202: Want to Future-Proof Your Blog? Here's What You Need to Know for 2025
Ever wondered how to keep your blog thriving in this rapidly changing digital landscape?
This week, I sat down with Liz Stapleton, attorney-turned-blogger and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit, to unpack exactly what you need to know about blogging in 2025.
In this episode, we dive deep into practical ways to use AI as your content assistant (without losing your authentic voice!), explore important copyright considerations that could affect your blog, and discuss why going back to basics might be the secret to standing out in 2025.
Liz brings her unique perspective as both a legal expert and successful blogger to help you navigate the intersection of technology and authentic content creation.
You'll discover:
How to leverage AI tools while maintaining your unique voice
Essential copyright knowledge for bloggers using AI
Why community building matters more than ever
Practical tips for balancing new tech with tried-and-true blogging strategies
Don't miss this conversation if you want to position your blog for success in 2025 and beyond.
P.S. Liz shares some exciting details about the upcoming Blogger Breakthrough Summit - you won't want to miss this opportunity to level up your blogging game! 🎯
Key moments from the episode:
00:01:17 - Liz shares her journey from law school debt to creating a personal finance blog, eventually expanding into helping bloggers understand legal aspects
00:02:50 - Discussion of current challenges bloggers face, including rapidly changing technology and social media platforms
00:04:06 - Insights into AI's dual role in blogging: both as a search tool and a content creation assistant
00:07:08 - Practical tips for using AI as a content creation assistant while maintaining authenticity
00:11:08 - Important copyright considerations when using AI-generated content
Mentioned in this episode:
Grab your free ticket for the 2025 Blogger Breakthrough Summit (affiliate link)
The Future of Blogging in 2025: Balancing AI and Authenticity with Liz Stapleton
In this episode, I sat down with Liz Stapleton, an attorney-turned-blogger and the creative force behind the Blogger Breakthrough Summit.
With her unique background in law and personal finance blogging since 2014, Liz shares her journey from managing student loan debt to becoming a trusted voice in the blogging community. Her passion for making legal aspects of blogging less intimidating has evolved into creating spaces where bloggers can learn, grow, and connect.
As we dive into the evolving landscape of blogging in 2025, Liz offers a refreshing perspective on balancing new technologies with fundamental principles.
She shares practical insights on leveraging AI tools while maintaining authentic content creation, and emphasizes the importance of community building in the digital space.
Her approach to the Blogger Breakthrough Summit, now in its 6th year, demonstrates how bringing together passionate creators can spark meaningful connections and foster growth.
Navigating Technology While Staying True to Basics
The blogging landscape is experiencing rapid changes with evolving technology and shifting social media platforms. However, Liz emphasizes that despite these changes, successful blogging still comes down to connecting with people and answering their questions.
While adapting to new technologies is crucial, there's a growing trend of returning to foundational principles like direct audience engagement, email conversations, and authentic community building.
Using AI as Your Creative Assistant, Not Your Replacement
One of the most significant developments in blogging is the integration of AI tools. Liz suggests approaching AI as an assistant rather than a complete content creation solution. She recommends using AI for tasks like generating headline options, creating outlines, and identifying potential content gaps.
The key is maintaining your unique voice while letting AI handle more mechanical aspects of content creation. By asking AI what information it needs and treating it as a collaborative tool, bloggers can enhance their content while preserving their authenticity.
Understanding the Legal Side of AI-Generated Content
When it comes to using AI in blogging, copyright considerations are crucial. Liz explains that human authorship remains the foundation of copyright protection.
Content taken directly from AI without significant human modification isn't copyright protected. However, using AI as an assistant while maintaining human oversight and editing can help ensure your content remains protected. This applies to both written content and images, with AI-edited images you own potentially maintaining copyright protection.
Building Community in a Tech-Driven World
Despite the technological advances in blogging, community building remains at the heart of successful content creation. Through events like the Blogger Breakthrough Summit, creators can connect, share experiences, and form lasting relationships.
