RSS 64: How to Win AI Search: YouTube, Reddit, and the New Rules of LLM Visibility

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0:35every day millions of people are going to google and they're not being met with 10 blue links they're being met with this thing called ai overviews they're seeing answers to their questions directly in the search and results page and for a lot of people a lot of brands maybe even you this is a problem in a recent interview that i have with nick stanley on the Nick Stanley Show. We had a conversation where we dove in deep into how AI search, LLM visibility, AI visibility, whatever you want to call it, and the efforts to actually start to show up. AEO, GEO, AI, SEO, EI, EIO, whatever you want to call it.

1:13How to actually influence the LLM and increase your likelihood of having a story told to the users in the way that you want, how it can be done. Folks, I am so excited to plug you into this interview. this is one that you will not want to miss. So tune in right now to my conversation with Nick Stanley.

1:47So as consumers shift from away from Google search to using LLMs for research, for purchasing decisions for everything in their lives. What do executives, business owners, freelancers, what do we all need to do to adjust to these changes that we're facing? I think the most important shift that all of us need to make is first understand that Google is no longer the only place that people look. So that old way of just optimizing your site, writing a few blog posts, optimizing your landing pages, getting a few links, and then saying, saying, okay, Google index me, is a thing of the past. Like today, what you really need to focus on is optimizing your site on multiple platforms.

2:34Because now when you go to Google, you're not just seeing websites, you're seeing Reddit, you're seeing YouTube, you're seeing LinkedIn, you're seeing X, you're seeing Quora answers, you're seeing TripAdvisor, Yelp, all of these different things all show up in the SERP. And this is influencing not just Google, but it's also influencing perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, you name it. So what I think more marketers need to be thinking about is how can you show up not only on your website in a way that is crawlable by the LLMs, not only in a way that is best in class for your own customers, but also how can you show up on some of these other platforms?

3:10Are you investing in YouTube videos that are aligned against the types of prompts that somebody might ask a ChatGPT? Are you creating Reddit content that's answering questions like this product versus this? Because these things are being cited by the LLMs every single day and decisions are being made by consumers based off of the responses that the LLMs are giving them, which is rooted in this content that it's citing on sites that are not yours and not the ones that you own. So in many ways, long answer to a short question, the best thing that marketers, freelancers, creators, et cetera, can do in today's day and age is to walk away from some of the traditional thinking that all that matters is our website and start to think outside of the box with channels like YouTube and Reddit and other platforms that are influencing the LLMs every day.

4:03Yeah, because if I'm hearing you correctly, when an LLM is running a search, and I believe this is how it works where it's running multiple searches at once. So if I'm just asking a simple question like, where do I get the best cup of coffee in Seal Beach, California? It's going to Reddit. It's going to YouTube. It's going to, let's say 10 to, I don't know, 30 different channels at once. And then compiling that information to give you that answer. And so if I'm that coffee shop, Yeah. Do I need to be posting in Reddit? Do I need to be on all of these channels? Yeah. So let's go back to the philosophy of what you just described, which is called a query fan out.

4:53So when you go into an LLM and you as the user say, I want the best coffee shop in California, the LLM is going to modify that question in a bunch of different ways. So it's going to take that and it's going to ask for the best, the top, the highest rated, the most reviewed. It's going to create a bunch of variations of that word that you asked. And then it's going to scrape the Internet and look for information. It's going to do that on channels like Reddit. It's going to look and see are there any YouTube videos where an influencer talked about this. It's going to go to Quora and see if anyone asked that same question.

5:28It's also going to use a traditional Google search. It's going to look at the top ten links and maybe visit Yelp, etc. All of those things are going to happen. And then it's going to do a count. It's going to count how often different coffee shops names are being mentioned. And the one that gets mentioned number one the most or number two is all going to have different weights. And then the response that you get back is going to be based off of this massive amount of data that the LLM just scanned and understood within the matter of a minute. And then it's going to give it back to you. So what does the coffee shop need to do?

6:02The coffee shop needs to make sure that it has its host in order as it relates to its website and it is using language that their target customer would use in their prompt. So you want to have a landing page or a blog post to put the best coffee shops in Palm Beach or whatever, wherever you are. You want to have a landing page or awards that you've received from Yelp, TripAdvisor that say that you're the best because that's going to help validate you with expertise and experience that will help validate you to the eyes of the LLM. Then you want to make sure that you're listed highly on all of those different review sites.

6:37You're going to maybe partner with influencers who can create content about you as the best in this space. Ideally, it's going to be content that lives on YouTube. And then when you ever see someone ask that question in Reddit, what is the best coffee shop in this area? You are definitely going to want to respond and reply and engage. Or you put out an email or you put up a status update to your Facebook friends and your connections, your customers. You send out an SMS saying, hey, folks, we just saw this post go live about best coffee shops. We'd love for you to chime in and share if you've enjoyed our coffee in the way that we operate as a business.

7:13And then your customers are going to create user generated content. Now, you do have to make sure that your customers like you, because if they go in that thread and they're ripping you a new, like they're yelling about you, it's not going to be a pretty site. So that's the approach that I would take. Well, let's zero in on YouTube because you mentioned it a few times. How important is it in this new marketing landscape? So even with the rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, all of these new LLMs, there's still one search mechanism that runs the world, and that's Google. And Google, a few years ago, bought this website called YouTube.

