717: How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business

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1:07That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T Whatnot.com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business. You know Google's market share is shrinking, customer behavior is shifting, and as business owners, it might be a little bit painful, but we've got to adapt. The good news is people still need your help, and it's just how they find you is changing. So by the end of this episode, you're going to have a proven roadmap of how to get found in ChatGPT and other AI tools. To help out with this, a return guest is back in the house from rankingonai.com, Tanya Van Gastel. Welcome back to the SciDustle Show.

1:47Hey, Nick. Super good to be back. We were just saying right before the show how many people reached out after the last episode. And it really just made me think, wow, the Sight Hustle podcast audience is like the best podcast audience. I hope you're super, super happy with that. That warms my heart for sure. I'm happy to hear it. So where do we start with this? So a lot of people listening are going to be in the content publishing space. They're going to be in the freelance or consultant or agency or service provider space, online and offline. And they might be in the e-com space. And it's trying to figure out this brave new world of SEO and generative SEO or GEO.

2:26So one of the shifts that I've seen is maybe there's not a lot of links. Even if ChatGPT is recommending you, not a lot of links in their standard responses unless you specifically ask for it. But we do see more branded searches. And so we start to see, you know, Side Hustle Nation specifically as kind of the top query now in Google Search Console. But do you recommend people starting with kind of that Google Search Console approach or even a ChatGPT approach to see what does it think about my brand or my online presence or reputation as it stands now? There's good news and there's bad news. Of course, the bad news, like you've said, is we've really gone to a bit of a zero click, zero click environment right now.

3:10People are just not getting any clicks. It's not very clear where actually traffic is coming from. But what you are going to see, and that's honestly huge positive news, is that ChatGPT conversions, they convert at 15 times conversion rate compared to organic SEO. And so that's really good news. And it's a really strong indicator for a lot of larger companies as well as smaller ones to focus on AI answers and appearing there. There's three things that, you know, I recommend everybody to do, no matter if they are a service provider, a publisher, an e-com. And I think if you do these three things, you'll already be like 60 % further compared to your average person.

3:55So those three things are, first of all, even if you are, you know, an Amazon seller or you are doing something else, the first thing is create your own source of truth. create your own website where basically there's everything about your brand. This is really important because it really helps ChatGPT to identify you as an entity. And essentially you want ChatGPT to be like, oh, this is where I can find information about this specific entity. We've seen a lot of companies come to us to say, hey, ChatGPT is spreading misinformation about my brand. And so sometimes that's coming from older information, things that are kind of out of date old Reddit conversations and you can correct that on that specific website so taking ownership of your own digital real estate and to what depth are you going like the about page and they're like well yeah I checked the box I did it that's my source of truth but it's you have to go quite a bit deeper than that no please don't so I would I mean, you know, with SEO, it's always the same story.

5:01It's a forever kind of thing. Right. But we're talking about three basic things to do. One is just a simple landing page and an about page. And on that about page, you can also include an FAQ. Right. So if you're doing a ChadGPT audit, and I'll tell you in a little bit how you can actually do that. If you're doing a ChadGPT audit and ChadGPT says, oh, Nick Loper, he's always wearing a purple T-shirt. Silly example, but you know what I mean. Nick Loper is always wearing a purple t-shirt. You would then put on your website in an FAQ, what kind of t-shirts does Nick Loper wear? And then ChatGPT can go and see Nick Loper doesn't only wear purple t-shirts.

5:42And so because you are the ultimate source of truth for your website and ChatGPT recognizes that, that's how you can go and correct misinformation. The second thing is you want to do outreach. So let's say, again, you are the podcast, you're Side Hustle Nation. You basically want to go and search on Google, on ChatGPT for what are the best podcasts in your niche? What are the best podcasts for building a business, for side hustles? And when you ask ChatGPT that, same thing with when you ask Google that, it's going to show you an AI overview. Or in ChatGPT, it's just going to answer you. and you're going to be able to click on sources.

6:24In those sources, more likely than not, you're going to see Reddit and you're going to see listicles. A lot of these are going to be best of listicles. You can go and do that right now. Just search for it in ChatGPT or in Google. Your specific niche and then, you know, best. So specific solutions for your niche. If you are a doctor's practice in Florida, you'd search for best doctor's practices in Florida. And then again, you will find those sources. What you want to do is whether those are Reddit or whether those are different kind of websites, you want to go and get your business listed there.

7:06You can do that through a variety of methods. On Reddit, you go and make a Reddit account. You go and post some comments on different subreddits to actually engage. And then you're going to start commenting also on some of these Reddit posts that are linked. And you're going to say, hey, I am a doctor's practice in this area. Check me out. A lot of people come here. And you want to include authority arguments. You gave the example of best doctors in Orlando. And so it's pulling from UCF Health. It's pulling from Medical Clinic Orlando Health. And then some of these magazines, like pretty high authority sites.