These connections often lead to accountability partnerships and business collaborations, demonstrating that while technology evolves, the human element of blogging remains irreplaceable.
The takeaway from our conversation with Liz is clear: while embracing new technologies and AI tools can enhance our blogging efforts, maintaining authenticity and focusing on community building are key to long-term success.
As we move further into 2025, finding the right balance between technological innovation and genuine human connection will be crucial for bloggers looking to make their mark in the digital space.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00]
Welcome to the Creators MBA podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destini Copp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching.
Or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today.
And my special guest today is Liz Stapleton. Liz is the host of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. And she has been a blogger and a lawyer for many, many years. And she loves helping people make their life easier with action oriented content and training. So Liz, you have been an attorney since 2012.
[00:01:00] You've been a blogger since 2014. You're also the founder and voice behind the Less debt and more wine, which is a personal finance site, where, and also your personal site, which is elizabethstapleton. com, where you help readers understand the legal side of blogging. But today we're going to be talking a little bit about your upcoming summit,
I'm gonna let you tell us a little bit more about that in just a second, but we're also going to be digging into blogging and touching upon AI and how that is changing the landscape there. But before I get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?
Sure. Cause it probably sounds a little bit weird going personal finance lawyer blogger. Turns out law school is expensive. Right. Lots of student loans. And so that's how I started, ended up on my first blog, starting a personal finance site. I had credit card debt at the time. I got that paid off and just talking
[00:02:00] money in general.
As I was doing that, I saw people kind of being scaremongered about the legal side of blogging. And I was like, that's just not necessary. It's important, but it doesn't need to be scary or hard. So then I started a site on that. And then eventually I was like, people, you know, need to be able to like figure stuff out faster
you know, back in 2020 was the very first Blogger Breakthrough Summit. Happened February 2020 before the world shut down. Just, you know, weird timing with that, and 2025, we're back for the sixth year, and it is one of my favorite things to do.
It's such a fun event that I love, seeing everyone be excited about and engaging. Well, it is one of my, most look forward to events of the year, but I'm especially interested in it this year because I think in 2024 we saw a lot of changes in the blogging world. And I'm super excited to chat with you today and get your perspective of it to see if yours is the same as mine, can you walk us through you've
[00:03:00] been doing this since.
2014. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that bloggers face today or moving into 2025, I should say? I think one of the biggest challenges is there's so much different technology. Technology is changing rapidly. Social media platforms are changing rapidly,
like TikTok might be banned, you know? There's, there's just, everything's moving really quickly. And I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm, a lot of uncertainty. You know, and What I'm seeing more and more is, yes, we adapt to the new technology, but we are going back to basics at the same time, right?
Because we want to connect with people and provide, answer their questions, which is really where it all boils down to. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more kind of going back to those basics. I love what you said there, going back to the basics, because that's one of the things I really started doing in 2024 too, is just going back and talking to people, hosting the live workshops, getting
[00:04:00] to, know my audience better, having those email conversations with them.
So going back to the basics. But let's talk a little bit about AI and How do you see AI playing into blogging? What should we consider there? What is the future? I think there's kind of two parts to that. So first of all, there's like AI search, which I think is going to grow, especially with all the different legal actions going on with Google.
If Nina Clapton, who's speaking at the summit, touches on this a bit, and I know she actually follows the Google lawsuits a lot more closely than I do. So she's a great resource for that. And Nikki Robinson, at the summit, talks about kind of, you know, the ways to use AI, but also the sort of AI search that is growing.
It's still very new. I feel like not everyone knows about it, but it is growing. The other side of that coin is the way to use AI to really speed things up. So we were talking before we recorded about how I processed my summit, and I actually didn't have a VA this year, and I didn't outsource anything.
