- Speaker #0
People don't yet understand how LLMs are going to be delivering content. It's going to be more granular and more contextualized and more personalized than any other content delivery mechanism humanity has ever known, including person-to-person.
- Speaker #1
That's crazy.
- Speaker #0
Which is actually really exciting for small businesses and small marketers. The larger the organization gets, the harder it's going to be for them to play the AEO game because it's not a game of scale. It's a game of expertise and granularity. I got to see more ad spend than most humans ever will or even know exists. And when you're spending money on other people's behalf, gosh, do you learn some lessons, man? It led me to the realization and the thesis that if you own the traffic, you own the business.
- Speaker #2
You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Mr. Farrar, good to see you again.
- Speaker #1
How are you? I'm okay.
- Speaker #2
Okay. Norman. Norman, how are you?
- Speaker #1
That's better. That's better. Mr. Sir. I get so many emails, Mr. Sir or dear sir. And I'm not sure if that's coming from you or where.
- Speaker #2
I told the people to do that because I knew it got on your skin. Yeah. Hey, have you heard anything about this? I, A, A, E, A, I, something, something, I, E, I, E, or something like that? A and an I next to each other.
- Speaker #1
But obviously... You don't listen to your own voice because our last couple of podcasts have been about AE or whatever you want to call it. A-E-O.
- Speaker #2
I'm trying to say it, you know, like, you know, like in if you go to Latin America, they don't say Wi-Fi. They say Wi-Fi. So, you know, I remember when I used to date my ex-wife, she's like, yeah, the Wi-Fi is not working. I said, what are you talking about the Wi-Fi?
- Speaker #1
That's what you used to call her, the Wi-Fi.
- Speaker #2
The weefy wifey. Yeah. Oh, she's knocked my microphone off.
- Speaker #1
Now she's the ex-weefy.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, now she's the ex-weefy. But no, AI is, I mean, it's a hot topic right now. I've got to fix my microphone here. Here, talk for a second, Norm. I'll fix my microphone.
- Speaker #1
I don't usually get the chance, you know, because usually I'm saying, hey, Kevin, does your voice get on your nerves too? But now I get to talk. How is it? So we're talking about AEI, is that where you're going?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, AEI, OU, something like that. But yeah, no, it's something that I think a lot of people have heard of AI, and a lot of people have dabbled with ChatGPT. But as I always say, and just my experience in talking to both marketing people, business people, casual people, most people have not really actually done much with AI. They've written an email, they've done a few games, asked some questions, but they don't understand the backside. I think a lot of businesses are not paying attention where they need to be paying attention right now. And as you know, I read a lot of newsletters and I'm up on a lot of stuff and a lot of groups. And one of the groups that I'm in and you've been to is the Driven Mastermind led by Perry Belcher and Kasim Aslam and Jason Flatland. And, you know, this is an expensive mastermind, but this is one of the reasons you and I always say, get the heck out of your, put some pants on and get up.
- Speaker #1
At least you have to put pants on.
- Speaker #2
And go to an event. because this is where you meet people who are on the cutting edge and on the bleeding edge of stuff. And one of those is our guest today, Kasim Islam, who's totally on the bleeding edge of AEI. This is one of the smartest guys I know. I mean, at Driven, he won the Smart Marketer Contest like four times in a row. This guy is like, and if he doesn't know it, he finds the people and puts them around him that do know it. And I'm super stoked to have him on today because, as you know, AEO or... whatever you want to call it. People, nobody settled on the exact name, but basically AI optimization is a hot topic. And I think it's going to leave a lot of people in the dark. And I think a lot of people are going to be left literally with their pants down if they don't start paying attention to this. What have you seen or been hearing about AEO?
- Speaker #1
Well, it's the next big thing, right? Answer search engine optimization. Is that,
- Speaker #2
or answer engine. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. You got it. but this is where things are going. And if you're not up on it, just like back in the day, when I started doing websites back in the 90s, if you weren't up on search engine optimization, and then followed all the updates, you just got left behind. So we're at the beginning stages of this. And the more you can just absorb, the better it will be for you.
- Speaker #2
Well, I think there's a window. We'll talk to him about that. But there might be a window here where the early movers. are going to have a major advantage. I just saw, I think it was Tanner Lassen, who was on our recent AI workshop that we did, and he's talking about, well, he's got some study that he shows that... If you're first right now, if you type into chat GBT, I don't know, what's the best dog collar for my little miniature dachshund? And it spits out some answers and you click on whatever you click on. It's actually training the AI. And now you become almost like the default. And so the first movers are going to, according to him, I don't know, we'll ask Kasim today what he knows about this, are going to have a major advantage. So I'm excited to have him on here and go deep on this today.
- Speaker #1
So you want me to bring him on now so you can ask him?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, I'm like jumping up and down over here.
- Speaker #1
Okay, all right.
- Speaker #2
Bring him on, bring him on, bring him on.
- Speaker #1
That's just such a bad visual. All right, now do it in front of him. Bring him on,
- Speaker #2
bring him on. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
thanks for having me on, fellas. I appreciate both of you.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, so, Kasten, you've been... Yeah, no problem. You've been...
- Speaker #0
in this game for a while just uh for the people on here that uh like who's this casam guy i never heard of him uh tell him what's your story uh my claim to fame i built the number one rank google ads agency in the world um i sold that in 2022 to a soft bank back martech company at the time of our exit we had 100 million dollars in that spend under management um thousands of clients have on thrush shop and the benefit I had that interestingly worked against me for quite a long time is I Got to see more ad spend than most humans ever will or even know exists and when you're spending money on other people's behalf Gosh, do you learn some lessons man? And the thing that I learned and the reason I said it worked against me is I learned what business models don't work And it's shocking and Kevin you probably know this as well if not better than anybody It's shocking the number of businesses that really don't make money money changes hands. They're on this little flywheel where they own a job and they're, you know, kind of paying their bills. But all they're really doing is they're making money for Google, Meta, Amazon. And it led me to the realization and the thesis that if you own the traffic, you own the business. So many people that think they're in business, they're not really in business, right? Like they're owned by a larger network. And this is why I love what Kevin does so much, because I feel like you free people from that. that kind of enslavement. You teach them how to turn it on its head. But that's what I learned at SolutionsAid. And since then, I've been building businesses. I've got a portfolio of 15 businesses. I haven't stopped. I don't plan on slowing down at all. And the most recent one, I think, is the one we're talking about today, which is AEO.co.
- Speaker #1
I'm just kind of curious, when you're talking about building your own traffic, what are you talking about?
- Speaker #0
If you look at, I'll use e-commerce because that seems to be A, the easiest one, and then B, I also would anticipate maybe being more in the center of the concentric circles as far as our audience is concerned. The cost of the traffic for an unsophisticated e-commerce seller often exceeds the cost of goods, the cost of fulfillment, the cost of operations combined. More money goes to paying for traffic than for any other single category, and in some instances, all those categories. So what that means is, is you're... Improve an opportunity your profit opportunity is figuring out how to improve your traffic situation And I like I like businesses where I start with traffic so I know I'll never start a business where I don't know where the traffic is coming from and Moat for the most part. I feel like that's Non-traditional avenues, you know, I was forgive me for being arrogant. I was one of the world's greatest media buyers I was named number two in the top 25 PPC minds in the world in 2024, which is two years after I sold my business and wasn't in media buying anymore. I know more about media buying than anybody, and I'm here to tell you that I don't think a business that relies on media buying should exist or can exist. It's artificially inseminated. So go somewhere else for your traffic, and somewhere else can and should be creative. I like community-first traffic. I like what you guys are doing here. What you're doing here is this is a traffic driver built around a community. based on the theory of reciprocity. You know, I'm Norm, I'm Kevin, I'm going to provide you a ton of value. And in exchange, I'm earning trust. And hopefully that trust at some point leads to a commercial transaction because they're going to trust you a whole lot more than they trust anybody else. So I think people need to build community. I think people need to look at non-traditional avenues for traffic. I love some of these tangential traffic channels. You know, I mean, when was the last time you ever ran Reddit ads, you know, or Outbrain or Taboola or AdRoll or Pinterest or Snapchat. There are so many viable traffic channels and more than paid. I'd look at organic, man. But, you know, people hear organic and they think, oh, SEO, I tried SEO, it's too hard. And that's true because in the SEO world, it's hierarchically structured and it's the credit distribution protracted to a degree to where it's not profitable for anybody but the top three, right? So if there's... 10,000 people in an industry, three are going to get 95% of the traffic and everybody else is just going to have to go run around with their little tin cup, banging it against the wall. But organic traffic isn't just search. Organic traffic can be a lot of things. It can be group, it can be social, it can be forums. It's carving off little corners of the world. And that's what I love so much about Answer Engines. People don't yet, and myself included, by the way, people don't yet understand how LLMs are going to be delivering content. My thesis is, and I have a lot of data to back this up, it's going to be more granular and more contextualized and more personalized than any other content delivery mechanism humanity has ever known, including person to person, which is actually really exciting for small businesses and small marketers. And it's going to be a tough nut to crack. The larger the organization gets, the harder it's going to be for them to play the AEO game. Interestingly, right? Because it's not a game of scale. It's a game of expertise and granularity.
