Leveraging SEO in Your Personal Brand to Drive Business

- We see this all this time.
We see companies who are spending millions
and millions and millions of dollars a month,
and we go to them, we're like,
oh, you didn't look at your analytics here, here and here.
We should adjust this.
And they're like we got over a 60% increase in ROI
and still spending the same amount of money.
(upbeat music)
- You know, I was reading your blog, you know,
when I was I think like 16 years old.
I've been following you for, you know,
better part of 15 years now or so.
I'm curious like, you know, in 2023
what do you think it takes to build remarkable content,
grow an audience and really stand out
given just the pace at which
the attention economy is growing?
You know, the creator economy now is blowing up,
and there's more and more people coming online
to building organic content.
You know, I was kind of shocked over the weekend.
We were both at this event,
and it must have been 98% of people it seemed,
the core part of their business growth was all ads.
And I couldn't help but think just how risky that is.
Just to be completely addicted
to the ad growth side of things
when you know, when you're building content,
and you're putting it out there,
you're truly building your own personal media empire
around your personal brand and your business.
I'm curious how you think about building, you know,
organic content and standing out in 2023.
- Yeah, so I look at that as
the same way as Google does, double E-A-T.
Also known as EEAT.
Experience, expertise, authority and trust.
Everyone can create content.
I can use ChatGPT to create content.
You can use the Ubersuggest AI Writer to create content.
If everyone's using the same AI tools to create content,
whether it's for social or tech space,
how are you going to stand out?
Everyone's going to look like Where's Waldo?
Remember that game from back in the day
where like you would try to find Waldo
cause he would stand out wearing that striped,
red and white striped shirt?
But these days everyone looks like Waldo,
and you got to find the people that look like you and me.
Which is really hard to do
cause everyone is just using the same tools
and the same technology to create their content.
So if you can create content
that showcases your experience or your expertise
or your authority and trust,
you can end up bringing a whole new perspective to a topic.
You're going to stand out,
and that's how you're going to build a community.
That's how you're going to do well in the long run.
But that's super hard to do for most people
because they're not willing to just take out their phone
and start recording.
They're stuck in the ways of,
what's the fastest way to create content?
What's the most automated way?
It's not actually hard from a, you know, mental standpoint.
It's hard from it just takes time.
Bust out your phone, start talking,
break down stuff that only you would know
or very few people would know
because of something that you experienced
or you've done in your current life.
While other people couldn't do this
if they used AI to create content.
- So are there any examples online, you know,
of different brands you're seeing or different people online
that you're like damn, that person's on
like the bleeding edge of, you know,
where you know online branding, audience growth
and like original content are kind of going?
- For a personal side,
there's a guy named Alex Hormozi,
which is worth checking out.
He's been doing some really cool stuff.
There's another person named Codie Sanchez.
She's been doing a really good job as well.
- For sure.
And in terms of, you know, when you kind of look back on,
you know, your career, you know, when you were younger
maybe getting going at like 20, 21, 22,
what would you have told like your younger self,
like getting started of, you know, maybe some key mistakes?
You know, we've all been there,
a bad partnership or a co-founder issue
or whatever it may be, right?
I know I certainly had a host of mistakes
that I would love to go back and change.
Curious how you think about that.
- Focus, that was the biggest mistake I made.
Tried doing too many things at once,
always trying to find the new shiny object
to make money from instead of just focusing on the business,
focusing on what I'm good at
and just executing on that,
and everything else being a distraction.
That's what I really wish I did long, long time ago,
and I didn't.
It's not too late though.
I'm 38 now, so I can focus now
and which I have been doing over the last five years.
The other big mistake is picking two small of a TAM.
My first few companies were like niche businesses,
and I was like, oh, the riches are in the niches.
That's so true, I mean, that's so false.
It's like the opposite of being true.
The riches are in big massive markets,
and I wish I knew that.
I think there was a quote
from like one of the Google founders,
and I'm paraphrasing it here.
It's something like if you can create something
that people have to use each and every single day,
you're onto like something big.
And I'm paraphrasing here, and I'm probably butchering it
so I apologize to whichever Google founder
created that quote.
But I look at those two things
as probably the reason I'm not much further along
in my career
- For sure.
I know we both are people that believe, you know,
in the power of personal brands.
You know, you brought up Alex Hormozi, Codie Sanchez,
you know, you've utilized your personal brand
over the years as well to help you build multiple brands
and successful businesses to the tune of, you know,
you were talking about $10 million even
you've helped bring in to your existing business
through the personal brand.
Like how do you think about leveraging, you know,
your personal brand, the content around it
to drive business?
- I think it's a great strategy.
I don't know why more people don't do it.
Kylie Jenner has done a great job.
Rihanna has done a great job.
There's more social content, but you can do a blog content.
I did it, Backlinko did it.
His name is Brian Dean of backlinko.com.
He eventually sold to SCM Rush.
The possibilities are endless.