7:51And if you understand capitalism, it's pretty easy to understand that Google is going to send more people to a YouTube video than they are to a random video on a different platform. Because Google knows that if people watch YouTube, they might actually pay for a premium subscription so they don't have to watch the ads. And they know that if they happen to watch the ads, they're going to get a higher cost per click and conversion rate on that ad and they're going to generate money on the back of it. So Google is incentivized to send more people to YouTube. YouTube also happens to be the second most popular search engine in the world.

8:25It has a ton of data, a ton of valuable insights from creators like yourself, who have put out a ton of amazing pieces of content that Google now has access to. Google has said, no, ChatGPT, you can't scrape our content. It has said, no, you can't scrape our content. So from all of this, Google has a bit of a moat. It has all of this data, all of this information that it's sitting on. And when you go to Gemini, when you go to Google AI mode and you ask a question, Google's advantage is that it can scrape and analyze the data that has been uploaded to YouTube and use that to inform the response directly to the user.

9:01And it's actually a pretty good user experience. People like visuals. People like people. In the rise of AI, when you can have anything written with just words by an AI, what do you think stands out as having the deepest human connection? It's going to be video content. So when Google is having someone who's saying, I really wish that I had some tips on how to grow my HVAC company or my coffee shop. It knows that yes, it can give somebody all of the words, but it also knows that more people watch movies every year than the amount of people who read books. So it's probably best in their interest to show a video that somebody can sit there and consume passively.

9:41So video and YouTube, in my opinion, is one of the most underrated, most ripe opportunities, even though the platform has been around for a very long time. I think it's never been a better time for someone to create video content. That's a great tactic to start with right there. And I can speak from experience. I mean, having only started this show a couple of years ago, I cannot believe YouTube's incredible reach and the opportunities that it has opened up. Now, you mentioned that ChatGPT and these other models cannot scrape YouTube for information. So Jim and I, just to be clear on this, that's the one large language model that we can go to that does have access to everything on YouTube.

10:35Yeah, now that I mean, that's really interesting. And I and I'm going to let you run with that momentarily. But I thought this was an interesting anecdote. So a short time ago, the United States went down and I believe it was the CIA picked up the president of Venezuela and brought him back to the United States. And if you went on to chat GPT in the days following that, it said that is not true. That did not happen. Whereas when I ran the same query on Gemini, it was absolutely up to date and had the details on what had just happened. And that was one of those moments where I thought, oh, Gemini's got something different that these other models don't.

11:18I think Gemini, I love what's happening with the LLMs and the competition. But it feels very much kind of like the early days of Mac versus PC in some regards. But I do believe truly that Google has an unfair advantage that they're going to run away with this thing. If you think about the average user, they are very familiar with Google. They're going to go to Google and they're going to ask questions. They're familiar with that. It's built into their DNA. The fact that AI is a part of that now, for the vast majority of the world, is not actually going to influence them at all. They don't view that as, oh, I'm using AI.

11:54They're just getting answers to questions. They're trying to figure out how long do I need to put my steak on the barbecue? They're trying to figure out the simplest questions, and Gemini gives them those answers. Now, here's where it gets really interesting. Google also has access to our calendar. Google has access to our inbox. There's this thing called Google Home that a lot of people have in their homes. Google has access to our browser behavior through Chrome. If we wanted to go really deep, we could say Google also owns this site called Waymo, where people are getting into cars that are driven by AI and we're going from place to place.

12:29Now imagine a world where Gemini is powering all of this experience connected to one individual. You ask Gemini any question, it knows everything about you from the things that you don't even want it to know because you're browsing on websites that you don't think anybody else knows about, but it knows. And it's going to give you recommendations based off of the insight that you haven't even fed it. So for marketers, this is where it gets even more tricky because forever we were able to use keyword research in data associated with volume of people typing things into Google to understand whether or not our website would show up.

13:09But when everyone has a personalized LLM experience, the platforms don't have the ability to understand the memory and the personalization of these tools. So your experience with Gemini is going to be very different from my experience because of the way you operate with Gemini, the things that it knows about you, your IP address, your location, the fact that it can look at your calendar and know that you're booking meetings with all of these types of people. You can see that I'm booking meetings with these types of people. The experience is completely personalized to you. So for marketers, we have a massive new challenge that no one is talking about.

13:49And that is the fact that you actually don't know anything about the SERP. You don't know anything about what people are actually seeing anymore. But we're going to pretend for a little while that we do. Yeah. So what do we do with that? Yeah. Let's say you are a nonprofit and you have a wonderful mission and you really want to help. Let's think of a good example. You've got a charter school that has this fantastic AI research pathway and you pair up with colleges. I'm thinking of a school right now, and they want to reach kids that are really interested in this. They know they can change their lives.

14:38It's all good motivations, but they don't know how to reach that parent or that kid that lets them know, hey, this exists. You would love this if you knew it existed. What are the next steps for them to get the right message in front of that person? Two key things to do. On one side, you're optimizing for the LLMs. The other side, you're optimizing for the human. So let's start with the LLM optimization efforts. You need to start by understanding your website and making sure that you have a structure and a navigation system within your website that aligns with the queries that a parent would have when they're trying to make a decision.

15:19So the parent is likely to ask, what are the best ways that I can make sure that my kid excels? What are the things that I can do to prepare my kid for university? Should my kid go to university? How do I know what the best programs in high school are? How can I augment my child's education? They're asking these types of questions. Now, ask yourself on your website if you have content that answers that question. And it can't just be a one line sentence. It needs to be an in-depth asset that answers that question. And you are writing in-depth blog posts across that entire spectrum. So if I'm in that nonprofit's shoes, I'm thinking to myself, what are the 20 most frequently asked questions that parents ask before they even discover us?