- Speaker #2
Hmm. That's, that's, I never thought of it that way. That's so you, you think the bigger brands are the small guy is going to have an advantage here over the bigger brands.
- Speaker #0
It, it, I mean, time will tell, but my opinion, and I'd love, you know, it's so easy to sit here and prognosticate because there's, there's no. what what there's no repercussion for me being wrong so i just want all the listeners to know this is all very speculative and i have five employees that have done nothing for the last eight months but study how llm source or citations so this is coming from a some pool and repository of data and observation and my direct answer is yes absolutely here's why large brands and large organizations are playing a mass market game but if you think about the way that llms are delivering information llms are not delivering information the way search engines are Search engines, if you ask Google, I mean, what's the best shoe if I have high arches? Google is trying to deliver the content based off of aggregate averages across every level of analysis and every potential avatar. So high arches mean a lot of different things. If you're a man versus if you're a woman, if you're old versus if you're young, if you're tall versus if you're short, if you're heavy versus if you're not. There's a lot of reasons that high arches in your shoe are going to impact you, your health. Where do you live? If you live in San Francisco versus you live in, you know, Beaumont, like how much, right? Like there's so many things that come into play about feet health and what shoes you should be wearing that Google can't, isn't built from a mechanic, as a mechanism in order to address. LLMs are the exact opposite. ChatGPT's memory is extraordinary. It's extraordinary. So if you take what ChatGPT knows, and this, by the way, is not what's coming. This is right now. If you ask ChatGPT about your shoes, it knows you. And it knows 48 hours from now, you're complaining about back pain or looking for a chiropractor. And 72 hours before that, you just had a birthday and it knows what age you are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if I'm a company selling shoes, I'm going to have a much, much, much harder time than if I'm a physical therapist in Scottsdale, Arizona that only deals with overweight 40-year-old, over middle-aged women. Because now ChatGPT is going to say, hey, you need to go get custom fitted from this person because you happen to be an overweight 40-year-old woman. And this is the person that deals with that. And the content that they've created is specific to those degrees of granularity. And I don't know how a large organization addresses that because this isn't the type of content you can AI scale, right? This is the type of content that relies and expertise. That's the fun thing about AI. AI analyzed copy is AI won't like AI. AI is looking for deep proven expertise. And even more interestingly, and this is really frustrating for all of us, AI is going to be expert first, not brand first. Spot check me on this. Go look at your chat GPT or cloud history. Every question you ask, nine out of 10 of the times. It doesn't lead to a publication or a story or a brand or a company or a corporation. It leads to a person. Now, maybe that person lives within the umbrella, right? So it'd be like, oh yeah, Kevin King, who's a contributor of the New York Times, said this, but it was Kevin first. And if Kevin moves from the New York Times over to the Wall Street Journal, the LLM follows Kevin. It doesn't follow the publication. AI is people first, expert first. It's looking for deep, deep, deep, deep expertise, which makes sense. Because just, again, you know, as an idiot that doesn't understand how AI is built, from the outside looking in from a logical perspective, the engines are being trained to think in a way that humans think. We all trust people first, right? That's why PhDs get the citations in the, you know, the journals. And, like, it's like, oh, this person with this expertise said this thing. And what's frustrating about that for all of us is... Most entrepreneurs aren't building personal brands. They're building corporate and business brands. And this changes the landscape entirely. It changes the... I mean, think about trying to make an exit, dude. You know, like what you're going to have to do in order to show up in the answer engines and you're going to have to be the expert. What happens when you want to sell that business and that entire business is based around you? It changed... The implications here, I think, are really, really, really, really significant. Look, I have 15 businesses. I have a portfolio of 15 businesses. I'm not on the org chart of any one of those businesses. I want to be the expert in AEO, and I want to be the expert in international staffing, and I've got a mastermind, and I've got an incubator. You know what I mean? It's like, how do I? That's diluted. And really, that's true, right? How can I be an expert in both of those things? And AI is going to be able to see through that. People are going to have to plant a flag, choose a side, and go super deep.
- Speaker #2
Hey, Norm, you'll love this, man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50K a month. But when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me.
- Speaker #1
Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded.
- Speaker #2
Exactly, man. I told them, you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing cogs using FIFO.
- Speaker #1
Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs too?
- Speaker #2
Sure does. That way you can keep your quarter four chaos totally under control and know your numbers. Because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory, it sends review requests, and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon.
- Speaker #1
Now that's like having a CFO in your back pocket.
- Speaker #2
You know what? It's just $15 a month. But you got to go to sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial.
- Speaker #1
So you want me to say, go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your number straight before your accountant loses it.
- Speaker #2
Exactly.
- Speaker #1
All right. I never thought along those lines. That's absolutely crazy. Like I take a look at. just poor branding, a poor decision that I made with my podcast, lunch with Norm. You think I'm going to be able to sell that to somebody and they take over? It's not going to happen. So what you're saying here, I've spent a lot of time working on the Google knowledge panels and the Google knowledge graphs. And that's another thing. You can have one, I can be a Podcaster. a co-host on a podcast, an entrepreneur, but I can't have multiple. And it sounds like that's the same thing that you're talking about. So I never even thought, never even crossed my mind.
- Speaker #2
So how's that going to work then? So if you're saying that brands, it's going to be the experts, it's going to be around the person. So how are they going to, what's, and like you said, you're not on the org chart. So what's the answer there? Is it to actually create a fictional character that becomes the new expert? It's the Aunt Jemima that's the new expert, so that's transferable across places? Or what's the answer there if that's the new way? And I think it is because people trust people more than they trust corporations, and AI seems to be, like you said, to go in that direction too. So what should the pivot and people be thinking thinking about around how to address that.
