Domain Sales Strategies for Fortune 100 Companies - Chuck Aikens: Maximizing AI Benefits | Saw.com

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today on the uncomfortable podcast, we have Chuck Isaac Akin, founder of Timu and previous owner of Volume 9 Media.

Speaker 1: 0:06

He shares his story how he used a little known strategy called SEO to propel himself to new heights at a major bank to becoming a digital marketer known for his work with Fortune 100 corporations, including Volkswagen, dish Network and others here, about my failed attempt to sell hybridcom to Volkswagen many years ago, and Chuck will share his insights as to how he would have engaged Volkswagen when proposing a domain acquisition, including their decision-making process, and who you should be talking to should it be the marketing team, the agency of record or the web agency and the typical timeline for such transactions.

Speaker 1: 0:43

Additionally, we explore Chuck's perspectives on Google search algorithms, the role of AI and content creation, and the irreplaceable value of human input in generating articles. At the end of the episode, we go down the rabbit hole a little bit, while Chuck shares some very interesting facts about AI in general and how he helps his clients benefit from it. So let's get it, dude. Welcome to the show, chuck. It's nice to have you here, you know. I think the best thing we can do is get started with you telling us a little bit about your background, your experience and how you got into digital marketing.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Well, I stumbled into digital marketing and thanks for having me so, as when I was coming out of college I went to work for a mortgage company and they basically threw the phone book at me and said go, generate leads and tried whatever newspaper mailers, phone calls, all those kind of things. But I stumbled into the internet and saw a little bit of success from it, generating leads, and I, you know I was hooked. I was spending all my time in Barnes and Noble and the IELTS, reading the books that I couldn't afford and teaching myself all about internet marketing and websites and digital, I mean and this was even before Google came along. So I've been doing this quite a while.

Speaker 1: 2:13

So when you first got your job in mortgages, you really didn't even start as a loan officer. You were just kind of like the lead gen guy or one of the lead gen people. Is that is that right? Well, I did. I did start as a loan officer, you know.

Speaker 2: 2:24

And then I turned in the lead gen guy, you know, and I was generating even more leads than I could handle. So I started selling them to my friends, you know, because they were like, what are you doing Over there? That's pretty cool. And I was like, well, I got some extra and they'd give me money. And you know, I was generating enough leads to feed myself, and you know other people in the business. I mean it even caught the attention of the president of the company, so much that he called me one day and, out of the blue, I mean, you know, here I am a little loan officer in Denver, colorado, and you know, somewhere in California the president, ceo, the, calls you and says, hey, great job, you're killing it. We don't, we don't understand the Internet, so please stop. And that was an interesting day because you know it, really it it's not what I thought would happen. When you, when you start to work for a company and you create success, I didn't expect to get told to stop.

Speaker 1: 3:25

You would think that they would at least call you to their headquarters and kind of interrogate you and have you sit with the marketing team and figure out what you're really up to and what you could do to change it to, to make it something they're happy with and that everyone could benefit from.

Speaker 2: 3:38

Right, yeah, you would think so. I think that that was so early, you know it's. You know, in today's world, I mean, a lot of big companies are. They're just, they're afraid of AI and they're banning it. So, I mean, that was the Internet. At the time, they didn't know what to do with it. That's what happened when social media showed up. Nobody, nobody really understood. Well, what do we do with Facebook? What do we do with IG? You know, what are these silly little things that are showing up on people's phones? So anytime a new, new platforms, new technology shows up, it it seems to be the response. You know, people are fearful. Until they write it, they understand it.

Speaker 1: 4:14

What do you think they dislike the most about what you're doing?

Speaker 2: 4:18

So, now that I'm a I'm a marketer of 20 plus years, I mean they, they, I didn't know what I was doing from a from a brand compliance standpoint, what I should say and not say, the Internet was somewhat I mean not unregulated, that's the wrong word, but I mean it was. It was the Wild, Wild West. So you know, I mean people were throwing crap up on my space and you know, I mean all kinds of things were going on. So I it's not that I was never mad at them, it just it just surprised me because, yeah, I thought that I thought it would get me a real you know, not that a loan officer is in a real job, but it's 100% commission. I thought it would get me a real job, you know, or, yeah, they would call me in and they would want me to work with them to understand it.

Speaker 2: 4:59

But no, I mean anymore, you know, I mean, and even today I mean, that a big brand is going to just just stop until we can figure it out. So, yeah, so I mean I got it. So, and that's part of my, you know my journey throughout the years, you know it's really about really understanding what is going on at a macro level so you can succeed at a micro level with whatever your you know your enterprise or entrepreneurial, you know spirit is leading you towards. You know you kind of got to understand and that was that was one lesson I learned is that you know big, big brands don't act rationally.

Speaker 1: 5:37

I always feel, like some of the decisions they make, that if you're in the boardroom or there is somebody that could probably explain from their point of view why they made that decision. It's kind of like when someone says, my God, another bonehead decision by the United States government. I'm like well, you probably don't know the whole story. You know, and you probably don't know the whole situation they've got ourselves in, but I probably agree with the information we got that, yeah, it's pretty bad. Right, it's a pretty bad decision.

Speaker 1: 6:04

So, when you got that call that you knew it was probably time to move on right, because once your leads dried up, then you're obviously your sales would dry up and the opportunity wasn't as good as it used to be, so you're probably at a crossroads. So what did? What did you do?

Speaker 2: 6:20

We know. I remember exactly what I did. I lived in a little two bedroom apartment, you know, with my girlfriend in one bedroom was. You know where we slept? You know it was my office and there's a whiteboard in there. And you know I'm barely out of college, I don't have a lot of expenses. And I wrote the number down and it was something like 3000 a month and I said I've got 90 days, I'm going to hang my shingle and I'm going to see if I can turn these leads that I'm generating from my friends into a viable business. And I have the 90 days to do it. I need to make $3,000 a month.

Speaker 2: 6:57

I sit there at the countertop and I came up with the idea of mortgage 101.com, which was an educational portal to teach people how to, how to, how to go about their mortgage. And the thing that I did I learned cold fusion. Everybody knows what that is Wow, but it's a programming language that you know was before, as all kinds of things that came along after it, and I learned how to program mortgage calculators. I built mortgage calculators, built 10 of them, and then I went out to all the real estate websites on the internet and I said link to me because I have a really cool mortgage calculator and I private labeled to their looking field, built a little system. So I had this little concept that I had with mortgage 101 where I put mortgage calculators on about 40,000 realtor websites. Wow.

Speaker 2: 7:39

Now remember, google wasn't around yet and I remember the day that Google, the first time I heard about Google I was like this is cool. And at the time there were InfoSeq, altavista, I mean Yahoo, I mean there were so many search engines. There were, there were 20 search engines. And I even remember like I bought the InfoSeq algorithm because you could run it at your company and reverse engineered the program, and they did so. Google came along and changed the game. But I remember the first day I went to Google and I typed in the word mortgage and my website came up number one.