16:01What are the pains that they have, the struggles that they have? Are they saying the traditional school system is failing my kid? How can I get them some support? Are they saying, I don't know how to help my kid. They're excelling. I need to find ways to make them thrive. What are the questions that they're asking? Create in-depth, long-form pieces of content that show how your nonprofit supports the answer to those questions. You're also going to now consider the human side. Can you tell these stories in a human way through video, through content, by answering questions in Reddit where people are asking these questions?

16:40There are subreddits that are dedicated to hundreds of thousands of parents where parents are asking questions like this all the time. Go into those subreddits and answer questions. There are Facebook groups as well. Now, while Facebook groups aren't today being indexed by the LLMs, it's still a real person on Facebook and in these groups where I would go and be like, OK, let me talk to people in these communities and in these groups. So you have two paths. One, you need your site and your infrastructure to be built around the questions and the queries that your audience would look for. And then you need to really lean heavily into that human side.

17:17And I think this is where you win in today's age because you're thinking the long game and you need to personify the brand. You need to build rapport. It's all about heart and head, right? Like on this side, it's the head. But over here, it's the heart. And to connect with the heart, you have to be human. You have to create educational content, engaging content, entertaining content or empowering content. That's what I call the four E's. So educational. Tell people what they don't know. A lot of parents. I'm a parent. I have no clue what high school is going to bring, but I would love to know.

17:48So create engaging content. All parents who are going through the education system or homeschooling or whatever, they all have questions. Ask engaging questions, create engaging content. Parents go through similar struggles, entertain them with a few memes, create some interactive content that makes them share your stories with their friends. If you can inspire that type of interaction, you've hit gold. And then finally, empower. Empower the students that you want to support and celebrate their wins and their successes because everybody loves to see people win. So if you do those things, you're going to tackle the human side and the LLM side, and that's what I would do.

18:26It's a lot. So here's how you make it easier for yourself. you leverage AI to support you in the production of these assets, right? Like we oftentimes hear the negative around all the AI and the LLMs, but I think folks, it's important to recognize that great organizations, great businesses, AI is an equalizer. You can use these tools now to create all of those blog posts in a matter of minutes. You can get a script for your YouTube video in a matter of seconds. You can modify it still with your human fingers, which I think is important, but you can get so close to that draft and that final piece now than ever before.

19:08And I want people to lean into it. Well, okay. Let's take this episode right here as an example. So there you've already given useful content that is educational. Number one, there's some empowering pieces to it. What were your other two E's? Engaging and entertaining. I haven't cracked a joke yet, but I'll work on it. As a given, we're entertaining and engaging. With this piece of content, let's say at the end of it, it's an hour and change length and it's filled with good insights for people who would want this information. What do we do with that to help that reach more people in terms of repurposing, leveraging these AI platforms?

19:57What are all the ways that that spreads out? So you take one, this is why I love video, because I think it's the most versatile format in the world. You can take a video asset and you can turn it into a blog post. You take the transcriptions, you can understand it, you can learn it, you can upload it to an LLM, and you can write a blog post out of it. This is a blog post that breaks down all of the things that brands need to know about LLM optimization in today's age. That's the blog post. Then from that blog post though, you can also take this video and you can identify 10 different moments where there was mic drop moments, moments where we were talking and there was something dropped that was so valuable that that needs to be clipped.

20:34And then you clip those up and you turn them into vertical, you turn them into horizontal, you start to share it on Instagram as a reel, as a story. You can share it as a carousel where maybe you find just this moment right here where we're talking and you take a photo and a screenshot and you put words under you, words under me that are the things that we're talking about. Then you reshare that on LinkedIn. You create a carousel on LinkedIn with the same concepts, the same ideas. You can then take the same content and then have it inspire questions that you might want to ask on Reddit or questions that you want to ask in your story on Instagram.

21:09All of those different things. You create Create ridiculously valuable content once and then you repurpose it forever. That's been my mantra in the story that I've told for years. If you believe truly that the content that you're producing is good, if you think that the content that you are creating is worth consuming, then you're doing a disservice to all those people out there that are struggling with the problem that you could have helped them solve by not promoting your work. Why don't we do it? Why are we so afraid to reshare content that was super helpful two months ago, but because Because time has passed, we feel like it's old, but the people, the world has no idea it existed.

21:48So you need to get into this habit of resharing your greatest hits, distributing your content. If it adds value to the world, then let the world give you value back. Now, what do you say to that person that says, I agree with everything you just said. Those are all really good ideas, but I am, let's say it's the coffee shop owner. So it's one, you got one shop, you are making the greatest cup of coffee. Yeah. People love it. And you say, what my passion is making that coffee amazing, satisfying my customers. And it's so difficult to carve out X number of hours per day to do this repurposing to get onto those forums and do that work.

22:32What tools can be leveraged to make it easier? So there's a few things. the first thing that I would recommend is that you create content passively. Set up your phone, hit record and make coffee and record that. There's folks all over the world right now with thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers who set up a camera, they make a sandwich and hundreds of people watch them. And they have a lineup out the door of people who want to meet the TikTok famous sandwich maker simply because they're there making sandwiches and they care about the sandwich. So if you care about your coffee, put up the camera, hit record and make your coffee and just do it with passion.