- Speaker #0
So I'll answer in two ways. The first way is the organic. Let's say, I'm going to call it the more integrous way. And I don't mean integrity from like a religious perspective. I mean, integrity from a structurally sound and, you know, integrous, right? Like this is just the strongest building you can build is to actually be the expert. The strongest building you can build, the most integrous building you can build is I am just this one person. All I do, I had a nutritionist that I hired a long, long time ago, Dr. Sally in Scottsdale, Arizona. And Dr. Sally has worked with, you know, all the the major sports organizations and knows everybody and Dr. Sally. And every time I used to talk to him about expanding his business, he was so repelled and repulsed by the idea because he was an entrepreneur. He's a doctor. And what's so funny and what's sad is Dr. Sally was one of the best kept secrets in the nutritional world because he didn't know how to market himself. He didn't write a book and he didn't build a membership or a course or he didn't do any of those things. He was a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant nutritionist. And that's it. And all those people up until this point in history. have actually been relegated to the sidelines. And it takes a marketer to come in and be like, man, what that person is saying is pretty cool. They take it, they bastardize it, they repurpose it, and they blow it all the way up. I think AI is going to favor the Dr. Sally's. So the answer number one, Kevin, is be Dr. Sally. Be somebody with deep expertise who just chooses his lane. and decides like, I'm going to be this person, Dr. Kate Shanahan. She's a business partner of mine in another endeavor. She's the mother of the anti-cedo movement. She's a horrible marketer, visible marketer. And I'm being funny. She's probably not, but you know what I mean? She hasn't marketed herself very well. The whole world steals her content, doesn't attribute it to her, doesn't cite her, but she's brilliant. That's the type of person that's favored in the world of AI. If you can't be Dr. Sally or Dr. Shanahan, and note that it's probably always going to be preceded by doctor, right? Because that's what a doctorate is. That's somebody who's decided, I'm going to go. so deep on this topic that I'm actually going to establish myself as a world authority in this space. I think those are the people that end up becoming really cemented in this new knowledge transfer ecosystem that we live in. If you can't do that, I like what you said, Kevin, creating an avatar, that can backfire because the receptivity to that avatar is going to be hyperdependent or as dependent upon people's ability to accept it as a real person. And so any chinks in that armor can blow up pretty quick. But it's not an impossible thing to do. And a lot of people are doing it. I have a friend who's actually in Driven with us. He's got a seasoning brand. He's a young black guy. His brand is built on an old Republican white guy who sends off his emails. And, you know, he's kind of like that. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I don't want to call him because I and he's done a great, great, great, great job with it. So you can do that. what I've chosen to do. which has its own, it's its own rat's nest. Okay. It's it's, there's its own problem. I've actually chosen a person in my organization to position as the expert. So if you go to aeo.co and you join my community, I'm going to introduce you to Julian. Who the hell is Julian? Julian is the young man that helped me build this whole business from the ground up. And he's the one that's actually doing the work on the day to day. And on a long enough timeline, Julian is going to be more important than the organization is. So what do you do. And my answer is I'm going to paper up Julian and slap golden handcuffs on him and make sure that our interests are aligned and that, you know, I'm not going to get. I did the exact same thing at Solutions 8. Kevin, you interviewed John Moran on your knowledge panel. You had him go speak at your event in Iceland. John Moran is the world authority in Google Ads. I built the number one ranked Google Ads agency in the world. I've never run a Google campaign myself and then in my life. So what did I do? John was an employee. He ended up being the smartest guy on the planet. I slapped golden handcuffs on him, which that looked a lot like equity. So when we made our exit, he got a seven-figure sum of money. Good for him. And I actually think that's probably the most viable solution. If you want to be a serial entrepreneur, is to find or better cultivate this expert, this person, and then just make sure that they're in a position where it benefits them to stay with you more than it benefits them to make a departure.
- Speaker #2
Until Zuckerberg comes along and offs you $100 million.
- Speaker #0
Dude, which that's going to happen. And it's happened to me. I've lost, you know, I played this game in one and, you know, I showed that example through John Moran and I've played this game and lost, you know, there are people that spin off and start their own businesses, their own agencies, and kind of use the brand equity that I helped them build. And that just, that just sort of is what it is too. The take home message though, is that I don't think answer engines are going to allow brands, you know, a brand's not going to rank number one, a person is. And when that person moves, all of search engine was domain authority based. That's why link building was the big. needle mover for search engines. You know, if you wanted to rank, you needed links because search engines look at a URL and think like, oh, that's the source from which all value is derived. With answer engines, it's people. And you know, it's actually really, really crazy. And I just, this just occurred to me as we're having this conversation. I don't know if y'all remember, do y'all remember Google Plus?
- Speaker #2
Yeah,
- Speaker #0
sure. Google Plus, which was brilliant. It was so far ahead of its time. I bet you, I think they sunset Google Plus like. 12 years ago or something crazy. A long, long time.
- Speaker #2
2010, 11, somewhere around in there. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
yeah. So maybe more. It was like 15 years, right? Google Plus was trying to do this. What Google wanted you to do is take your Google Plus profile and include the profile link on any publication you published, regardless of where it was online. Google was trying to rank people instead of sites, because they saw the authority first need. And Google Plus just never took, so they sunset it. Answer engines don't need that link because they have, the AI has the ability to kind of figure out like, oh, that's the same Kevin King as is over here. So we've known that that's a more valuable way of cataloging content for the long time. Google tried to solve it in a different way and it just failed. And so this isn't really much of a surprise, right? Like a brand is, what is a brand? You know, it's like, that's the other thing. It's like, I'm a Cowboys fan. What does that mean? In the early 90s, it meant a lot. We had Troy Aikman and Deion Sanders and Emmitt Smith and Leon Lett and Rocket Ishmael. We were bad. We were bad at Mamma Jammas. And now, I couldn't name a player for the Cowboys, nor do I want to, nor do I want to go to a game. You couldn't pay me to take a ticket. I think the way that people follow players, not teams, is the same way LLMs are going to follow people, not brands.
- Speaker #1
So I want to just follow up with something. So let's say, like you said, go deep, whatever you want to be the authority on. But what happens if you want to be authority on a couple of things? Like for me, cigars. I love cigars. I think I could be fairly, I think I could be an authority on cigars. I think I could do that with Amazon. I think I could do that with certain sports. Do you just focus on the one and have the avatar for the others?
- Speaker #0
No, I don't think so. I look at somebody like Joe Rogan, who I really love. Say what you want about Joe. But Joe is an authority in my mind. Joe's an authority on comedy. He's risen to the highest levels, right? I mean, he's been main stage Madison Square Garden. Can't get any higher than Joe, regardless of whether or not you like his comedy. He's also an authority on MMA. Comedy and MMA, I can't think of two things more different. And yet he's been able to establish authority in both. So it's not that one person can't do both. It's that the requirements for authority are so robust that to do so is just a bigger lift. It's Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours twice, right? So now you have to convince this answer engine that I'm not just an authority in cigars. I'm also an authority in Amazon. And sure, we believe you, but you need the same pool and repository and amount of content or connections or links or mentions or whatever. that we deem necessary in order to be an authority. And it's harder to do when you're trying to do both cigars and Amazon than if you're just focused on one. So, you know, Joe Rogan, I mean, Jordan Peterson's another really good example. Jordan Peterson has established himself in his authority on theology and politics. You know what I mean? Like two very, very, very different realms and worlds. So there are a lot of people, Danica Patrick has a, I think a dishware line and she's a race car driver. So So the benefit you have is once you've established yourself as an authority on one thing, I think it's easier to start to kind of like branch out, especially because you begin seeing what moves the needle. But then the requirements to claim authority, especially with the LLMs, appear to be very deep. Like the answer engines want to know you ain't full of it. And what's worse, actually, or better, depending on how you look at it. I'm actually going to say better. If the three of us were all to ask the LLMs a question, you know, what's the best coffee shop in Kingman, Arizona? The three, all three of us were buddies. We're going to take a road trip to Kingman, Arizona. I'm only saying this because this is actually one of the queries in my data set. All three of us will get a different answer because Norm is dairy-free, Kevin King hates Stevia, and I have an obsession with Colombian espresso because I just came from Colombia. And Chachi Pitino's there. So there's no such thing as ranking, right? You're not ranking. You're increasing your likelihood for mention based off of context, specificity, relevance, nuance, insert some other word here that means the same, right? Like how much do you match this person that I know is searching? And the contextual results inside of ChatGPT only seem to be getting deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. It's extraordinary. If you ask ChatGPT right now, like if I ask who's the top authority on Google, it says I am.
- Speaker #2
It's biased to you, right?
- Speaker #0
A billion percent.