Speaker 1: 8:11

You must have been proud.

Speaker 2: 8:13

I didn't even understand what was about to happen, because all I had did is I had, I had built something of value which was a principal and interest calculator, or a payoff calculator, or a buy verse, rent that someone would need right to think about the best mortgage choice, you know, an arm verse fix, you know. And then I got everyone to link to it. I had no idea that Google was going to build their entire algorithm off page rank and inbound links. So, yeah, when that came along as Google game steam, that, that website, you know I sold it way too early. You know it was the first, it was my, it was the first thing that I ever sold that, you know, in the business world Sold it for about a half million dollars and there were some other people that were involved in it.

Speaker 2: 8:55

And I am not independently wealthy by any means. I'm not here like probably everyone listed. I'm, you know I'm, I'm scrappy and getting by today. Well, it's all you know. It's sold later for six million. But I was on the right path, so registered domain name, built out the content, built a bunch of links and Google rewarded it. I got paid, you know, but eventually I turned into something of even more value down the road.

Speaker 1: 9:20

Where did that fall in with lending tree? Lending tree was always a good place for me to get leads when I sold loans.

Speaker 2: 9:25

Yeah, you know we were a competitor with learning tree way back when and the company I sold it with did make it to NASDAQ during the dot com run and you know it was a big player. So lending tree, you know, was the you know, was the gorilla in the room with a with a burn rate that we hoped Would be shorter than ours.

Speaker 1: 9:45

But the leads weren't cheap. And then there was bank rate as well, though you see a lot of leads from, and then with the same thing.

Speaker 2: 9:50

we had the rates tables and the mortgage calculators, but what we had that they didn't for a long period well, for about 10 years was the number one ranking on Google.

Speaker 1: 9:58

So let me write that down. So is that when you ended up launching volume nine?

Speaker 2: 10:03

Yeah, after I sold mortgage 101 and got out of the mortgage industry, I wanted to not be so vertically integrated. There were a lot of different things we did in the mortgage space. We started in the SEO space, built websites, eventually brought in social media, but at the heart of it was always as never a media company or an ad company. I always built branded content to bring the audience in organically. Now it's not free traffic. You still have to have a strategy and you buy assets and you build assets. But the non-paid channel is what I've always focused on.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Got it? And why do you feel that the non-paid channel is better than the paid channel?

Speaker 2: 10:46

I don't know if it's. I don't think that it's better or worse. When I talk to somebody, the first thing I try to figure out is are you thinking more like an advertiser, where you're going to buy the traffic there's nothing wrong with that, it's just a different game or are you going to be a publisher? Are you going to create content that your audience wants and they're going to come consume that, and then your compensation is going to be leads or sales, and that's how you're going to get return on investment for the content that you make.

Speaker 1: 11:15

Okay, and then as a small business owner, I mean that doesn't have a super large budget. What is someone like me supposed to do when we're worried about meta tags and titles and keywords and linking to other articles on your own site and optimizing, putting the right keywords in the article, when you're trying to do the right thing and paying other writers to write for you, trying to think of the right titles? What would be your advice to someone like me who's only been in business for four years and doesn't have a huge budget spent on SEO?

Speaker 2: 11:49

Well, the first thing I'll do is I'd say let's keep this simple, and when I'm working with somebody, the way you get simplicity is you say who is my target audience, what do they care about, what is my brand and what do I do? The VIN diagram, where it overlays between what your audience cares about and what you do, is actually very small, and in that little bit of overlay there's usually a topic that you can lean into or some type of content. It's usually singular, sometimes it can be a couple, and that's how you succeed in. What I'm talking about is that you figure out your voice and what you want to cover and you become an authority in something very, very specific. So when I had my agency for 15 years, one of the things that we saw success with is we always talked about the algorithm updates. Now, I talked about a lot of stuff, but the algorithm updates was something that I cared about because I'm kind of a technologist, I'm a geek, so I would write about it and it would be long and informative and people would like it and Google kind of caught on to that. So we always ranked really high every time there was an algorithm update and I talked about it, everything else we talked about. It never worked. It didn't engage people, it wasn't best content, it wasn't additive, it already been covered by somebody else. There was search volume, but it wasn't my true voice. But in that space of just algorithm and algorithm updates, in that space, that's what I would kind of tell somebody.

Speaker 2: 13:22

Even if you were doing Google ads I mean, let's say you're spending a thousand or even $5,000 a month, how many keywords can you bid on? How many campaigns can you run? How many different landing pages and offers are you going to test? You got to keep that simple. If you're running a one, five, even $10,000 a month campaign, same thing on the organic side. Keep it simple. Figure out your voice, figure out your content theme and even if you take it into LinkedIn or IG, those algorithms also reward you for being an expert, having experience.

Speaker 2: 13:53

I'm using the EAT model from Google authority and trust on a particular topic. You can stand out from all the noise out there. That's online. But what most people do is they start chasing you know this keyword and that keyword and this idea and that idea, instead of saying, no, I'm going to become an expert or I care about this one thing, and that's usually you can. Once you have one thing established, you can tangentially move to other keyword clusters and topics and thematical things. But all these machines out here running around between all the algorithms and the AI, and you know how does Google rank this? I mean they want to find the best content by the most experience and authoritative people and you don't just stumble into that with a blog post or two. You've really got to own a space and get out there and make yourself not only an expert but to be seen as an expert.

Speaker 1: 14:49

So when you're talking about that, I find that in my own experience with Google lately I'm finding myself using chat GVT more than Google, and that's because, I'd say, in the last few years, when I search for not just, I mean if I search for domain broker, I see, you know, different companies come up that offer domain brokerage or the ads, and then at the top I'll see someone like Neil Patel who does like top five brokers, and then below that is another brokerage and maybe a different kind of service provider or something like that, and I feel like the results aren't as good as they used to be in and out as trustworthy as they were before, whereas if I go to chat GVT and I just say, hey, I'm looking for domain broker, he might suggest like three in a very basic you know setting and I can say, oh well, I want one that specializes in this or does that or whatever, and then it'll help me narrow it down.

Speaker 1: 15:40

So why do you think you know a company like Google that really hurt? You know, when eHow was big, where I actually got the answer, I worked for it. What do you think changed in the algorithm over the years that has made search come to this and the way it is, and I'm not the only one who feels this way. I actually was talking to someone about this, or a couple of people about this, at a conference a couple of days ago. They believe the same thing. So what do you? What do you think their thinking is in the change of search results these days?