Larry Kim ended up building a site called Word Stream
and blogged and built up his brand,
and he sold the company I forgot the amount was public,
maybe somewhere around 100 million dollars.
You can make a lot of money through personal branding,
and people take it for granted,
and they think you can only do it in B2C.
Works well in B2B and B2C.
Again, you just need to go after a big market.
Doing it in a small niche doesn't do that well.
- And in terms of like, you know,
I know a big value of yours,
you talked about, you know, wanting to challenge yourself
continually learn, continually grow.
I'm of the mindset as well
like if you're not learning, you're dying.
You know, it's important
to kind of constantly be challenging yourself,
finding new experiences, new people, new books
that just you know, kind of bring you
onto new ways of thinking and surrounding yourself
with people also that are challenging you.
I'm curious, based on kind of where you're at,
any books that have helped you
or any key learnings you've gotten
over the last kind of six months
that really transformed your way of thinking
and what do you feel like in terms of over the next year
is like the next challenge,
the next big like learning opportunity
that you're really leaning into?
- Yeah, so no books in the last six months
that's changed the way I thought.
There's a lot of good books out there
from like "Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki,
"The Dip" by Seth Godin, "Principles" by Ray Dalio.
Those are all books that people should check out.
For me, what I like doing is I like learning
by just being on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube,
research any topic that you're interested in,
whether it's mindset, meditation,
whether it's that new business idea
or learning about an industry
or just learning about history.
You can find all this stuff online,
digest it super quick,
and you can keep moving on onto the next topic
that you're interested in learning about.
And if you find something that intrigues you,
double down on it.
But that's what I would say
in which people can learn a lot just from the web,
just from social.
You can literally find almost anything on YouTube
and learn there.
You don't need to go to college.
If you want to be a doctor,
I understand some professions it's required
but just go on YouTube and learn.
- And what do you think is kind of one of the bigger
sort of hidden opportunities right now
in 2023 moving to 2024
from a sort of marketing, audience growth,
content standpoint?
- Sure, so one of the big hidden opportunities,
and this will answer also part of your last question
cause I believe you also asked
what am I trying to learn over the next six months?
For me, I'm trying to learn quite a bit about AI,
and I think that's where also a lot of the opportunities
is going to be in the future.
I'm not talking about AI like "Terminator," the movie cell.
I'm talking about AI in which
how can you automate a lot of systems and processes
and make the world just much more efficient place.
And AI should help a lot of businesses do that.
And as humans, if we push away Ai,
I believe what's going to happen is you're going to get replaced,
but if you embrace it, you'll be more in demand
because companies will be looking for people
who understand how to use AI
and how to integrate it within their systems and processes.
- And based on your research there so far, I know,
you know, we're beyond the stage of just, you know,
prompting ChatGPT, that's kind of what you're seeing online.
Everyone talking about that kind of more rudimentary stuff.
But, you know, now we have the invention of things
like auto GPT, one of the most viral projects right now
on GitHub.
I'm curious, where do you kind of see it
affecting some of your businesses?
Are there specific systems
that you see it kind of taking to the next level
and helping automate and make easier first?
- Yeah, like analytics is a great example.
Imagine, or let's go back.
How many companies spend billions of dollars a year
or hundreds of millions on advertising?
A lot.
Just look at Google's market cap, Facebook's market cap.
Imagine instead of people analyzing analytics once a week
or once a month and try to draw insights
and figure out what to change.
Imagine if in real time AI was helping flag
where there's waste and where things are going really well
and sends it to a human,
and then you can click some buttons
and then reallocate money.
There would be such, there'd be a much better ROI
in a lot of marketing campaigns.
We see this all this time.
We see companies who are spending
millions and millions and millions of dollars a month,
and we go to them, we're like,
oh, you didn't look at your analytics here, here and here.
We should adjust this.
And they're like, wow, we got over a 60% increase in ROI
and still spending the same amount of money.
Well, that's great, but you went two years without that.
Imagine how much money was wasted over the last two years.
- Right, so yeah, that analytics side of things,
yeah, is one big opportunity.
Is there anything else you see it kind of disrupting
in your sphere or in the marketing space
that you know you're paying close attention to?
- Creative.
So in advertising,
creatives is one of the biggest piece of leverage.
AI can help you crank out 1,000 versions of creative,
and you can end up seeing what's converting better.
And then you can go in there
and fine tune the ones that work the best manually.
That's going to be a huge disruption.
Another one is going to be systems and processes.
There's a lot of mundane tasks that people are doing
like exporting, crunching numbers and creating reports.
A lot of that could be done with AI.
In SEO, you're going to see AI do a lot of the on page changes
over time because AI can even start creating code, right?
Why can't it just go and fix the issues
and then you just double check as a human
and then upload the changes.
- Yeah, no, I've been playing around a lot
with Mid Journey and feeding it different prompts,
playing around with different things,
whether it's for social or thumbnails
and things like different graphics for my blog,
and it's, yeah, it's crazy just to see the potential
of where it's at and to think that, you know,
it's really compounding at an insane rate as well.