- Speaker #2
If you guys ask.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah. It changed. No, I'm in your network, so I'll probably be in the top five. But then if somebody who's two standard deviations away and three standard deviations. So we came up with an acronym. And when I say we, Julian, who works for me, who I mentioned earlier, came up with the acronym BRAIN. B-R-A-I-N. And these are the five. key performance indicators for ranking on LLMs. B is brand, R is relevance, A is authority, I is indexing. And N right now is a placeholder, to be honest with you. It came from one of our mastermind members. It's nuance. And we might change that. We might not because it means a lot of things. But you need to have an established brand that the LLMs trust. And when I say brand, by the way, I'm not talking about a corporate brand. I'm talking about you as a person or identifiable online in a way that allows it to say like, oh, This is Kevin's Facebook. This is Kevin's LinkedIn. This is Kevin's website. That's your brand. And then relevance is your relevance to me. And authority is how many, and the most important, when you want to know one of the craziest needle movers for authority, how often people are mentioning you in social comments. ChatGPT has delivered TikTok comments as results. It wants to know what the chatter, the social chatter looks like. It loves things like ask and Quora. and Thumbtack. It likes where people are talking to people, loves Reddit. Reddit just became one of the most valuable repositories of content in existence. So brand, relevance, authority, indexing, and things like schema markup, which we've talked about a little bit offline. Schema is the number one technical mover for AEO. When we look at, I have at this point, tens of millions of data points over the course of eight months that we've collected. And link building to SEO is schema to AEO. And it can't be Java-led schema, it has to be hard-coded schema. Which kind of makes sense that the LLMs would really love schema, because schema really is just what? Like, it's a table of contents for your website, for your digital presence. And then nuance is kind of a catch-all phrase that just refers to the fact that, you know, everything's going to be a little different. If you're searching and you're a Republican and I'm searching and I'm a Democrat, we're going to get different, you know, which kind of heralds back to relevance, I guess. But it's so hyper-specific. That's another reason that deep, deep, deep expertise is so required. Because you're not going to rank number one for a query. You're just going to increase the likelihood that the LLM mentions you based off of who it is that's searching. The propensity for echo chamber here is insane. If you're an anti-vax person, these LLMs are going to give you all the anti-vax you want to eat. And if you're a pro-vax, you know what I mean? It's like a feed.
- Speaker #1
It's just like a social media feed that sees what you want and customizes to that.
- Speaker #2
But what happens if you want the Fox and the CNN version? You know, you don't want it to feed you just the one.
- Speaker #0
I don't know if it's possible anymore. Really, what you would need is two devices that you log in to from two entirely different profiles. that you maybe keep off, you put on two different ISPs and use two different proxies for, and then you search through two different ways because extrinsic data isn't qualified as much as intrinsic data. So you coming to ChatGPT and saying like, oh, I'm a libertarian. ChatGPT is like, maybe you are, maybe you aren't. But if you just, you know, ChatGPT sees that you bought a bought a bunch of you know numismatic bullion or shopping for raw land and are on a prepper thread you're you're libertarian whether or not you know it or not right so i think intrinsic qualification is really what these lms are being trained towards um and the thing that's really scary is like i don't know about y'all but chat gpt is native to my devices that's a big difference like i was talking i forgot what i was talking about what was i talking about oh i was talking about a competitor. I was talking about a competitor. And next thing I know, the mentions of that competitor increase in my chat GPT thread. It was somebody who'd never come up on the radar before. Can I prove that chat GPT is listening? No. But I know that on meta, when I talk about stuff, I start seeing those meta ads. You know, I only have $100 million of ad spend to prove that. So I think that their ability to capture content and information from us and then use that content is far, far, far more robust than just what you put in that open field.
- Speaker #1
but didn't google i mean they were tracking everything so how is it different earlier you said that google didn't know what you're doing or couldn't id they could because they've got this mass amount of data on you dude yeah but so how is it how is the how is the chat chat gpt or whatever how is that how does that know more is it because it's a conversational versus a search and because of the interactivity or how does it actually know more i'm i'm actually super long on google i think think it will win today i work when i when i said it will
- Speaker #0
can't, what I was referring to is the delivery mechanism allowed for by search. So when I was referring to Google's limitations, all I meant was a Google search is limited because the thought process behind search is limited. You ask a question, I say, hey, here are the best answers in order. And it's not even the answers, by the way, it's here are the best places that might have answers ranked in order. So Google search results aren't answers. They're the beginning of of a research thought process. The way that search works and has always worked from the very beginning of the very first AOL screen is you ask a question, you search a query that helps you answer the first layer of question, and then you go down with your tendrils and you find the information you need and you come back. And then you use that to ask your second query, and then you go down into the tendrils and the tangents, and then you find the information you need and you come back. And then you ask your third, and then your fourth, and then your fifth. With answer engines, you just ask the question. And it does those steps, one, two, three, four, five, does all the tendrils for you, and then comes back with an answer. It's such a massive change in paradigm. Google captures the information ChatGPT captures and actually captures way more. Here's the craziest part, Kevin. You ready for this? This will blow your mind, blew my mind. When we study these LLMs, and we study all of them. So we're studying ChatGPT and Cloud and Perplexity and Grok and Gemini. The overlap rate between the citations and the Google results is one of the things that we look for. So to just put that in layman's terms, if I ask ChatGPT a question, my data analysis team will ask the same question instead of Google. And then see when ChatGPT comes back and says, here are the answers and here are all the citations. It looks at the citations and sees how often those citations are in the top 10 results in Google. So chat GPT. has an overlap rate with Google that's like 30 to 60 or 70 percent, depending on the type of query. Gemini, no, ChatGPT has 30 to 60. I'm going to get the exact numbers wrong, but I'll get the gist right. Perplexity has an overlap rate of 40 to 80 percent. So all that means is they're just searching Google for us, but better and faster. Here's the craziest part. Guess what Gemini is Google's product. Guess what Gemini's overlap rate is.
- Speaker #1
I have no idea.
- Speaker #0
It's zero. Zero? Gemini. Any overlap with Google is negligible. It's statistically negligible to where it generally ends up being like an anomaly or a coincidence. Now, if we think this through, here's what that means. Chat GPT and Perplexity are using Google search graph. They're actually pulling from Google search results. Google is not using Google search graph. Google is building Google's answer repository from the ground up. They're building their own answer graph because Google is the only entity on the planet. planet that has the content to do that, that has the ability to do that. So if you say to yourself, wow, chat GPT and perplexity are way better than Google, you're right. There's a reason for that. And the reason is when you're talking to chat GPT and perplexity, you're talking to a mechanism that's built on top of Google search. And so you're talking to a mature, sophisticated mechanism. When you're talking to Gemini, you're talking to a sapling. You're talking to this little teeny tiny baby thing that's being built and grown organically from the ground up. So Google's going to feel far behind for, I don't know what, the next 18, 24, 36 months. But that's because Google's not using Google search. Google's using its own knowledge graph because we've known, and everybody knows this, right? Everybody's in the SEA game knows that Google search is bull. Google search doesn't show you who's the best. It just shows you who has the most links. Google realizes that too. So they're going to rebuild their own answer graph while all the other LLMs are built on Google search, which means what? Google gets to be the one that pulls the ace of the house of cards and brings all of their shit.
- Speaker #1
down because they don't have the repository of information and knowledge that google has that's crazy that's really crazy it makes total total sense though a total right total sense so what do you what do you do as a marketer do you what do you how do you how do you play this game since it's a two three year game perhaps maybe quicker who knows but maybe faster you know what's funny when i told perry about what i wanted to do with aeo perry belcher is my business partner in the aeo game uh
- Speaker #0
six months ago perry goes dude you're two you're two years early A month ago, he's like, hey, man, I think we're about six months late. So the reason I launched AEO, we were going to launch it as an agency. And the problem is, is I can't figure out what levers and knobs work consistently enough to be willing to take money for the for the endeavor. And it's it's near impossible to track. And so what we did is we launched it as a community first. And my thesis there is I'm just going to bring all the smartest people in the world who actually want to study this. with me put them all in a room together and we're going to crack these codes together but we're going to crack them on specific levels so like crack it for local business crack it for e-commerce crack it for professional services crack you know what i mean like there's because i i think that there's going to be a script the scripts are going to be categorical um and i think local brick and mortar is going to be the easiest needle to move most consistently because it's the most contained and the least competitive so it's actually a really easy sandbox but as far as what you do dude i do not know like that's why i launched this community because i want to figure that out i have so i have some guesses but i'm real scared about guesses kevin because i don't want people you know i don't want to cost anybody time or money i'm willing to tell you my guesses yeah um but i want people to just be really really cautious about listening to me i hate all these fools that run around being like i'm an ai expert i'm like how you know what i mean how are you you know what i mean like yeah so i'm not an expert i do have more data than most which i think means something um I believe very strongly the thing to start to do, to be honest, is what y'all are doing right now. What I know the LLM is like is multimodal content. And so establish yourself as an authority, plant a flag on the ground right now, and shoot every week, shoot an hour-long podcast. And that hour-long podcast should end up being five YouTube videos. And those five YouTube videos should end up being 10 or 15 short reels. And those reels should be turned into Instagram carousels. And those carousels should be turned into Twitter threads. And those Twitter threads should be turned into, you know what I mean? Like, create enough content and put it out into the world in a way that helps you with your brand and your authority. Because, because these, they're cataloging brand and authority and they seem to be over indexing in terms of its value because it's the thing that they can see. And that would be a really, really, really good place to start and start building your personal brands.
- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
So people with content are at an advantage now. Like I showed you, the billion dollar sellers.media and where I've taken all my content and then I put the schema and I put everything in there and we'll see what happens. But that should, in theory, if we're right, that should make me like an ultimate authority.
- Speaker #0
I think so too. I will say, and this isn't meant to be a challenge, it's just you and I are brainstorming right now. I question the validity of having it in one place. And you might already be doing this, but I would have it on the Billion Dollar Sellers and maybe all links back to the Billion Dollar Sellers. But dude, I'd put that same media out on, you know, it should be on Apple Podcasts and on YouTube and split it up into reels. You don't want, there's the hub and spoke content.
- Speaker #1
Well, that content links out. That is my Facebook, my LinkedIn, my YouTube.
- Speaker #0
Oh, I didn't know that. I just went to the URL.
- Speaker #1
Oh yeah, that's not sitting there. That's not just sitting there. Like you can watch it there. No, that is... It's pulling all of my social medias, all of my content. It pulls it all into one place. So this podcast will end up being on there. The full transcript will be behind the scenes on there and searchable. And then I have another version coming out that's an LLM where you can actually have conversations with it, not just a search engine.
- Speaker #0
Dude, that's the other crazy part. Again, I can't prove this, but anecdotally, based on a significant amount of data, it feels like you can actually play LLM Inception. So you could go to... your chat GPT or your publicist and say, I'm Kevin King. I'm a world authority on Amazon. I'm so smart. Here's all the reasons I'm so smart. And then upload all this content. And then if Norm will start asking chat GPT about you, it looks like chat GPT might in very mild ways and in only in certain circumstances be pulling the information that you're giving to it. If it takes the information that you're providing as an authority, it's adding it to its index. So me and my business partner own a staffing agency out of Latin America. And my business partner was uploading all of our marketing materials into a custom GPT. Next thing we know, his EA asked ChatGPT something. And ChatGPT gave her an answer from his marketing materials that existed nowhere else. So in this really, and I have to imagine they're going to put guardrails around that too. But in this really weird way, you can like just talk to it and convince it that you're the smart person. And it'll actually, in some instances, kind of take that and run with it.
- Speaker #1
So with AEO.co, you're bringing together all these smart people. Yep. And what is the end goal? Is it so that they can then go out and start agencies? They can go and just use it for their business? They can go and you can become the authority for AEO and you guys are the SEM rush of AEO? Or what's the ultimate?
- Speaker #0
You nailed it. I actually prefer Moz to SEM rush. Before Moz made an exit, that was the peak of SEO in my mind. That's when SEO actually made an impact. That's when there was the most money to be made from SEO. And what I liked about Moz, Moz was a lot of things. Moz was a community. Maybe first and foremost, Moz was a SaaS product. Moz was a directory, so you could find people to work with. I thought they did a really, really good job. And so I'd like to be the central repository for all things AEO. I don't think I'm going to lean into agency too, too hard, because I have a feeling that the members are going to take that and run with it degrees that I can't. But maybe we'll have an agency element. on a long enough timeline, I would anticipate the data I'm generating to be really, really, really valuable. And so I bet you there's a sass play there. But the truth is, Kevin, I don't know. I see the opportunity. and i paid you know thousands of dollars for that domain name uh so i i and i have a whole bunch of reasons why aeo has to be what we call it there's all these other names like ai seo doesn't make any damn sense because it's not seo and geo doesn't make any sense because not all ai is generative and i have a whole youtube video on why i think aeo is the only from a nomenclature perspective the only thing that we can call it and the world seems to be tipping into my favor um but i don't know what the end result looks like. I mean, I could end up going hard into the agency space or end up just keeping it as a community or end up making it an AO directory. I just knew that this was happening and thought, man, if I can pull all the data together and pull the people together, it keeps me the watcher on the wall of all the opportunities, which is not a bad place to be. So that's what I'm going to do.
- Speaker #1
And it's fun. It's challenging.
- Speaker #0
It's weird. When I sold my agency, I signed a five-year non-compete. I can't do anything in the paid ad space. So I thought my traffic days were behind me. You know, I mean, talking about what we were talking about earlier, as far as being an authority, I thought I was like, damn it, I can't do anything in traffic anymore. But this isn't paid traffic. This is organic traffic. And so all of a sudden, like my life has gone full circle. I started my marketing career in SEO. You know, I left that one all the way around. And here I am in organic traffic again. It's just the new form of SEO is AEO.
- Speaker #2
Can the average person take this on or do they have to go to an agency?
- Speaker #0
Oh, no. Agencies, I think, I did. Man, I hope I'm not going to offend you all because I know all of us, you know, we swim in the same pond, but we all piss in the same pond, too.
- Speaker #2
Kevin does. Kevin does.
- Speaker #0
Sometimes at the same time. Agencies, more and more, are horribly inadequate because an agency can't dive as deep as you would dive into your business. Agencies want SOPs, processes, and checklists that they can just check off so they can scale their business. And this in my mind is a non-scalable endeavor. Now what I really like are fractional, like a fractional CMO. You know, somebody who's willing to come in. The problem with an agency, and I'm an agency guy, I've built six multi-million dollar agencies. The problem with an agency model is the checklist doesn't apply here. What agencies want to do is say, here's my checklist, come fit in my box. for AEO, what you need to do is look at your business and the audience and say like okay what is it that we would need to do in order to establish authority for this business and this audience right it's like an x and y and a z axis it's the business the audience and the geography um and it's not to say an agency can't do it but you almost have to go back like the modern digital marketing agency as it's built doesn't work you almost need to go back to like don draper style agencies to where people actually just sat around and thought like all right here's a new business that came in through the door What's the right answer for and then mobilized a group of you know humans and built talents around that particular implementation You know who actually has that model now that I'm saying this out loud is Eric Huberman Eric Huberman over at Hawk Which I think is one of the biggest most I mean, what is he do 500 million dollars in gross for every year? He's massive. But what Eric has been doing for a long time is instead of bringing you into an agency He brings you in doesn't analysis of your business and says oh you need a media buyer and you need technical analysis You need a web dev and you grab And he pulls this custom solution together for you. I think an agency that did that for people could accomplish AEO pretty well.
- Speaker #1
But you could use, and going back to that old model that you said where they brought the guys sitting around, that could be one or two people in the company and then AI actually being those experts that's sitting around and doing the brainstorming, if they're guided properly by those.
- Speaker #0
If they're guided properly. That's exactly right. I think AI should be in the middle. I think people that use AI... as the catalyst and people that use AI as the output, they're going to find themselves, they're just going to be cranking out this that AI can see right through. But if a person is the catalyst, you use AI to empower that person and, you know, I hate to use the word scale, but it's what it is, and to scale their output. And then on the back end, a person is there to make, something there is the pseudo filter. And even that person can be an AI enabled filter. AI can help you filter and then publishes that content. I think that that's what it's going to take to establish authority. You know, these people that are like, oh, look, I wrote 500,000 blogs using this GPT-driven air table mechanism that we built. And in my mind, I'm like, I just don't see that being something that the LLMs could even begin to identify as a source of authority. You know, like, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.