Speaker 2: 16:11

Yeah, I have a thought for you on chat, gvt and in how you were using it there. But to directly answer your question, google's first guiding principle is to focus on the user and all else will follow what? And they have 10 guiding principles that they publish on the website and that's number one. The reason I say that is that, as Google fixed itself over the years and made a better search engine, even though they're already dominant through all their algorithm updates and machines, teaching machines and AI, writing AI I mean like we can't even wrap our mind around the what Google does, right, like they don't even know what they do sometimes, that they get they, just it, just it just magically happens. But their outcome is the best search results possible. And to have the best search results and with the 10 links, what Google's first going to do? Something where they have diversity. So they want to have a couple domain name brokers, they want to have a couple of review sites, they might want some instructional videos or articles. They might want something totally like so tangential. You're like, why is this guy even in the top 10? But that only leads to a three spots for training on a domain name brokers. But Google's trying to. You're trying to return the best 10 results for the user experience so that they click them, come back and click others. So, as they're trying to do that, and people are interacting with the search results, if they like something let's say, users like a review site where they kind of did the shopping for them, and if that's legit or not doesn't matter but it appears to the searcher that somebody pre research this and they listed the top three domain name brokers. Well, users like that, and if users like it, then Google's going to like it. It's not because it's not because it's a better solution Well, the data says it is if more people click on it and dwell on it and engage with it. So you just got to realize Google's ultimate goal is to have as many searches as possible, to have as many ads. So people click the ads. So, and they got to keep the users happy and they got to keep them coming back.

Speaker 2: 18:16

So when you, when you think about Google that way, or if you jump over to Amazon and think about what is Amazon truly trying to do when I optimize my content there, or what's the use case for you to what's Reddit, you know, why do people go to these different places and what are, what is happening on these? You know, even if somebody fires up a Slack channel, there's so many different places you could search. But what is the technology trying to accomplish? What does the business care about?

Speaker 2: 18:39

And when you go into that ecosystem, including Google, you got to understand the rules by which the community and the platform is built. And when you know that if your audience is there, you can figure out how to connect with them with content. I know I mean I brought up like a bazillion concepts there, but but you just kind of got to remove yourself like from like. As soon as you start saying meta tags and title tags and tech SEO, you kind of lose me a little bit, because it's like, yeah, that that's optimization you do after the fact. That's like, that's like due diligence, you do after you're buying. You know as you, after you have a potential buyer and a letter of intent, right, like you don't do that, like you don't, you don't have a fast website and imperfect, optimized content. That's not the secret to SEO. The secret is making additive, high value content that people care about and will interact with when they see it in the top 10 of Google.

Speaker 1: 19:34

If you do that, traffic will follow Google reward you and you think it can definitely tell the difference these days. Can it tell it between AI writing and human writing, or do you think that's kind of a oh absolutely.

Speaker 2: 19:47

And there's been a lot of blind tests between you know some of the AI detection tools and how well they work. But you know Google has also come out and they don't often do this, but they have stated publicly that they they're old. You can read this in their policies and guidelines. They're okay with AI. They just don't want you to use AI to do things that are manipulative, like build large content farms or you know, just let's call it article spin.

Speaker 2: 20:15

What I believe and what I coach and work with people on is that AI should sit behind you. It should much act like you're a research assistant, your intern, make you kind of de-stress, the whole constant you know the whole like writer's block that you get when you get started, like it should be when behind your sales, so that then you can sit down and I call it enriching you do brand enrichment of whatever content comes out for quotes and visuals and your take, and like you need to make the connection as the brand manager, marketer, owner, founder, entrepreneur, between your content and the audience. Ai will never do that, man. It sure gets you to the 20-yard line. You know we've got to punch it in.

Speaker 1: 20:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:59

You know, I mean that's and a lot of times that when people go to you know they see these use cases of you know the AI gurus and like I put in these prompts and it wrote this magical article and I published it and I got this much traffic and I did it 200 times and now I have this asset. It's like, okay, I get it, but like that's not how this works. Most small businesses need to put out a blog post or two a month, whether you're B2B or you know direct to consumer Instagram or you know LinkedIn. You need to put out your post and it's got to connect with people and it's got to engage. You know we're not, we're not trying to build content firms here. We're just trying to. We're just trying to connect with audience and bring them over to your website. You know, get them familiar with your brand, maybe start a conversation, maybe they follow you so they'll watch. I mean, the goal you know the goals that we're trying to accomplish with people is much lower and it needs to have that human touch interaction.

Speaker 2: 21:54

But I'm a big user of AI. It's changed my productivity. I've helped other people transform how they use AI on a daily basis. I use it for email, article generation, meeting notes. I mean, I use it for all kinds of things. I even have it now doing through PROMS. I have it helping me write my reports for people that I, you know, I coach and consult with on a monthly basis and I'm just now putting together a course that tries to that helps people understand.

Speaker 2: 22:25

Like, how do you use AI today the right way? And I know you're from now I'll have to redo all the material, but it's still, you know, today, how do you, how do you leverage AI to create your content strategy, to actually produce it? You know there's a right way to do it, the wrong way, but that's been true of everything. There's a right and wrong way to grow followers on social media, build links. You know, no matter what shows up, there's always been a white hat, black hat, ethical, yeah, you can do it, but is it really the right? You know, is it a good business practice or not? You know, we can all debate those. I just know where I sit, which is a little bit more on the. It is gray, but it leans towards the white hat. Or let's do this the right way and leverage technology and AI to get there.

Speaker 1: 23:08

So before we, before our call today, we were talking or before we started recording, we were talking about how you've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 companies in your career and I was curious to know and I think a lot of our listeners are curious to know what. What is it like to be on kind of the marketing and strategy side of things when it comes to ad spending and rolling out? You know opportunities and, most specifically, you know purchasing like a domain name.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Yeah, you know, being a being, a being a non paid or organic guy. Non paid comes from Google Analytics is what they call it. Paid, so it's non paid.

Speaker 1: 23:51

Oh, it's very much Pinary right.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Like so yeah, I mean I would always pay attention to the, to the ad buys in the media spend because I could, I could get strategy signals from it. But a domain name purchase, they always consulted the SEO organic guy to try to throw out value. And I mean I watched big brands primarily buy, not as much sell, right, because they're going to, they're going to keep the domains that they own because they they saw, you know, they, they see some intrinsic value in them. But you know, I saw how to evaluate maybe something they had in their portfolio again, something that they would buy, and a lot of times it was even funny with some of them they wouldn't tell me what they were thinking of paying and they would ask me for my independent assessment both on, you know, but we know the metrics, domain age, maybe some content, was there Common words, right? Oh my God, it has a dash. You know, like you know, whatever it might be, you know my opinions and it was kind of always a fun exercise, it was like a highlight of my month, like, oh, I get to, I get to play domain valueator and you know, and I would give them. I mean I was never.