It'd be, you know, crazy to see, yeah.
how on not just the system side, the process side,
but also on the creative end of things
how disruptive this new technology's going to be.
I'm curious as like you're kind of like, you know,
you work with tons of founders.
You've been a founder now for 20 years.
What are some of like the most common mistakes
that you're seeing people make these days
when it comes to looking to grow their brand,
grow their audience online?
- The big mistake is them not using all the channels.
They're like, oh, I love TikTok.
I love this one.
Use all the channels.
Don't be relying on one.
The second one is they're not consistent enough.
They'll post content.
They'll get some traction.
They'll post some more.
They don't get the traction they're looking for
the next week, and they just stop being consistent.
It really is about being consistent.
The third thing is looking at their analytics,
seeing what's hitting for you and your competition.
Learning from it to give you ideas
on what you should be doing to build up the audience.
The fourth one is responding to your community
and building one.
A lot of people have comments,
and they're getting engagement from social,
but what they're not doing
is they're not responding to people,
engaging and building those relationships.
I don't understand why.
But those are some of the big mistakes
that we're seeing people make
when it comes to building their brand.
- Right, and so when you think about like,
yeah, consistency,
I think where a lot of founders get caught up
is in this kind of content hamster wheel.
You know, they're trying to create content
for multiple platforms.
Oftentimes like they have a good idea maybe
of what they want to create, but you know,
they're just falling behind.
They're trying to make a TikTok one day,
long form YouTube the other,
and quickly feel like they're just simply drowning
in the level of content they need to be making.
Based on your experience like what systems
do you think are important to have in place
and also the mindset to have in place
to get off that content hamster wheel
and build a sustainable sort of audience growth system
around you?
- Gary Vaynerchuk has a content repurposing framework
that was online.
I'm pretty sure it's still online.
Go and follow it.
So for example, if you have a long form video,
you don't have to create the short form.
You can slice and dice the long form
and make short forms out of this.
Even before this podcast interview,
I'm like, hey, send me the recording,
and we'll plug you, and we'll put it online.
Why?
Cause my team can slice and dice, make long form from it.
They can make short form from it.
They can even transcribe some of the stuff I'm saying
and create a blog post from it.
I can take some of the things
and turn it into mini podcast episodes.
It's endless, but I'm taking one longer piece of content
and making tons of smaller pieces of content
versus creating a long piece of content
than five small pieces and then writing a blog post
and then recording a podcast.
Like you can do it all at once.
- Yeah, no, I'm big on that.
There's kind of like a content waterfall,
and you have, yeah your pillar piece of content
could be something like a podcast like this
and being able to kind of, like you said
slice and dice that into your TikToks, your IG reels,
your YouTube shorts, you know, shorter form YouTube videos.
And then yeah, translating that to text as well,
whether Twitter, LinkedIn, Carousels, you know, et cetera.
It's kind of, yeah, being efficient
and mapping out first things first,
that whole kind of content system and waterfall
so that you're getting the most bang for your buck,
and you're able to get off that content hamster wheel
and scale your time and buy it back.
I'm curious on the analytics side of things, you know,
there's a lot of different tools that I use
to kind of find, you know, the most viral content out there
from others.
Whether it's using tools like Twemex on Twitter,
Taplio on LinkedIn,
and finding kind of what content's really rising
on those platforms.
Are there any tools that you like to use
to kind of find, you know,
what competitors are putting out there in your space
and what's really popping off
in your kind of like marketing niche
and then translating that
to how you then think about your own content strategy?
- So you already mentioned
a lot of the good tools out there.
The other one I would add is Social Blade.
So then you can look at people's follower accounts
and see who's growing the fastest.
That'll give you an idea
of whose content's resonating the most.
So not just who's getting views,
but what piece of, who's creating content that's resonating
that's causing people to actually want to follow them,
hence building a community,
and then follow those people as well
and look at their content and learn from it.
- Is there some sort of like, I've used Social Blade,
and I'm also oftentimes looking at others
and looking at, you know, my own growth day-to-day,
and I'm curious is there some sort of
like leaderboard as well in Social Blade
or something where you can see rising stars
or, you know, people that are trending
or you just have to go kind of like one by one
and input their information into Social Blade?
- One by one input their information.
And what I also like doing too
is I like looking at Answer The Public.
15% of all Google searches have never been searched before.
Just think about that for a minute.
There's billions of searches.
15% have never been searched before,
even though Google's been around 20 plus years.
It tells you what's up and coming right now
before it's competitive.
The other one that I like looking at is Brian Dean had,
I'll actually look it up right now.
Exploding topics.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- Exploding topics.
Yeah, so that's another one.
I'm like, I'm forgetting the name.
I don't know why I was blanking on the name,
but it's showing you what's up and coming
and what's booming right now, and that's really cool too.
These two tools will help you
come up with ideas
on what to create your content around
that people are curious about.
But a lot of people aren't necessarily
have talked about before.