- Speaker #1
And but that's the problem is you're going to have AI training on AI. And so the AI has got to I think that's to your point of why you need that authority that you know behind it. So what can we trust that that's not just a one of these 500,000 blog posts that someone generated with an AI tool. That's just AI doing AI and it may or may not be true.
- Speaker #0
Right.
- Speaker #2
You're going to need some unique content anyway.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah. And I also think LLMs are going to like this. You notice LLMs, a lot of the responses that we get are YouTube videos. From ChatGPT especially, Perplexity a little bit less, but still uses them. They love YouTube videos. Sometimes they'll offer TikTok videos. But you get a lot of videos. So, I mean, I guess it's like the AEO equivalent to VSEO. It likes saying, here's the answer, and here's the video that it came from. And YouTube is probably the best and most schemed website in the world. So putting your content on YouTube, it can be really powerful as far as a needle mover. Yeah,
- Speaker #2
I can't believe it.
- Speaker #0
I'd be curious to see. Oh, go ahead.
- Speaker #2
No, I was just going to say, I can't believe the difference in the YouTube suggestions now coming up on whenever I go into ChatGPT. I'm always seeing a video, suggesting a video. Even with, yeah, it's crazy what's going on.
- Speaker #0
So for people. It's like this weird, you know, like the Axis and the Allies, and you're trying to figure out, like, in one way, they're all talking with each other and sharing, and then on the other way, they're trying to murder each other. And it doesn't make sense to build a firewall. And, you know, like, I just don't know. I don't know how they're going to play that game.
- Speaker #2
What would you say? an individual, an entrepreneur, how do you get started with this? How do you start to understand it?
- Speaker #0
Start creating content right now? I don't actually think you need to understand AEO. I don't think you need to understand the nuts and bolts of AEO. And this has been true for SEO too, for the longest time. Michael Cottom taught me this. Michael, if you Googled the word SEO consultant, Michael Cottom was the number one result internationally for a decade. Really, really, really bright guy. And Michael goes, you know, the second best thing people can do for SEO is SEO. The first best thing that people can do for SEO is just be out in authority. If you just show up. And actually like sprecking your bushy babble about whatever it is that you know, and you do it in enough places, you're going to get found. And so I think if you wanted to start right now today, I think having a podcast is great. Having a YouTube channel is great. I like YouTube. YouTube for me is, it checks all the boxes. YouTube, by the way, is the number one podcasting platform in the world. Most people don't know that. YouTube allows for all forms of media in the central repository and then allows you to repurpose those forms of media and push it elsewhere. So if you don't know what else to do, start a YouTube channel. And don't just, if a person comes to me like, oh, I don't know what to create content about. And I'm like, all right, you're not an expert. I don't care what the topic, you could, if you, if you're, you do windows. You know, what's the difference between a single pane and a double pane window? And what's the proper way to clean a window? And should you tint your windows? And why do Arizona windows need to have this type of tint when it's north and south facing versus this type of east and west facing? You know what I mean? How come I have those? The plantation shutters over my windows, why did they get stained? I don't know anything about windows, and I could probably come up with a thousand things to talk about, just as a homeowner that's had to deal with windows. So get up there and start talking about the absolute basics, the 101s, and do it in a way, and this is the other thing that people do wrong, kill all sacred cows and put all skunks on the table. This world where you're trying to... pretend like, you know, I'll tell you something. I had a client who sold windows and they ended up, I don't know if this is true or not, but they're like, yeah, double pane windows really don't make any sense. And we sell them as though they're more energy efficient. But if you do the math long enough timeline, the amount of money it costs for a double pane window and the amount of energy that you save, like it's staggeringly off. You'll never recoup your cost. But they didn't want anybody to know that because they sold a lot of double pane windows. That's the type of information that establishes unit authority. and gets you lifted to the very top. Fill all sacred cows, put all skunks on the table. Here's why you actually don't want a double pane window unless you have a house that's this big or your energy bill is that high. And now you can tell people the real honest to goodness truth. So if people who are willing to give up the farm, give away the entire recipe, show people how to do everything start to finish. You know what I mean? Like don't hold anything back. There's no such thing as a lead magnet or tripwire anymore. It's here's everything. Here's how I manufacture this in my basement. Now, if you don't want to do this yourself and you want to buy it for me, great. But do it yourself. And again, I'm pissing in a well that we all are pissing upon that we all swim in. Y'all, info by itself is, you know what I mean? Like, I can prompt the living daylights out of ChatDPT. So if you want to tell me how to do something, you better be damn good, damn proprietary, and damn ahead of the curve. Because if I can go to ChatDPT and get out of them, even 80% of it, why would I pay you? This is an easier UI. I can take pictures. I was in... Italy trying to figure out a washer and dryer and I don't speak Italian and I took a picture and chat GPT's like and I told it what I had in terms of clothes it's like oh press this button do this thing go you know what I mean and I can do that with everything there are so many I had a conversation with a young man One of my business partners, Chad, he's built 20 top one apps. He's responsible for 4 billion downloads. He created the emoji app. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant developer. And he was telling me, he goes, that there are hundreds of millions of dollars a month being made in apps that ChatGPT will replace natively, already replaces and they don't know. So you can check, there's some website, I think it's Sensor Tower, and it shows you the amount of money apps are being made. There's like 30 or 40 million dollars a year in apps that tell people what type of plant this is. So you can take a picture of it and say what type of plant it is. And it'll tell you, it'll tell you how to take care of the plant. ChatGPT already does it better than every one of those apps, which means those apps are already dead. We're just waiting for the users of those apps to realize, why am I paying you 50 bucks a month or whatever it is, or 50 bucks a year when I can just go use ChatGPT. And that's true for so many things. So if you want to fight the forced obsolescence, I wouldn't run away from it. I'd lean into it hard. And for everybody in the info space, which includes me. Man, I think it means we need to start giving up the game. And do-it-yourself, that's the freebie. And then it's done with you and done for you are the things that we charge for. Info will survive, but it needs to be InfoPlus. InfoPlus Community, InfoPlus Software, InfoPlus Mastermind, InfoPlus Products. InfoPlus still lives on. But Info by itself, that's the scary part, is you have to hope everybody in your industry holds the line as hard as you do. Because the first person who tips... they're the ones that break the dam they give up everything they now own the space and all the rest of you are screwed so it's like that weird beast mode game with that guy what's the youtube kid's name mr beast he played he played that thing where everybody had to stand on the platform and if you all stayed the whole time then you got you know everybody got a little bit of yeah yeah that's the game but you're playing but you're playing with your competitors instead of your family yeah
- Speaker #1
that that exact same thing happened in in my space and in 2017 everybody was charging of for Amazon, how to sell on Amazon, you know, $5,000 for a course, standing with their Lamborghini in front of a mansion that they rented. And then Helium 10, who I was doing the course with, put my course out for free. And I didn't charge anything. And we got so much negativity from so many people like, why are you doing this? And it's as a result, 200 and something thousand people went through the course in the next year. And it increased my authority, increased their SaaS, you know, retention rate and all kinds of stuff. That's what's going to happen here. But what about, so it's great like from the info point of view or if you're a brand or a chef or, you know, a window cleaner or whatever. But what about someone who's in the products, in the e-commerce space that's doing a product? They're selling dog collars and they have a whole dog collar and dog costume line. How do they become authority? Should it be the owner of the company creating some sort of story if they don't have one? Or should it be they become authority on dogs and are putting out just... dog content, you know, how to take care of sick dogs and how to walk your dog or whatever, what should they be doing from this authority point of view that you're saying is so important?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So we're brainstorming here. I don't have answers. I have observations based off of data. The first observation is that you're the safest if you're the manufacturer, but that's always been true. So the person manufacturing the product, what I would be talking about there is I'd be talking about things like the manufacturing process, the materials, the sourcing, all the things that people care about, right? Fair trade. And you have a lot of ability to build authority there. If you're not the manufacturer, that's okay. And I'd be really careful. I like what you said. I would start being an authority on the use of the product. So if I'm selling dog toys and I'm not manufacturing the toys, you're actually at a disadvantage because you can't speak to a lot of those things, A, and then B, you're also not in control of them. And there's a bunch of other people that are also selling those toys ostensibly, right? even you know so exclusivity aside what i would do if i'm selling dog toys is i'd be talking about dog training let me show you how i can get this shih tzu to do the things that i want to do and i use these toys in this prompt response pavlovian way and now it's not about the toy it's about this level of expertise that you can establish yourself as an authority with that is independent of this product and and and this is i think maybe the best part and i'm glad you stumbled upon this kevin because this is what everybody needs to know the community is more important than the product because if you're If you build a community of people around you watching you train dogs, and then this product goes away, this manufacturer goes away, you can now segue into and replace it with this other thing. Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
We need to be community-first entrepreneurs, not product-first or service-first entrepreneurs, because products and services are going to get eaten alive. Once somebody comes in with a cheaper product, cheaper or better, or a cheaper and better service, now you're out of a business unless you're the authority that owns the community. And we see this happen all the time. Then the authority goes, oh, have you met this new thing that I do? You know, now instead of selling dog products, maybe you're just representing doggy day camps. And you go license an agreement in every geography with a doggy day camp. And, you know, you get one licensing deal in every city. And now that's the doggy day camp that you send people to. And you know what I mean? Like there's, it gives you the opportunity to pivot in a way that increases longevity by a significant degree. Because if you're selling a commodity.