23:12Do it with your interest and then hit share. Publish one every day. It doesn't take a lot of time. You're doing what you always do, except now you're recording it. Yes, if you do all the LLM optimization stuff that we talked about, you do have to find some time to do something outside of the norm, but I encourage folks to record. But let's say you're bought into that and you still want to do the LLM things. There's There's tools like Claude that I would recommend folks check out. You can do vibe coding. You can connect it directly to your website, your CMS. You can write exactly the prompt that you wanted to create.

23:44Create 20 blog posts on this topic. It will create those blog posts for you. Then you can go in and make some various edits. There's tools like distribution.ai, product that I built, where you can take any long form content that you create, upload it, and it will write the tweets, the LinkedIn posts. It will schedule the posts. You can put it on autopilot and it will automatically share all of that on your behalf. That is also a tool that you could leverage. There's a ton of different functionalities and options out there. I think the key though is to lean into what you're really good at as your primary format.

24:16My dad always said, this is my joke, but it's kind of true. He always said, it's better to have one good kid than two bad. And I want founders, entrepreneurs to know that this is true for marketing too. it's better to be really really good at one channel like tick tock then be mediocre on reddit blogging facebook youtube pora all the other things it's way better to just be the best in the world at one channel before you start jumping into all the other ones and right now which channel seems like it has the most value wow great question so it's different depending on the niche. So if I'm in beauty, I'm going all in on TikTok and Instagram.

25:03Those are the channels that you have to be. That's from what I see. If I'm in interior design, I'm going all in on Instagram. If I'm in music, it's TikTok. If I'm in the world of entrepreneurship, it's probably YouTube. If I'm in tech, it's X still. If I'm in management and HR, it's definitely LinkedIn. Those channels still thrive. If I'm in local business, Facebook is a beast that no one is really spending enough time talking about. So it depends on your niche, but that's a bit of the lay. And here's another interesting one. If you are outside of North America, WhatsApp is actually blowing up in a real way and is worth it.

25:47Interesting. Low cost per click. Let's touch on Facebook real quick. I'm just curious because in my mind, I was surprised you said that because I think of Facebook as being kind of dead at this point, something that people over the age of 60 use. Right, right. But maybe that's just a bias. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's just I don't use it a whole lot. So tell me more. So the reason why I say Facebook is still alive is because here's the thing that is true. Social sharing on Facebook has declined. Facebook has gone from being a true social network to being a media channel where it's essentially just news and people sharing AI images that they don't realize is AI.

26:33It's a bunch of that stuff. But here's what's interesting. The people who are still there are typically 50 plus, 45 plus. And those folks are passively consuming content, but the vast majority of it is local content. So it's consuming local content by joining marketplace, by joining groups where like-minded people are talking about things. That's where the vast majority of the value exists on Facebook. People aren't sharing as much as they used to on Facebook. I can remember when I was in university after a party, you uploaded 40 images from the party on Facebook. Now you have a party and no one puts up a picture.

27:14No one's even taking pictures. I don't think people take photos. But back then that was how Facebook was used. Because of this shift, what I would be thinking about as a business is the Facebook groups is where the gold is. It's not in the page where they played the biggest bait and switch of all time, where they made us pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get people to like us. and now we have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach the people who liked us. Now, the money is in the groups. And in the past, I've bought Facebook groups and reached out to the person who ran the group.

27:52I had a product, I'd see the product, and it would pay for itself. The opportunity in Facebook groups is still absolutely huge. Zuckerberg said many years ago that his goal was to find a way to connect the world. The world can't connect if it's profile to profile. The only way that you can connect the world is if people are joining groups where they now have a network of people outside of their 250 friends on Facebook. This episode of the Nick Stanley Show is brought to you by Zapier. If you've ever felt buried in repetitive work, copying data, moving files, sending follow-ups, you know it's like death by a thousand mouse clicks.

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30:09Getting started is simple. Head to the Zapier ChatGPT MCP server and add the tools you want ChatGPT to access. Follow the steps in the Connect tab. And if you're an admin on a ChatGPT enterprise account, You can enable MCP across your entire workspace. So if you're ready to stop wasting time on busy work, join the AI revolution and make a little automation magic of your own. Try the Zapier ChatGPT integration using the link below. Yeah. Okay, I've got a real life question for you. There's an organization. I'm going to be a little vague, so I'm not giving away any details. But just so everyone knows, it is a real example.

30:57This is an organization that asked for some insights on how to reach potential customers. And they are spending an incredible amount of money on Meta and Google ads. Yeah. But not doing anything other than that, and they are surprised it's not working. By any measurement possible, it is definitely not working for them right now. Is that somebody that's stuck in the old paradigm? Is that a marketing company that's telling them something still works that doesn't anymore?

31:44What pops in your head off of that? So a few things pop in my head. The first one is that Google ads have changed forever. With the rise of AI and the way that it looks when you type in something, people are scrolling quickly to get beyond the ads because no one wants to click ads. Google's making a lot of changes. So cost per click is going up. My next piece that, and from that, I would also ask, are they bidding on queries that actually have commercial intent. Like a lot of times we run ads against words that people type into Google that don't actually translate into a sale. Someone who's going to Google and typing in coffee is not the same as someone who's typing in coffee near me.