Speaker 2: 24:58

I always came up a little on the lower side. So I think, like the largest one I ever did was I had I had estimated about 250,000. And they were. They were negotiating at 400,000. But and they went and bought it, even with the description. See, they were just curious to see where I would land without having the information and even the bias of you know with it, you know, to try to justify a purchase. So I, you know I would thought it was a stretch at 400, but it had strategic value to them and and they did it.

Speaker 2: 25:26

So, but but was interesting through all of it is and I know we were talking about a specific example that you experienced with this that it was always interesting to watch them get solicited or maybe they were poking around and you know the premium domain names come up and they start thinking about well, maybe I should pay money for that.

Speaker 2: 25:47

It was always interesting to watch the marketing teams not dilemma, but like struggle through trying to figure out whether they could get a return on buying the domain or if they're better off using something in portfolio or newly registered, like it really caused them a lot of angst and I I always watched the problem in the, in the confusion, but I never saw an external person that was pitching a domain really sell it into that like strategy and ROI.

Speaker 2: 26:21

It was like this just domain has value. But it never was like you know, like like if you're selling a house, you want someone to envision living there. So I always was like wonder why they don't like show them what they could do with it or float a couple of ideas by them, because they got to sell this upstream and this isn't a cheap buy. You know, someone's got to write a pretty big purchase order here and they're going to want to understand what's the strategy behind buying the domain and then they need to put a team on it and then they get an advertiser to roll it out in some way.

Speaker 1: 26:49

So we were talking about since you worked with VW we were talking about a domain that I was trying to sell back in 2009, 2010.

Speaker 1: 26:57

And it was hybridcom, and so my idea was, back in that period of time, hybrid technology was relatively new to the market I think it came out a few years before and when I went to all the major and even the smaller auto manufacturers, my idea or my position in that was why not use hybrid to showcase the hybrid cars that you have for sale and your offering to kind of separate it?

Speaker 1: 27:25

Because I think we're seeing it now with electric cars People are hesitant to purchase an electric car for a number of reasons. Number one is the range in as far as you think, or if you want to go see Matilda, 600 miles away, I don't want to wait, I don't want to stop for two hours to recharge, or I can't find a place to recharge, and then with hybrid, people were saying they're probably very costly to fix or catch on fire or whatever it is, and so I was thinking of pitching a VW or someone like that you know hybridcom and they would think that they would showcase their products on it and by owning the domain, they would be the perceived market leader in hybrid technology. And you brought up a really cool point of view of something that you would have pitched, so why don't you tell us what your pitch would be? I wish I was recording when we were talking about this.

Speaker 2: 28:14

Oh no, it's great, I'll love so. With VW you have to think first about what are they trying to do? And they're trying to sell cars and they've built this perfect website, vwcom, that they have spent millions and millions I don't want to say billions too big of a number of dollars to either drive people to the dealership or they, you know, they, they they're going to configure and get as far as they can before, you know, go into the dealership. And that's the purpose of the website. It's making model, it's car search. There might be some service or aftermarket parts, but I mean it is, it is car search, that's the purpose of the website.

Speaker 2: 28:56

So anytime that I would ever talk to someone like VW about content marketing, they, they, they didn't want to introduce any potential friction or distraction to that and and and. So they didn't want to put content unless it was somehow enriching, to make model information, which we did on the equivalent of product detail pages. But you know auto detail pages, you know content marketing couldn't fit in. So what I would have done with hybrid, I would have. I would have pitched them with hybridcom. I would have pitched them shelf space because, number one, what VW wanted me to do, and they had the domain authority to do it. They wanted to rank VWcom forward slash hybrid cars number one in Google. They may even have owned it, I don't know. I'd have to go back and look. However, not everybody most people want some type of third party validation, some type of trusted source, so I would have pitched them hybridcom as what if we could put hybridcom number two for hybrid cars, so that when someone wants a second opinion, you know they want some third party commentary. They bump over to hybridcom, they read all about hybrid cars and then, sure enough, it just shoots them back to VW, you know to, to price out the newest hybrid model.

Speaker 2: 30:08

So brands can get behind things like that, because now you've you're solving two problems. You give them a content marketing play where they can introduce people to VW who are curious about hybrid cars in a non-threatening research way, without hurting the conversion rate on their main e-commerce site, and this was something that I've seen big brands do. A lot is that you know what a small brand thinks about. They think about a microsite, right, like, oh, I have a pain product problem, or I have this, this new thing I'm doing, and so they build a five or 10 website page, website or you know whatever 50 pages. What a big brand does is, if they want to own hybridcom and hybrid cars and want to do it through content, they're going to produce 100, 200, 300 pages and be the comprehensive resource and and lean into that and then drive all the traffic back to the e-com or the car search site.

Speaker 2: 30:59

Now, vw didn't do that and the reason that I can speak so confidently to the strategy is that I did do it with another large brand in Dish. They had the same problem. We tried to put content on their website and Dish Network. As it became Dishcom, we figured out analytically that putting the content on the website distracted people because they wanted to read about. You know, when were the prince and princess getting married, or what time is this football game on, or when's my next episode dropped? They would get distracted by these entertainment questions and they would forget to finish the checkout.

Speaker 2: 31:32

So what we did is we built, we acquired and built Dish TV and this was, this was this was almost before WordPress, like no one had heard of WordPress. This is back in the bloggercom. Yeah, we started producing three times a day entertainment post Well before. Like I said before, blogging is the. You know the machine it is now and sure enough, we started building traffic and Dishcom sponsored Dish TV, I mean it was, it was branded and I mean everybody was going on and we just fed people into the, into the satellite package e-commerce engine and after about two years of investment, so we're talking I don't know we're talking more than a half, but not a million bucks worth of investment into this.

Speaker 2: 32:13

They had an asset that had positive ROI so you could pitch hybridcom not only, let's say you're selling up for half million dollars, but yeah, the two million dollar investment. If it sells cars internationally, I mean, how many cars does it have to sell? You wouldn't take it, wouldn't take a lot of work to have a quick business model. So the marketing person can push it upstream and look like a rock star because he came up with a big idea.

Speaker 1: 32:40

Yeah, I think it's funny. You said 400,000 because I think that was the list price, so maybe that was the deal that went across your desk he says only were 250.

Speaker 1: 32:51

So let's pretend that you're working with VW right now and a guy like myself calls in and pitches in that idea and it's a good idea, and they're biting and they like it. And they're like you know what we're going to buy hybridcom. You say you know what, the price is fair, I think it's high, but you know whatever. And they say, okay, let's do it. How long would it take from them if they bought the domain that day? How long would it take them to make that decision? You know, to really build that site, get it started, roll out that strategy like how long would it take, do you think a car company or a big company to do that?

Speaker 1: 33:24

To make the decision or to execute the project well, like, how long do they are taking to make the decision? Do you think wow?