7:45That might be a more difficult one to be like, raise your hand and be like, hey, I would love to be included in your list. Well, it depends, actually. So a lot of these, even like yellow pages, shouldn't be super, super challenging. Same thing with maybe, you know, UCF Health. So these are things that are like honored. But also with doctor's practices, I think they might be a little more careful about this specific query. Maybe one thing to look for is, let's say you ask for like best AI proofreader, right? So if you're, if you ask ChatGPT for what are the best ways to use AI to proofread, probably you're going to get a bunch of links and you can Google that or ChatGPT best AI proofreaders.

8:29It's going to give you those sources. And I say this because within the SaaS world, there are a lot more listicles. Same thing with e-commerce. There's a lot more listicles that are really easy to get. So when you scroll down, it's going to tell you which ones it recommends and what that is based on. So when you then go into sources, you're going to see a lot of these are listicles. What you can do with these listicles is you can actually go to that website and then you can go in and find their email. And then you can email them and you can be like, hey, what about I always suggest using command F and searching contact because usually it's going to be in the footer.

9:13And what you can do then is you can go and ask, hey, would you like to include my company, my website? And you Google them, something like that. But reach out to them. And I'm going to tell you that it's going to take you like 50 outreaches for you to get one answer. you can count on like a two or three percent conversion rate to actually get on there and the best way to increase that add in your landing page conversion rate and also add in authority arguments in your email because these affiliate affiliate bloggers or you know listicle bloggers they really get so many of these emails every single day so the way that you stand out is by letting them know how much they can actually earn on you by saying how well your business actually performs because they don't know if you don't let them know so i really highly recommend doing that like for me it's like i've been on a side hustle nation podcast sure and then people will be like wow that's great we have to you know make sure that she's on that list yeah so i was looking before we we got on and if you ask you know what are the best side hustle podcasts it tends to recommend the Sign Hustle show and a bunch of others.

10:24But if I go a little bit broader and say, well, what are the best entrepreneurship podcasts? Not always included. So here's a specific thing I could do is go to those sources, go to those listicles and try and make my case to, hey, would you consider including the show in your list? Yeah. Well, actually, on that note, kind of brings me to my third part. So the first one will create that website, Source of Truth. Second one is to outreach, Reddit, email people from listicles. What do you recommend on the Reddit side? Would it be literally just replying to those threads and throwing your hat in the ring?

10:58I would recommend being as straightforward and honest as you should. And so for a lot of people, especially if you are the business owner, if it is a side hustle, just be super honest. Hey, I am the founder of X. And actually, the thing that you are talking about, that's exactly what I do. don't put a link in there that's like the one big thing because that's going to get you banned immediately all right so number one create your own source of truth on your own website your about page your faqs your services your contact info number two was to kind of do this mini audit you know best uh you know ask chat gpt well what are the best things in your niche you to fill in the blank there you go find the sources for those and then raise your hand to cast your own vote on Reddit in certain cases and try and do some outreach to the sites that it's pulling from.

11:52What's the third thing? The third thing is my favorite thing because the third thing is where there's infinite work to be done. And so the third thing is create content that ranks. And so there's a lot of information here, but here are the basics. Actually, let me just give you the shortcut. The shortcut is to make a YouTube video in a format of a listicle or a how-to. The only way that you can rank for how-to or that you can kind of plug a recommendation or your brand into a how-to piece of content is never written. Written content right now is just going to get hoovered up by AI. It's just going to digest it by itself and then spit it out as an AI overview generated snippet and it doesn't matter it doesn't care about anything else that you said it will just give you the how-to and not link to your website whereas with video content that's actually where there are no completely ai generated video how-tos yet maybe you know in the next five years or whatever okay but for now that is really something where if you make a youtube video mentioning your own business in the title or your own kind of you know the problem or the niche in the title, you will absolutely have a really high chance of getting recommended.

13:17If you're not somebody who likes to do video content, which I understand, you can also create your own video that is like faceless, maybe with a voiceover, or alternatively, you can write your own listicle. And so listicles perform really well. So that means that you, Nick, you're going to write a listicle that is 10 best podcasts for entrepreneurs and you're going to talk about yourself and nine other podcasts about entrepreneurship and what i highly recommend is that you are super honest in this that you just say this is what it's more about this is what it's more about don't be like mine is the best and all of the other ones are terrible because it just doesn't work so mention everybody and also send a link to their website because in that way Google will also know well actually this piece of content is actually trying to be very informational it's actually giving a lot of value they care a lot about you know not only promoting other websites but genuinely being helpful because that's all that Google cares about being helpful okay which it may seem counterintuitive if you are a provider of, you know, custom wooden toothbrushes or something, you know, what's the best, three of the 10 best wooden toothbrushes.

