"Keep focused and execute well for success."
Cullen Boone, a former software developer, currently oversees operations at PassportPilgrimage.com, a travel blog he co-manages with his business and travel partner.
Specializing in offering top-tier travel content, ranging from comprehensive travel guides to invaluable travel hacks and miscellaneous tips, their focus extends across Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America.
Additionally, they are expanding their portfolio to include travel content on Peru and Argentina. With a keen interest in search engine optimization (SEO) and operational efficiency, Cullen is dedicated to optimizing day-to-day tasks to ensure the smooth functioning of their business endeavors.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Cullen Boone: We are a travel blog focused on providing the best travel tips and guides for various types of travelers, and destinations.
Our niche and target audience can be defined as “luxury backpackers”, people who live out of a backpack, aim to save money while traveling, but will happily pay for more expensive activities like scuba diving or multi-day treks.
We believe this type of travel will only get more popular, due to growing trends such as digital nomadism, and more and more people taking extended breaks from working.
Can you share with us your journey towards integrating AI into your business operations?
Cullen Boone: We started off attempting to write blog posts with AI. We would give it a prompt, some information not available on the internet, and let it write a blog post in it’s entirety. We quickly realized the content it generated was not top-tier so we abandoned this strategy.
However, AI tools can be great for many other purposes when it comes to content creation.
We currently use AI posts to generate outlines, summarize large amounts of information, do keyword research, create topical maps, and edit blog posts. This saves us hundreds of hours and is obviously a great help!
What specific areas of your business have been most impacted by AI, and how?
Cullen Boone: The content creation process is the biggest area of our business affected by AI.
AI plays some role in our content creation process, from researching topics, doing keyword research, drafting an outline, and doing any edits.
We don’t typically use AI to actually write the content, although many other travel blogs have found this useful.
What are the biggest obstacles you’ve faced in implementing AI, and how did you overcome them?
Cullen Boone: The biggest obstacle was understanding this amazing new technology. The biggest misconception was that AI is a genius, it always has accurate information, and you don’t have to do much on your end to get AI to work for you.
However, we quickly learned that writing incredibly detailed prompts is very much necessary. Although we learned this quickly, we are still working on improving our prompts to truly make the most our of our AI usage.
What advice would you give to other CEOs looking to integrate AI into their business?
Cullen Boone: It’s worth doing the free trials of AI tools, and paying for the tool that you like the best.
Also, while Chat GPT 3.5 is currently free, Chat GPT 4 is much smarter and more efficient. $20/month for Chat GPT 4 is the best investment you can make in your business, no matter what the size.
How do you see AI evolving in your industry over the next 5 years?
Cullen Boone: I believe AI will get much better at content creation and it won’t be possible to tell the difference between human and AI-written content.
Hopefully, bloggers use great prompts and google penalizes those with unthoughtful, unhelpful content.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Cullen Boone: Success for us means getting to 50,000 page views and fully monetizing. While we are on the right track to do this, we need to make sure we continue to stay diligent and execute properly.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Cullen Boone for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Cullen Boone or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