Speaker 2: 33:31

We are talking about fortune 100 and 500 companies, so should we talk in years or decades? Yeah, okay, you know you're definitely looking at quarters and something, something. This will be what I be looking for. I was talking to somebody Because in my world, when I, when I talk to an entrepreneur or a big brand does not matter.

Speaker 2: 33:54

The first thing I'm trying to figure out is does this person marketing, team, brand, you know, enterprise? Do they want to be an advertiser or a publisher? And Usually what makes an advertiser want to have a content marketing play is Is Google keeps raising their cost per click and the ad, the ad spend, just keeps going up and up and up and it became a big enough item on the Expense sheet that the CFO or whoever is in charge of the money Like it hurts, yeah, and and so then they say, okay, we've primarily been an advertising play, we need to do content. And then the next, the next point is Are you gonna do it off domain for this particular model? And there's a lot of reasons to do it off domain. Now they could consider sub domain, but as an estimate, kind of explain it to them and that it's like it's probably not gonna work the way they want it. Then all of a sudden you can build your case because you also have all the paid Like. For example, like if I knew that the brand is spending a Quarter million dollars a month on Google ads in their cost per conversion, whatever it might be. But let's just say it's 200 bucks, you know the matter. For 20 or 200, I just start doing the math. I can start extrapolating what the value of that would be and help them do that decision. But the, the, I mean you can take a $10,000 purchase order and it can take. It can take a quarter to get it through corporate America. So what's a? You know what's a half million gonna take, unless you already have corporate, our boardroom Initiative and then and then all it's greased.

Speaker 2: 35:29

If you have to convince them to spend this, like, if you can't get them, it's gonna be very hard for someone to enter the equation and convince them of the content publishing Alternative path. They kind of need to get there on their own through self diagnosis, and you got to have an internal champion. So I would often play that to, you know, to help them understand it. But you would get signals. You know, if you pitched it to a 50 or 100 people You'd be looking for. Huh, I wonder who's spending a crap load of money on Google ads? I wonder if I can look up their data cost per click data, like with a spy foo, our Simrush and then kind of start to work through.

Speaker 2: 36:09

Hey, you know, if you, if you had this other play, like all of a sudden you're you're having a business conversation, not a domain name conversation, and Right, whatever domain name they pick, because there might be other ones that they're considering, I mean that you got to hope that your content play kind of fits in like hybrid comm here better. So I mean, because it, you know, it's just like anything you're gonna. If you're gonna buy a house or buy a car, I mean it doesn't stop on the day you purchase it. You need to. You need to understand what you're gonna do with the house. You don't understand enjoyment You're gonna get from the car. They got to know what they're gonna do the domain name. You're never gonna get the money got it.

Speaker 1: 36:41

So then, sticking with this subject, with hybrid comm or any? What are your feelings about exact match domains, meaning it's exactly about the product or service they're offering?

Speaker 2: 36:51

It's very helpful. I mean, historically, the exact match domains did really really well, you know, I think that, yeah, I think there's a little more lenience with Google, but I mean it's absolutely gonna give you, it's gonna help you leverage, you know, to have to have the exact match, and and when you can get exact match to your brand name or to your or whatever problem you're trying to solve, whatever education you're like I had mortgage 101. So hybrid to represent hybrid technology are even hybrid car technology, and I would say cars would be where you start. You can get more comprehensive. Whatever that means is. The next most important thing, though, is that Hybrids a big. That's a big topic. Even hybrid cars is big. So if your exact match is that broad, that's a big content play.

Speaker 2: 37:45

When you work downstream and you try to find more of a niche Contemplate, when you can take an exact match plus be focused on that topic, I mean now you're just you're running downhill, not because Google rewards the exact match, but it works for your branding. When people see the domain on social or searched, they're gonna be more likely to click like it's just more of an all-inclusive, inclusive solution. That's, your exact match is geared towards your content strategy and the brand supports it, like if it was a triangle, you got all three working for you. I mean doesn't mean you can't do it without an exact match. And it might be, I Don't want to say it's the least important out of the three, but man, it is really nice when the brand and the exact match, you know exact matches up to the, to the, to the topical content.

Speaker 1: 38:31

Well, yeah, I think you search credit cards on Google, you're gonna see credit cards calm, but you're also gonna see like visa and then and then like other you know travel, you know related credit cards and whatnot. So, like you said, there's gonna be a mixture of results. So, sticking with the big fortune 100s are large companies, right, and so when I was trying to sell into Car manufacturing and I've tried to sell into other massive companies a lot of the times they they have in some of the data mining Sites that I use to find the decision makers of these companies will also let you know of the media company that they're using or the advertising agency that they use, or you know people that help as a third party For their advertising. Do you think it's worth contacting those Advertising agencies or those media buying agencies, or so do you go first to the Lions head first or the snakes head first and then get told to go there?

Speaker 2: 39:26

Boy, I'm in. That's a great question in my experience. First, the relationship between organic and and paid as it relates to agencies is interesting because In the agency world, someone's the agency of record, the lead, and it's often the paid media company, because it's the largest budget and largest fee and and what most paid media companies want to do is they want to control all of the decisions. So, yes, if you want, I mean they're gonna be a player in this. But their job as an agency to make money is to keep this simple, and Introducing a new domain name is not simple. It's very disruptive to media spending and buying. So just know that, right, if you're gonna change someone's domain and they're gonna go through a website project and that's gonna take, I mean like they're just frickin rolling their eyes, so you do have to talk that that is a stakeholder and the very important stakeholder, unless they, yeah, but why you seem to like if the original piece was that you're, you're gonna be more of a publisher, move your own content. I mean that that is anti paid search agency by by default and right, like it. It's just not how they're built. Now they're gonna have an SEO team maybe and like, maybe you can get talking to them. But I, I don't know I would. I don't know if it would work or not, but I actually I would go down the website path because the Somewhere in the brand whether it's a web agency, which would be ideal. But if they're managing the website internally, which most big brands do, then they have the heavy lift technology. You know they don't. You know they do have web agency like those are the those that's who people go to first, like they go to them and say do you have any domains that I don't know about? Number one and then number two if you don't have it, can you get it for me? I mean, they're gonna talk to the IT guys, the web guys. That that's who the marketer is gonna go talk to. Not I don't know many CMOs that would go to the paid search agency and start asking about Brand domains and content and all those kind of things. So that's just my experience. But I, I, you know, I feel that a particular agency only can hold one position. Even if they're, they are in the paid.

Speaker 2: 41:50

The paid media agency doesn't usually, yeah, they'll want a landing page or they'll want some creative for their ad display, but they're not managing the website. They're not running content, they're not. They're not doing heavy SEO. They're doing tech SEO and maybe a little light optimization, but they're not. You know they're. They probably Won't lead a domain thing like this unless it's a domain name for a marketing campaign. Got it If it is a, if it's a, if it's a tangential marketing campaign and they need to domain for it, they'll do it. But I don't know that they're gonna pay a premium for that because it doesn't like I just I just need a domain name to land traffic on. I can put anything in the world in the Google ads, unless you can show you it's been improved conversion. So I don't know. That just gives people my opinion, you know on the matter, but you know I would. I would lean towards web agency and IT guys over media spend.