32:23Someone who's typing in best coffee machine is not the same as the person who's typing in cheapest coffee machine. So simply thinking about best versus cheapest, the people who type in those two words are very different. it. One person is looking for a low cost answer to a coffee machine. The other might be ready to open up their wallet and spend whatever it takes. Two different types of people. If the customer or the client, aka the brand, doesn't have a high quality coffee machine, but they're running ads against this, they're never going to win. They are always going to fail against the higher value coffee machine when they should have been running ads against cheap.

33:04They should have ran ads against the cheap person. The marketing agency behind this should be asking these types of questions and doing that type of analysis. On Facebook, it comes down to demographic. It comes down to the type of ads. If you're in consumer, Facebook ads are ripping, so it might be an agency problem. If you're in D2C, selling to individuals, products, Meta's properties are ripping and still ridiculously valuable. So it might be an agency problem. But with the rise of AI, I would also encourage the brand to think, can you do more with your creative than you used to? You shouldn't have just five ads anymore.

33:44You should have like 50 plus. You should have multiple variations of an ad with multiple different words, with different spokespeople. You can leverage AI to have different backgrounds and scenes. So I would encourage them to try different types of creative now as well. Where do you see old school qualitative, like getting the shoe leather down to understand your customer in this network? Because I, Test Prep Gurus, who sponsors this podcast and is a company I started 20 some odd years ago and is still an ongoing entity very much. We found incredible insights into our customers by going old school, sitting down with a variety of customers, doing hour-long one-on-one interviews, recorded all of it, fed it into an AI model and did a sentiment analysis.

34:48What are the major pain points that came up across these 20 interviews? And it came up with different customer profiles. It really teased out insights that were there, but made it a lot easier and faster to pull that stuff out. But I felt like the key to it was we didn't start with the what's the quick and easy solution. We put in an incredible amount of work up front to do those one on one interviews to really get in front of humans one on one. That's where the gold is. That's where the gold is. In an age where you can ask an LLM anything, getting closer to the human is where the gold is because the LLM can't scrape me.

35:34It's not possible. So what you want to do as a brand is try to get that human touch. Try to learn from your customers. feed it to the LLM so you have an unfair advantage. And I encourage people to use the paid subscription so it's not all training data that's being fed over into the rest of the world. But go gather that type of insight, record them, upload it and build a project or a GPT around your customer where you can ask questions and you can get closer to them. And the LLM will learn and use the insights that you've uploaded to give you tailored insight for your customer. So if I was in your shoes, I would be like, okay, I'm going to take all this interview information.

36:15Now I'm going to ask my LLM to give me a campaign that's going to resonate with these folks. I'm going to also upload the transcript of this interview and say, Ross was talking about the four E's and about website content that we should create. For test prep gurus, give us a recommendation on the types of content that we should produce to influence the LLMs based off of this transcript with Ross. And it's going to do it. and use insights from our interviews to guide the records in these stories. Because I talked about like problems that people have with this and that. It's going to pick up on those nuances and then give it back to you.

36:51So what I think we actually have to do as marketers, and I'm excited by it, to be honest, is to go back into time. I think we as marketers looked at this whole concept of content marketing and over focused on the word content. where all we did was churn out blog posts after blog posts and tweet after tweet and post after post and scream at the top of our lungs, content is king, create more content. The world listened. We have way more noise now than ever before. But if we've remembered that it was content marketing, we might, we might actually go back to the fundamentals of some of the like early godfathers of marketing Madison Avenue style who actually spent time them researching and looking for insights from their customers that their competitors didn't have so they could use it to tell stories that connected with humans on a deeper level.

37:44Where we have no choice as marketers but to embrace the marketing side of our craft and the art of our craft, which is understanding the psychology of humans, understanding the nuances of culture and what moves people today. And when we do that, the craft gets fun again, I think anyway. So I think what you're doing is exactly what brands should be doing.

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39:18I was really struck. I mean, talk about it being fun. Again, struck by that Super Bowl commercial that Claude did about ChatGPT. Right. And yes, it's funny. I should put a little context about it before I get into it. But for anybody that didn't see it, Google it first of all so you can just see it yourself. And there's a skinny little dude that is trying to do pull-ups, And then he turns to this hulking bodybuilder and says, can you build me a training plan so I can be strong? And the bodybuilder speaks just like Chad GPT. And yet as it starts to talk about a training plan, the trainer goes into, oh, before we actually start training, part of being strong is feeling strong.

40:12And you might want to buy these shoes to feel stronger. And they were making a crack at GPT's move now to start working ads into the chat GPT model. What hit me about it was how deeply it resonated with people. Because the idea that ads are going to be inserted into chat GPT, people have a reaction like, well, they're going to poison the well. I trust this thing to give me unfiltered information. and it really struck a chord with people. But in order to strike that chord, Claude really knew who they were speaking to and how to speak to them. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's the key. Claude knew their audience.

40:57They knew that people didn't, they picked up on the insight, right? They could go to Reddit and see hundreds of people complaining about the fact that ads are coming to open AI, that ChatGPG is going to roll out ads. And from that human insight, they can create a creative asset that blows up on the Super Bowl. And I think that's a part of what makes marketing fun. It's like, can you find an insight that isn't as big as it should be and take that to the masses? And it happens every day. Like every day there's insights that you can, I was talking to a friend of mine and they're in the industry of like undergarments.

41:35And he said, there's a rise of people who are looking for cotton and wool undergarments simply because there is research that's showing up in Reddit that says that polyester and stuff like that might cause problems for your skin. Yeah. Massive insight. So they're going all in on this story about we need to have natural products, no synthetic, nothing. And they're blowing up. They're having the best year yet because they picked up on an insight from talking to people. Yeah. I'm reminded of an example with test prep gurus. This is years ago, but we were at a conference and there are all these deans of college admission at the conference.

