The Evolution of Modern Blog Systems in the AI Age - Quick Creator 2023

Tony Yan

·December 31, 2023

·8 min read

The Evolution of Modern Blog Systems in the AI Age — Image Source: unsplash

How We Start Our Own SEO

Since its official launch in March 2023, Quick Creator has amassed over 20,000 registered users, and more than 500 customers have paid for Quick Creator. As 2023 is about to end, it's the perfect time to summarize this year's work and look forward to what 2024 holds for Quick Creator.

Quick Creator is a product we developed to address SEO issues. Last year, we were struggling to drive traffic to our previous product, QuickTable. The ultimate decision was to transform QuickTable's underlying data processing capabilities into a smaller tool and then use SEO content to drive traffic. Coinciding with the emergence of ChatGPT, I was using it to help write some blog content. The quality of the content generated by ChatGPT seemed decent, so we decided to try creating an internal tool. This tool would combine data processing with traffic-driving blog content, producing a page that included both SEO articles and tool operations.

With a clear goal, the development work was straightforward, and this small tool began being used internally in our company in January 2023. Of course, SEO work isn't just about content generation; it also involves many of Google's requirements for on-page SEO and page metadata. We kept experimenting and solving problems while observing the natural traffic to our website. The eventual increase in traffic was beyond our expectations and was exciting. This success made us start rethinking our direction.

Pivot to Quick Creator

While using this internal tool to address our issues, we began to contemplate whether to continue with our commercially challenging QuickTable or pivot and develop this internal tool into a new product. I started inquiring in some communities about interest in a product that generates AI-driven SEO blog content and shared screenshots from our Google Search Console. The response was quite positive, with many users expressing interest. Consequently, we decided to make this internal tool as a product, named it Quick Creator, and purchased a domain for it. After about a few weeks of additional work, Quick Creator officially launched at the end of March of 2023.

In April 2023, we welcomed our first paying customer and had five paying customers by the end of the month. In May, we decided to halt the development of QuickTable and fully transition our company to focus on this new product.

Growth of Quick Creator

In May, we continued to grow steadily. Through partnerships and our community operations, we acquired 10 paying customers this month, including some annual subscribers brought in by our partners. We also secured valuable seed customers like Biggle and Kyligence, which helped us validate our product's effectiveness. Significantly, a friend in one community mentioned their product saw many registrations and paying customers through the ChatGPT plugin. While we had experience with SEO, relying on it to drive traffic to our new product would take longer due to the low domain authority. However, the ChatGPT plugin emerged as a potential channel to attract traffic. So, we began developing a plugin for ChatGPT and submitted it to OpenAI. The review process was lengthy, and our first plugin didn't go live until the end of June. But this laid a foundation for our subsequent growth.

By July, we started to notice the clear benefits of the ChatGPT plugin. Throughout the month, we gained 20 new paying customers. As we added more plugins, the number of new paying customers in August rose to 32. And up until today, the ChatGPT Plugin continues to attract new users and paying customers.

Quick Creator's Evolvement

Since the launch of our first version in March, the product has been continuously evolving. Many customers have presented different needs, and we, as our own users, have also identified various areas for improvement. Here are some of the main product updates:

Product Segmentation: Initially, the product combined Landing Page and Blog Building. Observing that the user groups for these two functions were different and addressed different problems, we decided to separate the two products and focus more resources on Blog Builder.
Multilingual Native Support: Initially, blog generation involved directly translating English content into different languages. However, as Google's content quality requirements increased, the quality of directly translated articles could not be guaranteed. Therefore, Quick Creator Blog Builder started using native language generation to support multiple languages. It now supports 28 languages across 87 countries and regions.
Shopify App: Many of our customers are independent e-commerce merchants who needed a blog generation tool that could be used directly on their stores. We created a Shopify App that allows users to generate blogs from their products and publish them directly to their Shopify blog system.
WordPress Integration: Many users wanted Quick Creator Blog Builder to be able to publish generated blog posts directly to WordPress. Therefore, we integrated with WordPress, allowing users to publish blog articles directly to their WordPress sites.
Multiple Writing Engine Upgrades: Initially, the SEO blog writing for Quick Creator Blog Builder was entirely based on OpenAI's API. However, like all products using OpenAI's API, it faced issues of hallucinations and outdated data. We significantly revised the entire generation engine. Now, it first searches from search engines, then refines the information, and then generates the outline and logic for the content. The product also added the ability to create Fusion Articles, which allows users to input multiple URLs for rewriting.

What is Good Blog System in the AI Age?

As I've continued to understand the product and customer needs, I've also been contemplating what constitutes a good blog system in the AI era. While many systems and platforms like WordPress and Ghost already offer blogging services, and various website-building tools provide blogging capabilities, a good blog system in the AI era should ideally feature the following:

Ease of Use: Usability is always a primary consideration. Many customers find WordPress powerful but overly complex, especially when managing various plugins. Most bloggers aren't tech experts, so enabling them to start creating their blogs within minutes is crucial. Providing a range of ready-to-use templates for easy selection and customization without a steep learning curve is also important.
SEO-Friendly: While many blogging systems offer some SEO functionalities, most are quite basic. SEO is a specialized field requiring ongoing adaptation to search engine algorithm changes. A good blog system should track these updates and continuously optimize for SEO, as it's a critical factor for both individual bloggers and enterprises to gain organic traffic.
AI-Native: Since the emergence of generative AI like ChatGPT, there have been significant advancements in this field. For blog creation, generative AI can greatly improve efficiency. An AI-native blog system should allow users to easily generate content with AI and then refine it in an AI-assisted editor, including not just text but also images, audio, and video to engage readers more effectively.
Easy Distribution and Sharing: Beyond natural search, blogs serve as a means of content distribution. A good system should facilitate easy sharing, integrating with major social platforms to spread content.
AI-Driven Automatic Maintenance: From an SEO perspective, many articles require updates and maintenance after some time. As a blog accumulates content, keeping it updated becomes a challenge. A good system would automatically maintain blog content, checking link validity and updating content to meet the latest search requirements or integrate new knowledge and insights.

In this AI era, a good blogging system should not only simplify the creation and maintenance of content but also leverage the latest AI technologies to assist with SEO, distribution, and personalization, ensuring that both creators and readers have a superior experience.

Quick Creator 2024 Plan

As a new blogging system born in the AI era, Quick Creator Blog Builder aims to evolve in 2024 with specific goals in mind. The main plans for iteration include:

User-Friendly Editor: Implement a new, more convenient editor that allows users to easily edit generated content. This will be coupled with a richer selection of templates for users to choose from.
Advanced Writing Engine: The writing engine will continue to evolve to enhance writing quality and support a variety of writing styles. It will incorporate factual data support within articles as needed to meet Google's E-E-A-T requirements. Gradually, capabilities for generating images, audio, and other media will be added.
Team Version Support: Introducing features for content teams within enterprises to collaborate effectively on the platform.
Automated Content Maintenance: Enhancing the system's ability to automatically maintain internal and external links and update article content.
Keyword Tools: As an SEO-focused blogging tool, Quick Creator will incorporate keyword research and article keyword distribution scoring tools to improve SEO outcomes.
Additional User-Requested Features: Other needs and requests from users will also be considered and potentially integrated.

The hope for 2024 is that Quick Creator Blog Builder will be increasingly used and loved by more users and will continue to grow through user interactions and feedback. This approach ensures that the system not only meets the current demands of its users but also evolves with the rapidly changing landscape of AI and content creation.