Speaker 1: 42:42

I've. I've found myself approaching those third-party agencies and and I really haven't had much luck. And I've asked some other folks and and I think they are a little Disenchanted by their experience and they say, well, they can't mark it up like you can on Google ad spend, so they don't want you to take up their budget. And I mean that's like kind of a crappy thing to say. But you know, either way it doesn't matter, it's not leading to a sale, I guess. So that's kind of two, two dead ends there.

Speaker 1: 43:10

So one of the other things that we've been talking considerably about to change the subject slightly here is talking more about AI. I and you said it can help you get to the 20 yard line and it has kind of revolutionized your business. And I'm getting, as a business owner, a lot of people in the SEO or the media world coming to me and saying, hey, we can write articles, we can optimize the articles, we can handle all your customer service with AI and you don't have to pay these people anymore. And for me I kind of cringe because some of the answers I get from chat, you BT. And then there's another solution I really like to use called computercom, which is a more unfiltered version of AI or less controlled by the filters of some sort of sensors that can give you some answers, and you said it brings you to the 20. So someone at your team still needs to put human eyes on it before it's fit for human consumption, right? Is that your opinion right now?

Speaker 2: 44:11

Yeah, absolutely. The first thing I think about is I use a word called co-create and the co-create is the brand usually. Sometimes it's a marketing person, sometimes it's the founder, entrepreneur. There's AI, and then I'm playing a role as a coach, seo, content guy. The three of us together can pull this off, meaning that I can get ahead of the audience, I can run all the tools in the analytics, I can come up with content strategy, I can help you find your voice, I can push that through AI and give it to you, and that's a 20-yard line. But it cannot.

Speaker 2: 44:52

And I've tried it, I've done it. I've jen stuff up and published. I've ran it through the optimizers and published. I've hooked up chat bots. I'm even working with somebody who's trying to put an avatar at their barbershop in a kiosk to greet people as they come in. So I mean, ai is doing sales calls. I've looked at every use case possible and I understand where it's at and it can do some things. But you need to figure out what it can do for you and not do for you. And I agree with you To jen up an article and just throw it out there one it's not additive. I mean if it came from a large language model processed by AI prompts and then you published it. You kind of just added another page to the billion that are out there. I doubt it's going to succeed because it was already known information. Why would that be the other problem?

Speaker 1: 45:44

You're not adding any value to the world.

Speaker 2: 45:46

You're just reprinting with what's there, and there's some things that need reprint, particularly if they're brand new topics, but really, what you need to do is that you would use it like you have this idea. Maybe you really want to build a guide, a guide to shopping for hybrid cars, and it's going to be a compilation of 25 to 30 pages, from beginning to end, and really it's that you're assembling your thought process and how you would shop. Ai can help you write every one of these articles. I'm putting together a course right now that teaches people how to do this, and I used AI to produce it. But AI didn't get in front of the camera and talk for me. It just helped me understand my curriculum, my coursework, my quizzes. How would I build the best course possible to create a transformational experience for someone who takes it? But I'm still the one in front of the camera. I'm still the one answering the one-on-one questions. I'm still having the monthly call with you for you to learn. These are examples of like AI should be behind you and you can, my God, you can leverage and do some really cool things, but it's not that last mile. That's still you, that's still the brand. That's what people are going to pay for If you do it the other way, then yeah, you are.

Speaker 2: 47:00

You're creating something where AI has replaced, brings no value and someone else can do it. If you're building a product or a service, you're not going to look at everyone else and copy exactly what they do and think that's going to sell in the marketplace. Why would you think that would happen? With content, you have to have a take. You have to enrich your content. You can use AI to get there really, really fast.

Speaker 2: 47:26

A year ago, let's say a year and a half pre-date December and January of last year, when Open AI took the market by storm I probably produced 10,000, 50,000 articles over the last couple of years. The average cost reduced about $5, $600. And a lot of that was a good. Part of that was copywriting and research and all those different type of things. What I did is I just re-engineered. You're still going to spend $3, $4, $500, but in the old days you would get kind of a vanilla.

Speaker 2: 47:54

Look in written, even if it was by a good writer 800 words, 700 words. Now I can cover multiple topics, put out 3,000 to 5,000 words, add visuals, enrich it with quotes, publish it and boost it on social media. For the same $5, $600. So it's not that I cut cost. I'm putting out better content that the audience cares about, because I can get AI involved in the process. So me, ai and the brand person we can make hey together, and that's a great way to think about it, because I understand how it works and can teach you but only you know the brand and then we can use AI together so that there's less stress, right, no, writer's block kind of gets you started, but we can leverage it together to put out the type of things that the audience is looking for.

Speaker 1: 48:43

I'm kind of picturing that a carpenter comes in and redos your kitchen but then it really comes down to the finished work carpenter who comes in and wood that really makes it pop right. And that's you now, rather than being the carpenter and the finished carpenter five years ago. I think that I do see it helping me in my own life, but yeah, I'm unwilling to trust it all the way. I find it interesting that there are people advertising that right now and I'm sure there's going to be companies that trust that it's going to be good all the time, not only of it having a hallucinations, but again you're saying it's regurgitating things the world already knows, so it could be quite boring. I find it to be long-winded at times as well. Exactly.

Speaker 2: 49:27

A couple of quick things there. First and I share this when I talk to people on AI, even as someone who plays with AI every day, I have about a 25, so one out of four or 33, one out of three chance of something actually doing what it says it will do, and I feel like I know what buttons to push With the hit rate that you get with these AI tools and even the chatbots. You just need to know it's low. Even if it works one day, it may not work the next day. It's evolving fast, but when you try stuff, it's not that you can't trust it, right? Sales and marketers always overstep their bounds and tell you how cool it is before it's time. That's all that's happening, nothing else. Don't be afraid to come back in six months and see what that tool that you checked out about now, that you checked out six months ago maybe now it's more on it does a better job. Now it's living more up to its brand promise. That's number one. Number two you're exactly right. In a large language model, with the billions and billions of inputs and outputs, we're all playing with the same information. What I try to get a brand to do when you develop is, I start building the additional content your brand story, your products and services, your FAQs, your tone and voice, your specific persona, your topics. You build a secondary set of knowledge that every time I run a prompt, I'm loading anywhere between three or four or five or six documents at the same time so that as it pulls the information out of the large language model, it then writes specifically to my brand that I'm working on to create content that is closer. Maybe I got it to the 10 yard line Right out of the gate and I'll repeat it, but when I work with folks, get your tone and voice, your audience, your personality, your content topics, your keyword work. You got to do all this work, but then you feed this into the AI as you're working with it and the output completely changes. This will all get built in later. Later you'll have your own personal libraries and chat and it'll reference them.