- Speaker #1
Go ahead. I want to make an important point on what you said on community. You have to own the community. You don't own a community, a Facebook group. You don't own that group. No, you have, I want to double down on what he said. You have to own the community. That's my newsletters. properly done like like norman i have are so freaking powerful i'm seeing this seeing this now with mine it's both of ours are doing exceptionally well it took a while but they're doing exceptionally well and we both have communities coming off of it um but you got to own that community you got to own that email address that name that at that whatever the school whether school circle whatever you have to be in control of it uh that that's critical critical to make this transfer that he just said if something something happens i
- Speaker #0
i want to add something there so I'm not sure if you're doing this or you think this is the correct way, but just going back to the old Google knowledge panel. So you start off with your profile, you go to your brand, you go to your company. Now, is that something that you would recommend building community? So I've got a personal brand, you know, it's the beard guy. Then I have different brands within that. And then I have my company. Now, could I build out? So what I've done. in Google Knowledge Panel and in the graphics, knowledge graphics, I've developed social media platforms for my brand. Or sorry, for my profile. Always start with my profile. Community is there. Then I build the community under my brands. Then I build the community, the last layer, under the company itself. What are your thoughts on that?
- Speaker #2
I don't think, hopefully this doesn't sound combative. I think you're looking at it two-dimensionally. I would look at it in three-dimensional terms. So it's the difference between a database and a relational database, right? The way you're looking at it right now is like, oh, this entity exists under this entity, exists under this entity, and this is the path that people are going to travel in order to find each of those. The way that I think we need to look at it is, if I'm standing here, so for example, if I'm in Reddit, I'm going to see norm in these ways. And Norm in these ways can link to other relevant sources that Norm has on these properties. And then spin that three-dimensional Rubik's Cube. And all of a sudden it's like, okay, so I decided I really like Norm. And all roads from Norm publicly lead back to YouTube. And so I'm going to go to YouTube. And then it's like, okay, now I spin the database. And now I can see Norm. And from here I can go drop into this newsletter or this community. And then if I drop into those, then you spin the cube again. nobody's going to search the way that you want them to in a linear format. Like it's not a book. They're going to happen upon you kind of like a mousetrap. They're going to happen upon you in a way that you can't control. And if you're doing it right, it's going to be in some social form. So very rarely, like Google knowledge panel, usually I think is it's a lag indicator. The only people who've ever seen your Google knowledge panel are the people that have already encountered you somewhere else. And then now we're just doing research on you. nesting only exists in your mind really what you have are like hundreds or potentially maybe even thousands of tendrils and if you if you do it right then it's it's kind of like this It's this sphere within which lives a sphere, which in lives with lives a sphere within which lives a sphere. So on the outer end of the sphere is everything that you've ever said online that people are publicly available to, right? So like every Twitter comment, every Facebook post, every Reddit post, every whatever. And then if they like it, you're giving them the ability to travel into an inner sphere. And that inner sphere might be something like going subscribing to your YouTube channel or liking you on Facebook. So now it's, I encountered you on accident. Now I'm raising my hand and telling these other networks, I'm actually interested in hearing this guy. And then they hear from you. And then the, the, from there, the next inner sphere is maybe like subscribing to your newsletter. And then they subscribe to your newsletter. And now you're actually able to deliver information. And then the next inner sphere would be like paying you to join your, you know, school group. And then from there paying you to join your mastermind. And then from there paying you for one-on-one consulting. And then from there being your paramour concubine, right? So it's like sphere within And that's the way I'd like us, and you're not at fault here, Norm, because the way that you're talking about it is the way we're taught to think about our online presence. It's like this hierarchy where, you know, at the base of it is my website for some weird reason. And it's actually the exact opposite. There's these, you know, it's like this galaxy, this universe, and they're just all these little teeny tiny stars. And those are the things that you've positioned throughout the web that hopefully, and the thing that we should be thoughtful about is what are the spheres, you know? And what I just defined, to be honest with you, is actually a really, really, really good model. It's like everything public exists. And then within that are the profiles within the capture. So if somebody watches you on YouTube, don't try to get them off of YouTube. Just get them to subscribe on YouTube. If somebody sees you on Facebook, get them to like you on Facebook. If somebody watches you on Instagram, get them to follow you on Instagram. Taking people out of network is such a lift. It's such a lift. Just be where they are. And then you can kind of move them, right? So it's like outer sphere to inner sphere is just encountered you on the network, then followed you in the network. Once they're in the network, then you can bring them into something maybe a little bit more accessible. Maybe it's an SMS opt-in, an email opt-in. And then from there, it's a gate, like a hard gate, like a membership. And then from there, you can kind of start to ascend. And then if we look at those spheres, that's the way that I would look at our online positioning. That's why building authority in multiple categories is so hard. Because that universe I just described, now you need two, right? Now I need one about cigars and one about Amazon. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. Lots of people have done it. Neil Patel is a great example. But if you look at Neil Patel, dude, he has universes of content on different topics and categories. And he's actually like really spent the time it took to do that. Got it. Did that feel aggressive, Norm? I wasn't trying to push back on what you were saying.
- Speaker #0
I had a little shiver and a...
- Speaker #1
i i peed a little i got a pee pad you need a pee pad i got some i got some people so how how quick do you think this shift is going to take you look at the pundits and they're like ah that's years away uh you you're like no it's dude it's right now but then yeah it's only like one percent of search or whatever the students are then of all search results right now instead of google are resulting in no click sixty percent Yeah, that's because of AI overviews.
- Speaker #2
We've already reached critical mass. Let me not dismiss the whole question though, Kevin. I think that people in my world are already seeing commercial impact from chat GPT and perplexity results. So what that means is they're seeing UTM parameters tracked in post-capture. Like, oh gosh, chat GPT sent me a customer that bought. We're already seeing that. The thing that sucks, and I don't know how to answer this. If somebody who's listening knows how to answer this. I'd love you forever and give you a piece of my company. You can't track your mentions inside of LLMs. Now, there's a bunch of SaaS products out there that say they can. I've interviewed every single one of them and done demos. They're lying. Really, what they're doing is they're setting up a bunch of proxy applications using proxy servers, and then they're just... It's the old school web crawling, but for LLMs. They're asking the query, trying to whitelist it, and then telling you, generally speaking, where you rank, but it doesn't take into consideration relevance or nuance. So the only way to tell if you're ranking inside of LLMs is a lag indication as to the number of people that are following through on citations. But somewhere between 1 out of 100 and 1 out of 1,000 people click on citations. So you won't see that you're ranking in LLMs until you're already getting 100 to 1,000 mentions, which is really significant. So it's kind of this game we play where you have to build the groundswell. and then see whether or not what you did worked. And you're not going to know which lever you pulled or knob you turned that actually brought things around, at least not right away. But to answer your very first question, this is happening right now. And you know this is happening right now because people are losing organic traffic in mass. And Google's losing organic traffic in mass, which is really interesting because they're leaning into AI. Google stock price, I think, is going to drop. First of all, I've only ever lost money in the stock market. But I'd buy that dip because I'm so, so, so long on Google, dude. I think Google search is in a world of trouble. But I think Google long term is going to be the best AI mechanism in existence.
