherwise they just confuse the hell out of me. I’ve heard lots of jargon, SEO, HTML, optimized, blah, blah, blah.
I just want to learn to build directories because I think they can make small, steady income if I learn how to do them right, and once I get through the trough of sorrow, I will know how to rinse and repeat.
I asked both Claude and Gemini to put together a five part course for absolute beginners on building SEO optimized registries using AI.
The first project is building a simple web page listing a bunch of restaurants, using HTML templates provided, manually gathering data on 5 businesses, and then using AI to write SEO optimized descriptions.
Even when you’re being precise, you’re going to get misunderstood, which is how I got the suggestion to feature this Dave Portnoy review for one of the pizza places I found. Always be doing QA.
The work was very manual. I want to learn how to use a data scraper. I need to automate all the data entry. It’s all on the list. Nothing wrong with a little bootcamp though to appreciate how good it is when our robotic overlords can do so much of the grunt work for us.
🍯 🦡 Building
What did I ship today?
Once I get through the whole five part course, I’ll distill the best of what Claude and Gemini came up with and turn it into a thank you, lead magnet, digital product.
Today I built two web pages, dead simple directories of five pizza places in a New Jersey suburb in HTML using Visual Studio.
I dumped the project files in Netlify (link below in 🤑 Selling) to get them live for you to see. The first is following instructions from Gemini.
The second was made following Claude instructions.
Which one do you like better?
🤑 Selling
Here you’ll find either things I’ve made with AI or affiliate links to tools I’m using.
Whispr Flow - smart speech to text - you and I both get a free month when you sign up.
Beehiiv - used to make this - you get a free month and 20% off for three months, I get a nice little kickback
Netlify - free web hosting for your projects - No kickback for me on this one
Last Word.
Doing the grunt work can feel like a waste of time but it exposes you to the mechanics of what you’re doing. It also helps to develop your nose for bullshit when you have someone else doing the work whose trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
Till next time,