Speaker 2: 51:37

Right now it's kind of a manual process, but the concept I hope you're hearing is large, large language model, but then you make it hyper specific with your information all in PDF and text files, and that could be massive in volume. It could be volumes of content as well. To reduce the ultimate outcome, the last thing I want to leave you with. You can control the.

Speaker 2: 51:59

You know how its temperature and how verbose it is, but this thing I always want to make sure that people understand is that in the current version of AI, there is no logic. Now there's language logic, but the way that it works is it's always trying to figure out the next token in the vector. So, for example, 2 plus 2, we know, when we punch into a calculator is 4, punching into Google, it's 4, put it in a spreadsheet, it's 4, there's computations happening. The way that a large language model that knows that 2 plus 2 is 4 is that it has read it a million times. Therefore, it must be true, but it didn't actually compute it. And so when we say we're dealing with a large language model, a chat bot, we sometimes think it can do things that are logical. So, but it can't, and that's where you have to feed it with these additional inputs to help it arrive at where you want it to go, because it is just figuring out the next word that most makes sense to be.

Speaker 1: 53:08

Next not the logical word.

Speaker 2: 53:11

Right, don't ask it about politics, right, and that's why I mean, but I think when you kind of get some of these core concepts down, like, ooh, I got to add my own docs to this thing, oh, I have to. It can be analytical, but it's not doing math the way I think it is. You know, now it's going to and it will sooner than later. That's what the open AI aha moment was back in October and November is that it's not public information but speculation, is? It added 2 plus 2. And it was such a breakthrough that you know and Sam Altman wanted to release it but the board wanted to keep it we had the big, you know brouhaha, if you follow AI at all. They fired him for a week, brought him back, but you know it was all because they were having internal arguments, because AI added 2 plus 2.

Speaker 1: 54:03

That's what it was about. I didn't know that. I thought it was some sort of company politics going on, but that's what it was. That was the root of the argument.

Speaker 2: 54:10

That was my take. I mean it did then turn into company politics, because open AI is a, it is a, it is a I don't know the right word for it. I don't know if it's a B Corp or a. You know a philamprical, but it's not a. It's not a for-profit business, the way that Google and Amazon started right where they're trying to monetize. Now Sam is trying to monetize, like right now he's trying to take down the video, like he wants to make the chip, so they have to pay the video, all the money.

Speaker 2: 54:36

But you know, that's the internal thing with open AI and they have a unique, they have the market leadership right now. But that's a unique challenge they're going to face because they have this internal. Well, what are they trying to serve? Are they serving mankind through the foundation or they want to make a you know a crap load of money for all the people that are tied up with with with stock? And now you got Microsoft involved in their co-pilot product and you know they're now on the board. So those things are a mess. I love that kind of stuff because it right. Understanding the ecosystem helps you understand how to play the game.

Speaker 1: 55:06

Yeah, I mean it's. I mean, and then also kind of like the incestuous relationship of the people that have worked at each organization and knowing each other, and then investments and right you know. And then the other, the other investors and the other business partners that are working with them and you know the hosting providers and all the different service people are, all you know, they intermingled with each other, providing different services. So it's whether they're competitors or co-working, you know people or whatever I mean it's. It's going to be interesting.

Speaker 1: 55:37

What they all come up with and it was what's always amazing to me is when open AI came out with chat, gtt, but then, like only a month later, a few weeks later, microsoft launch theirs, and then Google launch theirs, or whatever order, and it's like, were they all not sharing information? And they were all that close. You know, it's almost kind of like you look at World War two with the, the atom bomb and jet engine, where you had multiple countries working on it and they were all so close and you know the Germans seemed to have the best jet fighter and then the US got the, the atom bomb, you know, and when they were spies, stealing the information and sharing it to get like different countries to different spots or different companies. It just seems way too coincidental that they all launched, around a similar time, something so unbelievable, right.

Speaker 2: 56:26

You know you can do your own research. I'm speaking somewhat out of my knowledge base, but in my when I've read the different computer science books and the the, the true leaders of AI, back from the 70s and 80s and 90s, when this was first these first concepts came along, they predicted with some accuracy that this would happen around this time. Wow, and they forward project this all the way out to about 2075, and there's different versions of AI that will happen At different times, based on the computing power and how technology should follow, you know, like Moore's law and stuff. So, honestly, the way that you're describing it, we're, we're right on track for what they, how they thought this would evolve over time From a from a pure, like the way that physics have to think about black holes. The true computer science is the forefathers of AI. They have predicted and they wrote books about it. You can read about it and it's it's eerily, you know, accurate. And you know just because I had a friend last night at dinner asked me, you know, because he asked me what I was doing. I told him about the AI project I'm working on, where I'm teaching brands how to leverage it at the Tidal wave content and he said well, you know, what do you think of AI? And I said, well, before, we, before I tell you what I think about it, the computer scientist says there's only two outcomes we either, you know it's gonna be our friend and we're gonna live to be 250 and it's gonna improve our quality of life, or it's gonna kill us. Those are the only two outcomes. It's very binary and you know now we won't see it in our lifetime.

Speaker 2: 57:53

You know this is gonna be a 2075, you know 2100 type. You know, before we get there, to where it can, it can have that kind of presence. But you know, that's why people are afraid of it, because of that outcome. Not, I don't need to fear monger, I don't need to like, I don't need, I don't need to know which outcomes gonna take place. Yeah, this is what's happening today. But you can learn a little bit about this evolution and how things might progress by.

Speaker 2: 58:17

But by just poking around a little bit and reading some of the you know, reading some of the you know the conspiracy theories are reading about, you know some of the things that the original computer scientists thought about. So I find it fascinating. But it's just like the. It's like the SEO algorithms that Google built and the machine learning, and then social media came around and the dopamine releases that the algorithms were built to do. Now we're just in AI. So in my professional career, this is just another technology showing up that people are somewhat afraid of. They don't know how to use, and I love it. I like deciphering it, decoding it and then helping the scrappy emerging brands hey, I love big brands too. They got money, but my, my passion is helping, you know entrepreneurs and smaller brands. Uh, you know Leverage that information and you know Create success.

Speaker 1: 59:06

All right, so I know you got to go shortly, like in a minute or two. One last question how do you see, when you look at Google or even Yahoo, when they're implementing AI at the very top of the page? Now, do you foresee SEO completely changing and are you going to find yourself catering to the language models or to AI and really the results are possibly going to vanish Because, like Google's AI product is probably going to get to know each of their customers in a custom way? So do you think that the days of like listing results might be different? Do you think that like listing results might vanish or do you think that you know SEO will totally change with AI?

