Rob Hoeijmakers: Using AI to Transform Blogging Workflows – Episode 28

Rob Hoeijmakers
LLM-based conversational tools are revolutionizing all parts of the content ecosystem, including blogs by independent professionals.
Rob Hoeijmakers is an independent web strategist based in Amsterdam. He's using AI tools like Whisper and Perplexity to streamline and improve his research and writing workflows.
This lets him spend more time on his websites' information architecture and improves the business results he gets from his blog.
We talked about:
his work as a web strategist and his multiple blogs
his happiness with being able to delegate tasks to his LLM colleagues
the freedom that AI tools like Whisper give him to research, think, and ideate as he walks
how the abundance of content that AI tools provide helped him abandon his old scarcity mindset around information
the huge time savings he realizes from using AI-generated summaries of transcripts of interviews
how he uses AI tools to draft his blog content
his insight that the real value in his blog is in its information architecture
his preference for using his own images over AI-generated ones
the details of his content "knitting" which stitches together his current and prior content
the analytics tools he uses to track traffic to his blog
how he uses his blog as a conversation starter
Rob's bio
Rob Hoeijmakers is a passionate web strategist with over 30 years of experience. Known for his curiosity and love for recognising patterns, he excels in crafting engaging content and innovative web solutions. Rob writes insightful blogs and is a hands-on builder of content, chat, and messaging platforms. A dynamic public speaker, he frequently discusses web strategy, digital marketing, and AI, always focusing on enhancing user experiences and client success.
Connect with Rob online
LinkedIn
Instagram
Twitter
Web Strategies
Web Strategies (Netherlands version)
Chat voor Bedrijven (Chat for Business)
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/FRaHqLRWT9k
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 28. Many of the stories you read in the media about the adoption of AI tools cover enterprise workflows and other uses in large organizations. It turns out that LLM-based applications can also help tiny, one-person companies. Rob Hoeijmakers is an independent web strategist based in Amsterdam. AI tools like Whisper and Perplexity have revolutionized his research and writing workflows, letting him focus on his websites' information architecture and the business of blogging.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 28 of the Content and AI podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Rob Hoeijmakers. Rob is a web strategist based in, are you in Amsterdam? I forgot.
Rob:
Yes. Amsterdam.
Larry:
Amsterdam. Yeah, in Amsterdam here in the Netherlands. I'm also here in the Netherlands. And also as part of any web professional nowadays, he blogs a lot and we were talking at an event a few weeks ago about his blogging and I said, Oh, tell me more. And I'm like, wait, I have a podcast. Let's talk about it on the podcast. So anyhow, welcome Rob, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Rob:
Yeah. My name is Rob Hoeijmakers. I'm a web strategist and for content marketing, I blog a lot. It's not only marketing, it's also way of learning and keeping up. I am into LLMs driven chat bots. I did it with the ReSViNET, which is on the, which is RS virus thing. So that's something I'm working on currently. And then of course for my blogging, I write a blog in English, I write a blog in Dutch and I have another one in Dutch on chat for companies. That's what I do.
Larry:
Oh, nice. And the main thing, you do a lot, like all of us these days, but what I really wanted, hoping we can focus the conversation around is the way AI has helped you in your blogging workflow.
Larry:
Because when you think about blogging is like the old thing about the power of the press belongs the person who has one. We all have a printing press now. We have our own blogs, but we don't have the whole editorial staffs that giant publishers do. Is that how it feels with AI? Does it feel like you have a team now?
Rob:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I feel like being the manager of a rather big team, and it's really a joy because it's so many chores I've been able to delegate and I've been able to be more productive. I.
Rob:
I've been able to be more deeper into things because I can have conversations, I can do research things if you have to do that through Google, and I'm basically doing all those things alone. I don't have a big group of people. I don't have a big office with all sorts. Of course, I have friends and colleagues who are into this as well, but they have busy lives.
Rob:
So I have loads of conversations with the LLMs to deepen my knowledge, to brainstorm, to get creative, to see relations, to see patterns to different sort of developments in society and especially in the digital world.
Larry:
Hey, one of the of your most recent blog posts was about the kind of epiphany or something you had around, because we're recording this just when the Scarlett Johansson thing around OpenAI came. Tell me about that blog post. I thought that was hilarious.
Rob:
That was extremely funny because I do a lot of research, but the thing that really helped me is Whisper and Whisper is the natural language recognition and generation within ChatGPT. So it makes me completely hands free, I put on my Air Pods and I go for a walk and I have conversations, long conversations on certain topics, which is fun, can be topics for work or also I have a lot of private things I like to figure out.
Rob:
Anyway, so the voice I had was Sky, and I thought it was really, really nice gentle voice. And then only till yesterday, suddenly there was a completely different sound, and it really gave me goosebumps because I thought, Hey, what's happening here? I really felt like stepping under a cold shower, it was really a shocker.
Rob:
Which is funny in itself, but also it worried me a little bit because I already noticed how attached I got to the voice and I was talking first person to it, but I'm talking to OpenAI, it's a company, they make a bug, they make money out of this tool, and I'm just a consumer, I'm a customer.
Rob:
So that was really, really a good wake-up call for me.
Larry:
Well, that's really interesting. As a web strategist, you probably, the time cycle of figuring that out was like, oh, wait a minute. This is kind of creepy. But it also gets at the power of the conversational. A lot of people have pointed out that these LLMs aren't that much fancier or they are in some ways, but the thing that really may have made them come to the fore is the conversational interface and especially the personalities associated with that, it sounds like.
Rob:
Yeah, definitely. Because it frees you up from your desk. I used to do research and I was in front of my computer, in front of my desk, and that limits your thoughts, that limits your possibilities.
Rob:
So because if you go for a walk, you give your eyes freedom and they can wander around and you're less time pressed. And for me, that was really a change of my life, a change of my daily life I mean, and by that of course, also my bigger life, but these are hours and hours. I can do that.
Rob:
As a strategist, you need to try and think a little bit deeper or not just choose for the possibilities that are already there, but come up with new things, a certain creativity, and it involves a lot of societal developments, but also of course, people and people you also need to study.
Rob:
How do they function? How do they work? How do they work as a team, what sort of infrastructure do we need to cooperate successfully? It could be things like very practical things like Canva. I do a lot with Canva for social media utterances or social media things. And then these are always complete worlds nowadays. So they're big.
Rob:
And then you need to figure out how to cooperate with an external team. Do they have to have a subscription? And if they have a subscription, can you share all your assets? So many things I needed to research I used to do in front of my desk, I now can do with the walk, but then I also noticed that you get a little bit attached to it emotionally as well, and I think that's not actually, I don't think it's a good thing.
Larry:
Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, first of all, the fact, I mean, I've actually done a fair amount of research around walking and creativity and ideation. It's one of the best things. If you're stuck, you just get up from your desk, go out and take a walk, but now you're out walking and you have this creative companion that you can chat with as you walk.
Larry:
That seems really powerful. But it's also like we talked before we went on the air, something you just said reminded me of this observation you made that some creative people feel like they're cheating when they use AI, but it's really more like delegating. And that kind of gets through the people stuff you were just talking about. Can you talk about-
Rob:
Have to be inherently lazy, shamelessly. And lazy because laziness of course has very bad name and we need to be productive all the time. And I've noticed that's okay. If you live in a world of scarcity, you have to be productive, you have to work hard, and you make sure to survive, etc.
Rob:
But when there's so much, when there's abundance, then a certain laziness and a certain things are actually tools for survival as well, because you can optimize and then you get so much information, there's so much available that yeah.
Rob:
I think actually it's really, really good to change your mindset with the changing tools,...