And the reason I was able to do that was because of
[00:05:00] AI. Like, AI just helped speed up my processes so much. And it just made it a lot easier. I still had to review everything. I still had to double check stuff, right? But I didn't have to do the, manual tedious labor.
And so I think AI, you know, kind of goes into the helping you in the background, and then it's the front side of, okay, well. Where does it fall within search and within all those other aspects? So I'm glad you talked about some of the presentations that are in the summit that's coming up that are going to be specifically looking at and kind of walking us through that AI search because that is really fascinating to me.
to me. So, and I've done some tasks, like I've gone into some AI platforms and typed in, you know, where can I find mostly local stuff, but where can I find somebody, in Milton, Georgia to do X, Y, Z, or something. And, you know, it's starting to come up, like all of that starting to come up in terms of, go to this website or this website does that.
So I'm super interested
[00:06:00] in those presentations in the summit. That's one of the things I love about the summit is I learn so much. I fortunately have ~like ~months to process and get ready, but I end up learning a lot. And that's the struggle when I'm prepping everything is to not get distracted by ideas that I get from like processing the sessions.
So I know we can use AI to actually help us create our content, our blogging content. What are, you've gone through some of these presentations, I know there's going to be some covered in the summit, but can you give us some tips today on how we can actually use AI to create our, you know, to create our content, to give us some, you know, maybe ideas for our blogs, or even help us create some of that content without compromising our content?
Our voice, our, the authenticacy that we have, our brand. What, what would you say there? I think there's a couple things. First of all, treat it like an assistant. Don't just try to hand over your content creation. Especially because that's honestly, for a lot of us, the
[00:07:00] most enjoyable part of work. Try to hand over things you don't enjoy as much.
But use it as an assistant. Especially because you don't want to take whatever AI comes up with and just, like, paste it on your site because then it's not copyright protected, right? There's a legal element there, too, which I do talk about in the legal sessions at the summit. But, you know, do it step by step, right?
Think of it like a small child who, you know, you can't give them more than, like, two things at a time to do. And honestly, two is pushing it because they don't want to listen to you in the first place. So it's like, do one thing, okay? Hey, help me come up with 25 different headlines. You know, options.
Because I really need a good title for this post. And then oftentimes what I find, and I think we've discussed this before, Destini, as well, in your session, where it's we do some combination of two or three. Right? It's not necessarily that we take one as is, but it gives us the ideas. Alright? Hey, can you give me an outline?
This is the keyword. This is some of the information I want to make sure to include. And then another thing I like to ask it
[00:08:00] when I'm using AI and like chat GPT is, hey, is there anything else you can think of that would be helpful, right? So it can help flush out maybe an area you hadn't thought of to include in your article.
Hey, what information do you need from me in order to be able to do this? That's another thing I do. A lot of times me, doing stuff with AI is just asking, hey, what's the easiest way to do this? What do you need from me?
And then you're like, no, that's not what I meant. What additional information do you need for me to do it? has been a huge helper when I'm using AI to help me with things. I love that. And you know, here's what I'm looking to do, but what do you need from me to accomplish that?
So I love it. I can't write a like prompt to save my life. I asked chat GPT to write it. I go, Hey, this is what I want to accomplish. Can you help me craft a prompt that Accomplishes x, y, and z. And then we work through it and we test it. And it's, you know, it's an assistant. It's someone to bounce the ideas off of in a sense.
It helped me do some coding the other day, which was awesome. So you just, you gotta have a conversation with it and you gotta treat it like an [00:09:00] assistant and not just, you know, because it is dumb technology, you have to really step by step explain what you want and say, hey, that wasn't actually what I meant.
Let's go back. So, otherwise, it can be really frustrating when it goes down this weird path of like, and when it hallucinates, you have to be like, no, no. Don't make things up, you know, stick to what was in the transcript or stick to whatever piece of information I provided. You do not, you know, do not infer things that aren't there.