14:33And then it's like, I don't know if I necessarily want to link to my competitors, but you're saying, yeah, you kind of need to feed the system with that type of material. Yeah, you do. Because the thing is, the more honest and helpful you are in your content, the more likely that you will actually be ranking very high. And you'll still be ranking number one because you put yourself number one on your own listicle, right? And so that really matters. It's a conversation of would you rather not be mentioned at all or be mentioned? Yeah, the user's not dumb. They understand that you don't operate in a monopoly either.

15:08They understand there's alternatives out there. And we have some stats on how these listicles generally operate and like how it's distributed, how the clicks are distributed. it generally about 50 will click on the first one and then 30 goes to the second and the third one yeah and so that's kind of how it works and then you know the other ones might get about like 20 of the exposure so that's something to keep in mind but especially in you know a brave new ai world these listicles specifically for something as niche as you know best custom wooden toothbrushes, perfect. Because nobody's made that listicle about best custom wooden toothbrushes.

15:47And if somebody searches in ChatGT, what are the best custom wooden toothbrushes? And there's only one listicle on the whole internet or one YouTube video on the whole internet. You are 100 % going to be in that list because you wrote the only listicle about best wooden custom toothbrushes. Hey, real quick, I put together an AI SEO checklist based on this conversation with Tanya. You can download that for free as a listener bonus. Just hit up the show notes for this episode and you can't miss it. We've got a lot more to cover too, including a big content mistake, creating custom GPTs, and more coming up right after this.

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18:50Both work. And honestly, listicle probably still better. yeah because listicles are you know when chat gbt recommends a tool or a business or a product it never recommends just one it will always recommend multiple right so when you're looking at how can you actually get into that recommendation is you want to kind of think about what is the answer that chat gbt would give and think about structuring your article that way So one thing for same with YouTube, same with content is you want to take an approach where you basically write the entire where you give the answer immediately. We call it a bluff strategy.

19:33So bluff strategy is where you put the bottom line up front. B-L-U-F bluff. Oh, not like poker bluffing. Okay. Oh, yeah. Not like poker bluffing. it's for content same for like youtube because basically all the youtube content is transcribed and then it's fed into ai search you want to do bluff and you do faq bluff is completely different from traditional seo people will be like oh here are 5 000 lines of texts about you know kind of a similar topic and then at the end they'll be like this is potentially the answer yeah it's like the recipe site so what's the best chocolate chip cookie recipes well after i get through telling my grandma's life story about how these cookies were the best.

20:15Oh, there it is. It was invented in that kind of stuff. So we're doing none of that. We're doing none of that. The AI doesn't care. The AI just wants the answer. The AI wants the answer in a way that is direct and that honestly, ideally, is conversational. And conversational, that's kind of where we get to the FAQ part, right? Because if you're thinking about how AI search engines generally work, They're always conversational. It's always a conversation with the user. You're asking a question, right? And generally, that's the question that is really specific. So it's very different how SEO works and AI SEO.

20:53Because with SEO, we've all kind of learned how to, you know, talk to Google. And I just gave that keyword, best AI proofreader. I would never talk to Jaiji Biti like that, generally. I would, you know, I still do that because I'm kind of, you know, millennial child. I have to think of the best keywords and the best parameters so I can finesse the best answer out of Google. But with ChatGPT, you don't need to do that. With ChatGPT, you can actually ask, based on what you know about me, what is the best for this? Or what should I be using? Are there any AI tools for writing that you think are good?

21:28And these are all conversational. And so really what you want to do is whenever you do content, whether that is YouTube or whether that is an article and you want to start ranking and get cited, you want to do bluff, you want to put the answer up front immediately. And then you want to do an FAQ where you answer a bunch of questions that are kind of related to what a user might ask about regarding your content, your product, your this, your that. And then you want to answer those. So really it is a frequently asked questions section. Okay. Are you pulling those from the, like people also ask, you know, to get some seed inspiration for what to include in the FAQs?

22:09You 1000 % can do that, which kind of brings me to the next part that I would really like to talk about, which is the biggest mistake that I see people make when it comes to content. People are not going to like it. Nobody likes it. But the biggest mistake is to AI generate your content. Don't AI generate your content. Especially don't AI generate your written content. I know that you and I might both think that it sounds and looks really good and that it's really helpful. But Google has become really good at discerning what is AI-generated content because their whole algorithm essentially shapes the Internet, right?