42:23And everybody, this is a number of years ago, but everybody wanted to know what can you put in an essay, your personal essay to a college? It's going to really resonate with some of these people. And we all had ideas and had things that we could see generally worked. But we ran a really simple survey. We were giving away a couple of iPads if they filled out this form. And it was really short and easy. And one of the questions on there was, describe in one word the most memorable essay from the last 10 years. and we went from memorable because we thought you know if you see a great essay a good essay that takes you one place but i really wanted to know okay i want to hit an essay that you remember from 10 years ago you've read you read thousands of them every year right what's what really pops out and the number one word that was mentioned on there was failure oh interesting yeah shocked us Really?

43:29And and then once we had that, we gave away the iPads in the following weeks, followed up with those people that had written that. Right. And it was so incredibly insightful. These guys, I mean, sure enough, they said, yeah, oh, yeah. I remember 10 years ago, this kid that got cut from the water polo team and he wrote this essay about how much he loved water polo. and right at the end, he reveals that he never even made the high school varsity because he was cut, but he convinced the coach to let him be like the statistician so he could just be a part of it. And he remembered this essay because, oh, now that's a kid who will overcome obstacles when he gets to my school, get involved one way or another, and help himself and everybody else get to the next level, whatever they're doing.

44:16Right. And it was it was a real key insight at that time. But again, it was back to the old school human to human connection, because I feel like even right now where I to chat GPT that question. Right. Some more generic broad based answers would come up. I don't think failure would have been number one. Definitely not. No, I love that. And I think it's interesting, like even today, if you think of the people who people resonate the most with, like they publicly talk about the struggles and the rise and the fall and then the rise again. So like that insight is a great one for even creators to think about brands to think about when they're thinking about the stories that they tell online.

45:02Yeah. Tell me more about Distribute AI because it really looks like a very interesting tool. I appreciate it. Yeah, you created it. I really want to know more about it for personal selfish reasons. So tell me all about it. So for years, I've worked with companies, large and small, helping them repurpose podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos and more. And they put me on a retainer. I'd listen to their webinars. I'd write a blog post about it. I would find moments in their podcasts or in their YouTube videos and say, this is where we want to clip it. And I pass that off to someone to clip it and then share it.

45:45I'd write emails to promote it. I had to do all of these things by hand. And then over the last few months, we've been bringing to life this product, distribution.ai, where creators, marketers, brands, enterprises can connect their RSS feed, can connect their podcast feed, can connect their YouTube channel. And automatically it learns their voice and learns their tone and it will rewrite blog posts for them out of YouTube videos. It will write email newsletters that can go to their list. It will write the LinkedIn posts, the threads, post the Mastodon post, the Blue Sky post, whatever platform you're on, it will modify and create content tailored to that channel in their voice and schedule it to go in the future.

46:30So over the next few days, I will have my YouTube videos being shared. I have LinkedIn posts going live from content that I created in the past, and it's all on autopilot using distribution.ai. Now, here's where it gets even more interesting. Because in my old role, in my world, I used to have to do this for the CEO, the CMO, the sales team at these different companies. We built distribution.ai to be able to tap into the main assets and then distribute it from every individual on a company's platform. So the CEO can have content going from their voice. The CMO can have content going on from their voice.

47:06the sales team can all promote these pieces. So you don't have to write someone on Slack a hundred times, hey, can you share this? Can you share this? Can you like this? It's all on autopilot using distribution.ai. And to be clear there, I said distribute.ai. It is distribution.ai for anybody that wants to. However, now I have to go and try to buy that URL as well. Yeah, it would probably be a good idea for somebody that gets it wrong like me. Okay, so let's say I'm resonating with what you're saying, and I like this idea of repurposing, especially for somebody in my shoes that is cranking out a ton of YouTube content.

47:50Right. Do we need to think about how to make something repurpose friendly before creating it? No, because at the end of the day, if you create great content, it writes itself. Like if the content is valuable, it needs to be reshared. It needs to be promoted. Like the video that you created at the beginning of this year is just as valuable today as it was when it went live. But it's very unlikely that you're going to reshare it on LinkedIn because you don't have time. You have to create a new video. You have to do life things. You're not even thinking about that. That was the interview in the past.

48:25It was great at the moment. And for those five days, it was a nice spike. But who has time to go back? With distribution.ai, it automatically connects and it's automatically going to cycle that into your feed. So it's going to automatically share that on every other Sunday at 2 p.m. or 2.30 p.m. just because it knows that it was a valuable asset. So it's keeping you always on while you're living life at a baseball game, a hockey game, whatever it might be, your feeds are staying active with content that you created in the past. Consistently, all in your voice, all in your tone. That's the and it even pulls stuff intentionally from the past and pull stuff intentionally from the past.

49:10And that's with intention, because I think the biggest mistake that creators make is they create great content and then they don't let it get promoted. And I'm a victim of it myself. Like there's podcasts that I would be on and I just would get so busy in life and business that I wouldn't have time to reshare it and schedule it online. But now with distribution.ai, it's always on. It's always picking up on the new YouTube video that I publish. And here's the other thing that people don't realize. The day in which your content goes live, there's a lot of other news breaking. There's a ton of politics things going on, tons of media outlets.