Yeah. And that's a good point. Cause sometimes when I've had it, help me create some blog posts and I've done this with hobby school in particular, it'll come with these examples that are these completely fake examples. And I'm like, where did these come from? Like, give you this information. It's fun though.
Cause when you. When you ask it, you're like, where did this even come from? They're like, Oh, you're right. That's fake. Let's not include that. And you're like, yeah, like let's not do fake stuff. Exactly. Well, I want to go back to something you said just a few minutes ago, and it had to do with copyright considerations.
So you're a lawyer. So you're a perfect person for me to ask this too. [00:10:00] What should we, be thinking about when we're using AI? What does it mean that we need to be? Thinking about copyright considerations based on the outputs it gives us. Sure. So first, quick disclaimer, this is not legal advice.
It's informational and educational purposes only. I am not practicing as an attorney currently. I am, very interested in the area, and I like educating, but I am not practicing. I'm not your attorney. So, with that in mind, the sort of better, what the courts have said when it comes to AI, because there was this case actually where this guy built the AI and had it like generate an image, and it wasn't copyright protected, okay?
Because even though he built the AI, it was the AI that created the image. And so what it is, it comes down to human authorship is the bedrock of copyright. So if you're taking something straight from AI and pasting it, it's not copyright protected. It needs to, you know, human authorship, edited, revised, format, there's all sorts of things.
If you're using it more as an [00:11:00] assistant, then you're in pretty good shape to be able to produce copyright protected content. If you are using it, to just try to take over and you're pasting as is, People can steal your stuff, and there's not anything you can do about it because it's not copyright protected.
And that's on the, like, content side. On the image side, things get even more complicated first of all, AI generated images are not going to be copyright protected on that same basis. Now, using AI to edit images you own is, right? Like, it could still be copyright. So, I think AI can still be super helpful, and we've been using AI in image editing for years.
Background removers, things like that. So, there's kind of two sides to it, and I do dig into it, like I said, in, I think two of the three legal sessions. Each of the sessions in the summit are broken out by level, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. And so I do touch on copyright and just the basics of it, especially when it comes to AI, in those sessions.
The last question I have for you, and this comes down to how [00:12:00] fast everything's like changing in the industry.
And I know that, you know, with the blogger breakthrough summit, you foster a lot of community there. So can you walk us through exactly what you do and why that's important? Oh, that's a big question. I mean, I would say I bring together the summit, but I mean, what truly makes it are the speakers and the attendees, right?
So the speakers give incredible presentations. They're super action packed. They're fluff free. As you know, I'm like a stickler for that. I will edit out pitches, if they're, you know, I allow a little bit at the end, but if there's anywhere else, I edit it out, and then the, Attendees that can ask questions in the comments or at the live panels.
And so you see those conversations happening. That's the speakers and attendees. I kind of create the environment and I'm happy to foster it and I'm happy to encourage it. We also have a Facebook group and stuff, but I don't know that I do that much apart from creating the environment for it to happen.
And I love seeing it happen on all
[00:13:00] these Relationships Thrive. I've had speakers say, Hey, we met, I met this person being on a panel with. That your summit last year. Now we're like biz besties. And I've had, you know, attendees be like, Oh, this person that I met in the comments is now like my accountability buddy.
So that's stuff. I really enjoy seeing, but I can't really say I made it happen. You do make it happen because you're there. You're facilitating all of it. So Liz, before I wrap it up here today, any last minute tips for the audience. I mean, I'd say make sure you get your ticket because you're going to learn a lot at the summit.
Is that, is that count as a tip? We're going to make sure that the link for that is in the show notes. So everybody has it and make sure to check out Destini’s session. Cause it's fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Well, Liz, thank you so much for joining us today. And I am looking forward to the 2025 blogger breakthrough summit.
Yes, me too. It's happening
[00:14:00] in a January. And again, we'll make sure all of the links to sign up and join us are in the show notes. And Liz, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you loved the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.