22:51SEO people are constantly trying to figure out what is Google doing now and how can we, you know, change our website, change our online real estate, our online presence to rank higher and get more traffic. And Google knows that. So if Google would allow for AI-generated content, then the whole internet would become AI-generated content. And then their own AI algorithms wouldn't have any data that is human to train on. And so that is part of why they are quite strict about AI-generated content in most content types. These content types include reviews, listicles, these types of things. When it comes to how-to are informational content, then it's kind of fine.

23:32But again, I do not recommend that you use AI for content because generally you will not rank or drive conversion. And so it's way more helpful to, you know, either hire a writer or my favorite tip is to download something like Willow Voice, where you can actually just go in, you download it, you press a button, and then it will transcribe whatever you're saying for you super fast. Another thing that you can do is call a friend and use an AI transcription service. I personally really like HappyScribe, AI NoteTaker. Use that service to, you know, just put the AI bot in the room. And then it will essentially record everything and it will just spit it back out for you.

24:16Then you can use that as a baseline transcript for editing the whole text and then turning it into an article. These methods work really well if you don't like to write or you don't really think of yourself as a writer. Is that just to make sure that it is formatted in a more conversational way rather than traditional keyword plus answer? I was reading something recently where it talked about the importance of feeding, creating your content in, I think they called it chunks, where it was like, you know, header formatted in such a way, and then, you know, max three-sentence answer, and then onto the next header.

24:56It was like very deliberate how they were structuring it. It used to be like that. It still is helpful to some extent. You know, you want to think about your, like, your H1 tag, your title tag, your meta description. You still want to put your keyword in it. but I would say the reason that I suggest these things is you know I like to use a productivity app called Akiflow and literally I used to write all of my content and then I would write this is the headline and here are the 50 things I need to do to actually get a piece of content going because they're just taking that many tasks right it's like research this paragraph the whole outline whereas generally you know especially when you're not a writer or you're just not used to it, it's so much easier to just talk it through with another person or to just think out loud and have it spoken out loud instead of sitting in front of a blank screen thinking, how the hell am I going to write 800 words about this thing?

26:00Because you just don't really know how to structure it. So I think AI tools are really helpful for helping you think through that structure so you don't look at a blank page. It's just not going to write the whole thing for you. Even then if you're doing video as well, like now you have kind of a seed script or something that you could maybe massage into a video script there too. Yeah, 100%. And I mean, you know, if you can do the video, right, going back to you do the website, you do the video or the article, and then you do the outreach, you are 100 % going to get cited and get recommended in AI search.

26:39And you didn't actually have to, you know, do backlinks or anything like that. So these are my top three things that I should just people start doing and how to do them. Should you recommend, going back to your example about, I should write the article, 10 best entrepreneurship podcasts, put the side hustle show at the top and then pick nine other favorites. Do I need to make the video version of that too? Would anybody watch that or is that just for the benefit of double dipping, the transcript is going to go into the ether and somebody's going to chew on that and spit back out the answer? Double dip it, triple dip it, quadruple dip it.

27:16Do all the dips. They all stack. So put up on edit, okay. Just do as much coverage as you can on different keywords, right? So, you know, do one about entrepreneurship. Do one about e-com, store owners. Do one about service providers. Do one about, you know, marketing agencies. Whatever vertical that you think your business touches upon, create a post around it. and then when you make that YouTube video, also embed it in your piece of content because if you're lucky, people are going to go on your article, they're going to scroll down, they're going to see a video, they're going to click on it, they're going to watch the whole video from your page, hugely decrease your bounce rate and then Google is going to say, wow, that's a really helpful page.

28:01This person was basically on it for 15 minutes and that really helps to improve your SEO as well. Other things that I would say for your content is add authority arguments. Again, the social proof, the testimonials, and write them out. Don't add images of logos. It doesn't help because AI search engines are not necessarily indexing that as fast or as well. And so you really want to make sure that you type out loud, Nick Loper is trusted by X, Y, and Z famous person, or has X amount of followers or listeners, all these kinds of top authority arguments, place them upfront, place them close to your entity name, your brand name, and also really make sure that you don't do too many vague referencing.

28:53And what I mean with vague referencing is saying things like, a sentence like, side hustle nation is the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is trusted by, no. make it so that your sentence where you add the authority arguments literally says side hustle nation is trusted by these are kind of small things they're not going to make the you know a massive change but if you structure it like that you are way more likely and again it's about stacking all of these things double dipping triple dipping to make all of these small changes and that's really going to make a huge difference in terms of you being perceived as the authoritative go-to product or solution for your niche.