49:45There's press, there's buzz. Algorithms are changing. Businesses are getting acquired. not everybody who follows you seen that content. You might have reached 5 % of your following on the day in which you went live. So why aren't you trying to share it again to the other 95 % that didn't see it the first day that you went live? That's where things like distribution.ai come into the play, where it's keeping you always on. Yeah, and it creates visual as well as text. You can create images. Like if you go on my LinkedIn, you'll see sometimes me holding signs, character versions of me, that's all done directly through ChatGPT.

50:22Not ChatGPT, through distribution.ai. However, I will say ChatGPT can create great images too. I've used it for some imagery and the stuff that it can produce is also pretty fascinating. Quick pause. This is important. There are only three things you can train in life. Your craft, your body, and your mind. Most people work on the first two and just hope the third one shows up when it matters. That's why I'm recommending Finding Your Best by Michael Gervais. I've done the course myself. It's excellent. It's not motivational, not fluffy. It's structured to train the skills that actually drive performance, confidence, recovery, trust, grit, clarity under pressure.

51:09If you ever feel capable on paper, but inconsistent in real life, this is about closing that gap. I don't put my name behind a whole lot of things. This one earns it. You can find the link below. No urgency, just a genuinely solid tool if you're serious about getting better. So earlier, you mentioned the recording somebody making a cup of coffee or a sandwich and how that resonates and how sometimes a boring piece of content can really resonate with people. I'm going to put you on the spot here. We tried to think of, OK, a piece of content that could be created like that around a video podcast like this.

51:55It's not just the podcast itself, because so many other people are already doing that. Do you have any creative ideas in that space? I think it's the process like people want to see behind the scenes and there's this concept of a parasocial relationship that is talked about often which is like I will consume your content have no real two-way relationship but because I watch you and consume your content your stories in your life I feel a sense of trust and bond with you so what people actually are willing and interested in consuming is literally just hitting the record button and showing people behind the scenes of you getting ready for the podcast.

52:39Simply saying, oh, we're having a hard time getting this technical thing set up. I'm going to figure it out. Let's see. Letting it go and continuing to allow it to record you while you're fixing things. I have to get scrappy now. This isn't working. Let me use my camera. And then you tell the camera and then you are still streaming this entire time. You're recording that whole time. Then two things are going to happen. in one. Some people might chime in live and they're consuming this content. That's great. That's a cool experience for them. But then you can also download that as an MP4 and upload it to an editor and say, hey, editor, I want you to create a day in the life video for me where you're going to break down all of the things that would happen on this day.

53:15And then they're going to take those clips. They're going to take other clips of you working at a coffee shop. They're going to take clips of you maybe just recording, turning on the record button and cooking up your lunch, whatever it might be if you work from home, and then they're going to create a day in the life. Now, here's what's also special about all that B-roll that you just created. If you haven't noticed on Instagram and these channels, there's sometimes just background visuals of people doing things. And then over those things, they'll put these long form captions that people resonate with.

53:45Now you have a bunch of videos that you can now circulate on social where it's just talking about your experience as a creator, your experience as a marketer, whatever that might be. So, for example, I had someone on my team record a video of me speaking at a conference once and then I didn't share the conference talk. It was poor quality. It was just like a phone. But I took some words and I put them on there that talked about my journey of going from a kid who in high school was called Shy Ross because I was afraid to speak in front of people to who could speak in front of thousands of people on some of the biggest stages in the world.

54:23And I shared that and it got tons of reviews, tons of shares, tons of comments, tons of likes. We went wild over it. And it was a, what would be considered a boring, low quality video just with so you can repackage your day to day life. And that gives you the stories that you can share in the future. And the beauty of it is you don't have to always be on. Like when you create that content once, you can enjoy Valentine's Day and not be on your phone because the content is just going live. Yes, you have to resist the urge to get the dopamine hit and hit like and comment and share. But this content can just always go and you're always engaged.

55:04You're always on. So you're saying I missed a great opportunity this morning when we were having our tech difficulties. That would have been good content. Yeah. Yeah. For me too, because I was like, what is going on? I was, yeah. And I was using LLMs to try to figure out how to fix my problems. Right. It would have made for great content. Yeah, for those watching, listening, normally we record on Riverside FM, and for whatever reason it kept freezing as we were trying to record this conversation. And it kept working for about two minutes and then freezing again and again. And so now we had to shift platforms to Zoom and that actually would have been really engaging because I was running around here trying to get the Zoom credentials together that I couldn't weren't automatically saved for some reason on this desktop.

55:57Yeah, it's OK, but I'm actually going to invest in like I've got a camera here that I'm going to set up over there. And every morning I'm just going to hit record and let it record what I'm doing on the day to day and see if I get any good materials from it. Yeah, yeah, you've got me thinking out loud here, but I'm working on a book. And I just thought, would anybody care if there was, I mean, before I would have said no, they would not care. But maybe I'm hearing from you, maybe they would just setting up a camera while I'm writing and often frustrated or staring at a blinking cursor. Yeah, I think it's I think it would work.