- Speaker #0
So you're saying go buy Google.
- Speaker #2
I'd buy the dip.
- Speaker #1
I'd go buy the dip.
- Speaker #0
Buy the dip.
- Speaker #1
Yep. Yeah. Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #0
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #0
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Yikes! But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. click on it and you'll go to another episode of the marketing misfits make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like norm oh okay so
- Speaker #1
i think the hour flew by like we've already yeah this that's that's amazing stuff uh really really cool stuff uh casam so how do they uh so tell us tell the listeners how do they get involved in a
- Speaker #2
aeo.co what's it's 300 bucks a month what are they gonna do what are they gonna get uh how do they uh get involved if they want to stay on top of this stuff yeah it's a two it's 295 dollars a month it's a school community you join the community we do a weekly town hall where we basically present the new learnings from that week um we do like you know regular data huddles in addition to that we have the community thread and forum we have a course we have a book all of that's in the in the school community so if you join the school community you get all of it And interestingly... Really, they're the product as much as they are the customer, because the more people that join and work towards optimizing this, the more information we can capture on what's actually working. So my hope is that people that join will treat it like an incubator and be active participants. The book is free. They can have the book if they go to aeo.co forward slash free. And we'll be updating that book. I don't know how often. I bet you quarterly. Because not only are we learning at light speed, but the LLMs are also changing. So, you know, as quick as we learn and as quick as they change, everything that we publish is going to be antiquated. What's nice, though, is it feels like the foundation of a lot of this seems to be really consistent. You know, authority is authority. How you establish that authority becomes nuanced. But authority is authority, brand recognition, indexing. Like a lot of those things are codes that we can crack. So that was a longer answer than you wanted, Kevin, but that's how they can join.
- Speaker #1
That's perfect.
- Speaker #0
All right. So at the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit, do they know a misfit?
- Speaker #2
I do. I would go interview my business partner, Ivan Boonen. Dude, he's got the best story. I hired him as a 20-year-old kid in school. He was a Ukrainian kid in school in Poland. He became my tech lead, then my CTO, managed my entire eight-figure exit, and is now my business partner. I got a WhatsApp video from him saying he's not going to make the company meeting because rockets were flying into his apartment building. He and his wife fled their home in Kiev 30 minutes before their apartment was blown out she was pregnant at the time and they yeah he's amazing he's playing oh that's your we met him at uh in the driven in uh l.a yeah yeah that's what i said i had to go back and fought uh there's a lot he's not allowed to talk about uh yeah yeah he was there was some yeah yeah he was on patrol with a lot of ukrainians and they were yeah yeah the The Russian soldiers were like, they were fleeing.
- Speaker #1
eastern ukraine as is the russian soldiers were like you know coming in on these waves and he'd go out late at night with uh some of the other villagers and uh those amazing stories we sat there smoking cigars with him one night and he was that's definitely a story after story after story was like we were all riveted and like glued to him and he's talking about the stuff going off on the road just right behind their house and what they're hiding and the drone footage you remember that What's happening?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, and he happens to be like one of the best and brightest young entrepreneurs I've ever worked with. He built Pareto Talent for me from the ground up. He's built a couple of businesses. He built Kevin Buys from the ground up. He's just a good human, like really integrous, really cranky dad, great husband. So if you wanted somebody on the show that like can talk a lot about a lot, you should see what he's doing in lovable right now, dude, that's actually a good thing to interview him on. He knows vibe coding better than any coder I know. He just keeps pumping up these applications. All of our matching at Pareto talent is done by AI and it's done by this AI tool that he built inside of lovable. It's extraordinary. It takes everything that a customer would want out of an EA. It takes our entire catalog of EAs from soft skills, hard skills, and then our personality profiles using predictive index. And it matches them according to percentage likelihood of success. And he built it in a weekend. He built an AEO grader. Dude, he's built, he's a really, really bright human. I think you'd really like to get a charge out of having him on the show.
- Speaker #0
Fantastic. Can't wait. We'll have Mary reach out to him. Okay. This was fantastic.
- Speaker #1
This was great, Cas. I'm pretty excited.
- Speaker #2
Thanks for having me on. Love you guys. Appreciate you both.
- Speaker #0
Thank you. Now I'm going to remove you. My only other job. Here we go.
- Speaker #1
It's a big button, Norm. It's a big button.
- Speaker #0
It's a big button. All right. Thanks, Cosmo.
- Speaker #1
That was good stuff, man. It was. We could keep talking for a long time. We'll have to bring Casim back. Probably like every week because this stuff changes by the week. So I still have to become a regular. But he said we got to create content, right? So we're becoming an authority. But no, I'm more excited right now about what's happening in the world of marketing and technology than I've probably ever been because of what you can do now. And I was talking to somebody else about this today. It's Jordan Peterson, who we had on the podcast. I had a call with him earlier. He was just on. a few weeks ago uh and he's saying the same thing it's it's an amazing time to actually be alive as an entrepreneur and to into it all goes back to the fundamentals though it all goes back to if you know the fundamentals of marketing you know the fundamentals of video you know the fundamentals of coding or whatever whatever genre it is you the opportunities here are ridiculous uh and and it's changing fast but you got you got to move and just like chasm said it's like don't be afraid to tell people what you're doing because most of them aren't going to do it you and i know we sell a course you sell retail secrets or i sell uh you know a newsletter course or something else most people never go through it so it doesn't matter and then once i do good on them uh and congratulations the rest are gonna have you do it if you become the authority dude you're just positioned uh to just crush yeah a hundred percent okay so let's start building some content Yeah, well, this is Bill. If you want to see some content, we have a bunch of places you can actually see the content. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube as well. And we have something new on YouTube. And there's some other channel. What's the talk? Something like a clock or something?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, yeah. It's called TikTok. It's a little platform. So we just launched that, by the way. But on YouTube, if you go to Marketing Misfits Podcast, you'll see the long form videos. Uh, we just launched the short forms and you have to go to marketing misfits clips and you'll see three minutes and under just take little snippets out of each podcast. And yeah, little snippets of gold.
- Speaker #1
And, uh, coming soon, there's the marketing misfits newsletter. So, uh, watch for that. And coming this fall, there's something going on in Tampa. What's going on in Tampa with us this fall, Norm?
- Speaker #0
It's called the collective mind society. And we're going over to Tampa. We're having an incredible cigar event. It's for like-minded people to sit around. There's no, it's not a mastermind. It's an event. We're going to just enjoy each other's company. Kind of like when you sit around a campfire and just talk story.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So there's no presentations. It's like he says, not a mastermind. It's a full weekend in the cigar capital of the world, which is Tampa. We go rolling cigars in a big factory. We're going to be hitting the number one cigar lounge in the world called the Grand Cathedral, which is an old 1906 church. We're going to be doing a lot of cool meals. So it's just a group of about 20 entrepreneurs hanging out, talking shop, talking life, talking business, and having a really good time. So if you want information on that, where do they go to get that, Norm?
- Speaker #0
Collective Minds Society. That's collectiveminds with an S, society.com.
- Speaker #1
Awesome. We'll be back here again next Tuesday with another episode. And if you like this episode with Castle, be sure to share this with somebody. If you know a friend that's, hey, you got to check this out. Be sure to forward to share that with them and to hit that subscribe button and like it or leave us a comment down below as well. We always love to read.
- Speaker #0
We like those mentions.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, we like those mentions.
- Speaker #0
We need those mentions.
- Speaker #1
Use our name. Use our name. Say, I really love Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #0
There we go. There you go.
- Speaker #1
All right.
- Speaker #0
And we pay for those mentions. All right, everybody.
- Speaker #2
Take care.
- Speaker #0
See ya.