Speaker 2: 59:47

Well, it's always going to change and, yes, ai will change it. You know, I just kind of say, when you, when you look at SERPs, search engine result pages, and even as Google thinks of universal search and what they, what they, when they brought out universal search, and they, you know, and they've already talked about how they're going to have generative search and and I can demo it and see it Kind of say to everybody's like there was a day that maps wasn't integrated into Google search. There was a day when the product feeds didn't come in. There was a day when there wasn't restaurants and airlines. Like Google has added different Windows into right, like it wants to bring the world's knowledge to you through search or through their browsers. They don't, like they have the concept of a zero-click search, like you just know what you want magically, which is not out of the question if you carry a google phone now working backwards. Sorry, the tangent is that introducing AI is just another part of the search results, um, and the reason that when Google introduces them, what they're going to be looking for because, remember, focus on the user knowledge will follow if it enriches the search results page and people interact with it and they can figure out how to make money off of it. Hell yeah, it's going to be all over the search results, yeah. However, if it doesn't quite meet that case, then they're not going to bring it in and we just won't know. And it'll probably be very Like, just like sometimes you see maps and sometimes you don't you get. When you do a recipe search, you get different results. When you're looking for when the ballgame will come on, you might. You know Every, every result is different. The same thing will happen here, but what I would say as a marketer is more important Is to go up a level and say what's happened today For the people you want to reach in marketing, and as you think about the value of a domain name as being the hub Of the brand, is that Users are going everywhere in addition to search, they'll do search in those use cases. We know they're all over social media People that consume video on youtube, people that are on reddit, the number of slack communities I'm part of, then I'm over on discord and then I'm I'm in a. I'm in a private community that's behind a login, like I'm all over the place. Yeah, it's wild Right.

Speaker 2: 1:01:54

Like to think that, like to think that whether or not Google introduces ai into the search results Is that big of a ripple when you think about going to where your audience is and all different places you've got to interact with them. I'd kind of say it's a moot point, like if people start using chat gbt more, right, but we know that chat gbt, whenever you do it and you do web access, kind of bring in in the top results anyway. But I and I even say from a linking standpoint, I mean wow, if I can get in the large language model and get a citation and people copy that and put it on their website as a citation. I've now learned a backlink, so so I just think you got to lean into it and say, how do you not, if you're going to leverage a large language model, absa epping lootly, you should leverage it and then hope that because you leverage that, google does introduce it. But getting into barred is going to be different than getting into Claude, going to be different than getting into chat gbt. Um, you know, in in chat gbt if you somehow published, making this up, because I don't, I don't know who they block, but A lot of publishers are blocking chat gbt. So if you're publishing on Forbes or new york times or entrepreneur or wherever it is. It's not going to be in chat. Gbt Might still be in barred like this is going to get really complicated really fast.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

So I'm going to kind of go back to fundamentally For who I work with, with small emerging brands, even though I'd Gladly take the big, the big brand money and when it comes to earning Traffic. So earned media Is pick a topic, own it, become an expert and then take that multi channel wherever your audience is. That's what I teach and and if the technology changes, you change with it. I wouldn't try to get ahead of it, I would just change. It happens.

Speaker 2: 1:03:38

If you get lucky, great, and that's what I did with the mortgage calculators. I got lucky. If you're doing good content, it'll take care of itself and and you'll be able to. You know, if you have a video library, an article library, and something new shows up, you'll be able to backfill into it. You don't. You don't need to be on the cutting edge of like I need to be the first one or 10 percent in here. You know, I think when facebook released threads in the first two days 10 million people signed up and then nobody else signed up, they thought they would get rewarded for being first of the party.

Speaker 1: 1:04:06

No, it doesn't. Nothing happens fast.

Speaker 2: 1:04:10

I mean, if I was an engineer, if I was a developer, that would be the first thing I would develop in my algorithm. Like, don't reward people that come in and try to make a splash, make them earn it. So if I'm on linkedin I you know there's if I'm on google with the new domain, I'm in the sandbox. I just know I am for three to six months. If I go into linkedin, they're not gonna. They're not gonna. They're not gonna distribute me until I prove myself, go to youtube and I'm putting out videos. I mean I gotta prove myself before they're gonna just pick me up and start showing me to their users an audience.

Speaker 1: 1:04:38

And it makes sense, it makes total sense. Why do you want to see someone who's made one video? I mean, yes, usually the content is good. I mean, if I look at my first podcast, uh that I just I'm on my 10th or 12th episode. I mean I've learned a ton since then and the quality has gotten a lot better.

Speaker 2: 1:04:53

So absolutely good. All right, well, I hope, I hope, I hope that was helpful to every and I hope I hope people get some value out of it.

Speaker 1: 1:05:00

I got a ton of value out of this and you definitely have me thinking about AI and a lot of different things in the, In the strategy that people should take when trying to sell, you know a large domain and Trying to speak their language some of these larger companies so chuck, why don't you tell people how they can get ahold of you if they want to use you for your services?

Speaker 2: 1:05:17

Yeah, so, uh, find me on linkedin and or chuck akins you can type chuck akins or I actually go by cia, chuck Isaac akins, so you can. You can look me up there. The I've got two things. I'll tell people about the first tidal wave content. That's the AI and content marketing membership I'm building. It's got a price point right now in beta of about 500 a month to screaming value.

Speaker 2: 1:05:41

Uh, you know, to develop your content strategy and, and, you know, just start putting out that, that first topical piece. I've also got my own podcast. It's called deciphering digital. About I'm eight or nine episodes in. I'm dropping this if they're sixth one next Monday and I'm just trying to bring on other experts and really breaking down if it's whether it's amazon, sco, youtube, whatever, whatever the digital marketing channel or strategy is, we trying to deconstruct it down to hey, this, this is what you need to do and, what's most important, that's what I'm doing on the podcast. So, uh, you know, as a creator, I've got a podcast and I've got a membership. That's, uh, believe, by coaching and courses.

Speaker 2: 1:06:17

But, uh, you know, most of my work is, uh, you know, is as a marketing coach, both for b2b brands and direct to consumer, b2c, cpg. So, chuck Isaac akinscom is where to find me there. And, uh, you know, I'm always like I have a low overhead. It's just me. Now I used to have 20, 25 employees. I'll talk shop with anybody. So, uh, you know, don't, don't be afraid to reach out. And, uh, you know, if we end up doing some work out of it, great. If not, um, I'll probably learn something from it just by the nature of the question. So, uh, um, I just, I just love what I do.

Speaker 1: 1:06:49

That's great Thanks for having you. We appreciate it and I'll definitely put um your contact information in the description. Have a good day.

Speaker 2: 1:06:56

All right, thanks, all right, I'll see you.

Speaker 1: 1:06:58

Okay, all right.