56:36I think people would resonate with it. And the thing is, as you're writing the book, don't be afraid at some time to just go to the camera. And it's kind of like diary-style journal entry. It's like, so I'm at this chapter. I can't break this mental break. And then you describe that to the audience. And then you can have an editor fast-forward through the just zzzz moments. Yeah, make for something cool. Right. Yeah, I like it. And it's very doable, right? Very doable. Because you don't do anything different. You just live your life. And then you talk to a camera once in a while. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

57:06Now, I did want to dig a little deeper into Reddit because I will be the first one to say I've been a little unsure. I mean, should I be doing that as an individual? Should that be a brand account that's in there? How to navigate Reddit? I do sense there's an opportunity there because I notice how often on the LLMs the little Reddit icon comes up when it says it's thinking. Clearly, it's playing a very big role. Yeah. in our lives now, whether we know it or not. So how do you navigate Reddit? Yeah, so Reddit has gone from being kind of the channel that all marketers need to stay away from to the channel that every marketer should be paying attention to.

57:49It's being cited more than ever in Gemini and ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, you name the platform, Reddit is being cited. And the reason is simple. Over the past few years, people have started to add Reddit to their search queries when they were looking for the top mattress, the best coffee shop, because they wanted to hear from real people instead of from SEOs who wrote blog posts that kind of tried to trick them. So how does the brand navigate Reddit? I think you should set up and create a subreddit first and foremost for your brand. So reddit.com slash r slash your brand name. You want to own that.

58:21If it already exists, I want you to check whether or not there's a mod or if it's expired. If it's expired, if it's like doesn't exist, then create it. If it's a mod there, you You want to send a DM to the mod to try to claim it, get access, all those good things. The next thing that you want to consider is a user account. reddit.com slash you slash your brand's name. So you want to create one account that is clearly the brand representative and you can actually do a trademark infringement claim with Reddit if somebody has your brand. Then you have Ross from distribution.ai. You might have Jenny from Bitly, Matt from Next.

59:01You have a name from a brand that is going to be the personified user who browses around Reddit into different communities in different places and educates, engages, entertains and empowers people. That is the account that's going to show up in these different spaces. As someone who has been on the front page of Reddit probably 23 times, who's also been banned from Reddit probably 18 times, let me tell you that while I go on this platform, it is ridiculously important to read the rules of the subreddits and understand the culture before you add a bunch of content. I haven't been banned for like six years, but in my early days of marketing, I got banned a few times.

59:47What were you doing that got yourself banned? So I took every blog post that I ever wrote and I went to subreddits like our technology, our entrepreneur, our SEO, and I just submitted all of them at once. Link after link after link after link after link, thinking I was going to generate tons and tons of traffic and change the world. And I was banned really, really quickly. So lesson learned. You can't just go in and spam a bunch of links. You have to add value to the conversation. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and would you even say have multiple people within the organization creating accounts and then they're all getting in there?

1:00:31Okay, that would be interesting. Oh, yes, I did. Well, I still have you. Metrics to understand whether or not marketing is working. because I feel like a lot of that has changed. When it was simply all I had to do was buy ads on Google and Meta, I could just see how many people were converted, what's the conversion rate. Those metrics were pretty simple, and I think it's gotten a lot muddier with that. And so what do those leading indicators look like to know if you're doing the right things that are eventually going to pay dividends? Yeah, it's definitely harder now than ever to kind of monitor, and what I would encourage folks to do is be okay with a little bit of nuance, Like perfect attribution no longer exists.

1:01:16You're not always going to have very clear, oh, we did this and that led to this. The fact that people are discovering things in the LLM makes it even more complex. But there are a few things that you can look at. What is the referral traffic from OpenAI, from perplexity, from Claude? How much traffic are you generating from the LLMs? Then if you really wanted to get sophisticated, you could do a sentiment analysis within the LLMs. So how often are you being stated and talked about in a positive way? You could also do an analysis of how often are you listed number one or two or three or four when a prompt results in a certain response back.

1:01:54You can use tools like Profound, AirOps, Athena to really get insight into whether or not these tools are where you show up in the various LLMs. And then the one that actually still matters the most in most traditional businesses is whether or not you are tracking self-attributed sales. So what I mean by that is if you're a B2B, ask the question in your form. How did you hear about us? If someone shows up even at your restaurant, maybe start asking people, how did you hear about us? Is this your first time there? And use that qualitative data to help you understand what the sources are so you can make smarter decisions in the future.

1:02:34If I see that ChatGPT is showing up as the source for leads every single week, but my analytics doesn't show that I'm seeing an increase in ChatGPT traffic, then I know that there's a break in the model where people are getting an answer to a question in ChatGPT, opening up a new browser, maybe an incognito mode, and then they're landing on my site. You still want to track that. So ask the question, whether it's on your website, whether it's at the checkout on your website, on your form, or in person, I encourage people to look for self-identified attribution insight. Yeah, yeah. So again, I mean, that's like old school, right?

1:03:17Making sure you just ask the question, how did you find out about us, rather than just relying solely on your website analytics. Well, Ross, if people want to find more about you online, they want to go deeper with this stuff, let's get all the places where they can get more. Yeah, they can definitely find me right on YouTube, Ross Simmons. You can do a quick search and you'll find my YouTube channel. You can find me on RossSimmons.com. That's my website. It has links to distribution.ai, foundation marketing, all of that good stuff as well. you can find me pretty much on all of the platforms whether it's x linkedin reddit you name it I'm easy to find but major kudos to you and all the value that you add to the YouTube ecosystem the internet in general my hat's off to you and what you've built and I appreciate you having me on really appreciate it it's been an absolute pleasure and I have learned a lot today and I feel like these are things I thought I knew something about and so thank you for continuing to educate.

1:04:22Gosh, oh, engage. I was missing engage. Educate. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, Ross. Appreciate you. I'll see you on the internet. All right. Bye.