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- [00:01]
Kip
Hey, if you're like us, you're asking a lot of questions around how AI is disrupting marketing, especially disrupting search. If you're worried about losing traffic from search engines, this is the episode for you. We have an amazing expert on who's going to walk through how you should actually be focused to win Google Search today, what you should do to spend your marketing time and content time outside of Google Search to really grow and scale with content. And he's going to break down all the AI tools he's using and give you a template and masterclass framework for how to automate a lot of your content production with AI. Today we're joined by Ross Simmons, the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever and the founder of foundation, and he is putting on a masterclass on the show today. Let's get to today's episode.
- [00:52]
Ryan
Hey guys, real quick. You know we love building custom GPTs on the show and we love sharing it with all of you. Well, we wanted to kick that up a notch. We just developed this free guide that teaches you how to build your own custom GPT on chatgpt. We've taken the guesswork out of it. We've got templates, we've got a step by step guide to design and implement custom models. So you can focus on the part that's actually fun, the part we love actually building it. And if you want it, you can grab a link in the description below and go check it out now. Now back to today's show.
- [01:37]
Ross Simmons
Ross, welcome to the show. There are really two things we have to talk to you about. You are a person who understands how to grow companies, grow audiences, get millions of eyeballs. We're using content and you literally read the book on it. And there's two clear subjects for us to talk about. One of them is something we've talked about a lot on this show and people are really starting to feel, which is the change in nature of search engines. Like how are we all going to cope with the disruption of Google? And then I think the other thing our listeners would love is you are a content creator yourself. You know how to create incredible content. Just how you are using AI tools. I think that will be an incredible amount of knowledge for our listeners to get. So let's start with the start. You know, we've talked about this a lot on the show. Kip and I, we both built our careers in the time of Google, which was the most funnest time to be a marketer because you could do like smart things to get traffic from Google. And we kind of talked about this maybe like 12, 18 months ago. We really started talking about it in November 2022 when ChatGPT was launched. But people are now feeling it. I think now it's becoming real, which is like, I'm losing 10% of my traffic, 20% of my traffic. How do I even grow next year?
- [02:42]
Guest Expert
Right.
- [02:44]
Ross Simmons
And so just give us your like, what's your take on it now? We've given our take a lot. I'd love to just get your take. How you think things are.
- [02:50]
Guest Expert
Yeah.
- [02:51]
Ross Simmons
The state of AI in search.
- [02:52]
Guest Expert
Yeah, I think the current situation is pretty straightforward. For the last few years, a lot of brands, a lot of businesses were able to generate a lot of ROI on the back of SEO by pressing publish on blog posts, pressing publish on landing pages, building a few links and calling it a day. You do that consistently, you understand search intent, you apply best practices around H1s, all of that good stuff, and you're able to pretty much rank content successfully, especially if you have a high authority domain. When you look at startups, when you look at fast growing companies and even successful companies who have been around for decades, everybody is getting a little bit nervous around the future of the way that their website is able to consistently generate organic traffic for good reason. With a lot of the latest algorithm updates, they have intentionally been trying to reduce the likelihood of having content show up in the serpent. That is mediocre. So the biggest piece of advice that I give people right off of the jump is to recognize that mediocrity and AI generated content as it comes out of the LLMs probably isn't going to be sufficient enough for you to rank in the serp, because essentially Google already knows those answers and they're using AI overviews to respond to the queries with that type of insight. So what do we have to do as marketers? We have to go back to fundamentals. We have to recognize that the old way doesn't work. You can't just press, publish on mediocre pieces and expect to rank because you have a few links. You can try to do that. And we saw a significant amount of people, a significant amount of brands, skyrocket. When ChatGPT first came out, everybody was going into the programmatic SEO world. Let's create a bunch of pages, let's scale this. Let's like just use ChatGPT to create thousands of pages and look at our traffic. It's skyrocketing. Pro tip, folks, don't brag about when you are using AI to manipulate Google system. What are you telling people?
- [04:41]
Kip
You're trying to game the system.
- [04:42]
Guest Expert
Real GS move in silence like lasagna. What are you doing? That is not what you do. So so many people made that mistake and then they're like, oh, why is my website getting dinged? Because you were dumb. Like, you can't do that. You can't do that. You make Google look silly. Google will make you.
- [04:59]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, you make it look. There was a Duda, right? Bet you he wish he didn't viral. He went viral and he was like, yeah, look at this, look what I've done. And then everyone was like, three days later, site toast, gone, gone.
- [05:09]
Guest Expert
You can't do that. Like, what are you doing? So I think where we're at today, like recognizing a lot of these things, one of the things that we've done with a lot of our partners, which have allowed them to retain and maintain or increase their traffic amidst all of this chaos, is like we double down on high quality content and making sure that the like expertise and authority, like the fundamentals of double elite, so experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness come through the content. So there's always an author page. That author page has to be in depth. It has to be like a real person. You can't have something created by Ross no name person that doesn't actually exist. And we've implemented those strategies while also optimizing and improving light content. So instead of allowing a piece of content to decay, like there's a real thing that a lot of brands overlook, which is content debt. Over the years of creating content, you build up a library, but some of that content in the library is outdated. Like a piece of content that was great in 2016 might be mediocre today because the standards and the expectations of consumers is higher and shifted. So we're encouraging brands to leverage AI to take those pieces and make them better, faster. In a traditional sense. We would have just threw editors and writers at it and been able to tell them to use their man hours like to actually just do the work. But now with AI, we can augment the human to, to optimize these pieces to still make them excellent and great at a faster rate. And that's been a key function for a lot of organizations that have been around for a long time that we work with now in the early stage companies, you're in a ridiculous time. There's no world in which you can like, if you're early stage folks like, I'll pour 10 for you. It's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. Brutal. So what I believe you have to do is play a whole different game. I think that you need to identify like up and coming keywords that you're going after that your competitors haven't even touched yet that the incumbent that you're trying to disrupt isn't even thinking about. And you try to create those pieces because you want to rank for those before everybody else so you can establish some authority. Now here's where you also have to think differently. You have to recognize that Google isn't the only place in the town. Like the amount of traffic, the amount of leads coming from other sources beyond Google now is at an all time high. There's a more diverse level of traffic coming to websites. So what should you be doing? You should be thinking about distributing your content and having your brand show up in other places. We all know that Google and OpenAI have a very strange but great relationship with Reddit. So if I'm early stage, you know what I'm probably doing? I'm thinking about ways in which I can create content that shows up in Reddit. We also notice that Google is starting to index Reddit more than any other website. Like it's in the top three most visited websites in the us. But for some reason marketers are still scared of Reddit. Why?
- [07:55]
Ryan
Why?
- [07:55]
Guest Expert
Like this is a massive opportunity. If you're early stage, Reddit is a massive play. People one Self identify the only people who are subscribing to a subreddit about marketing are marketers. The only people subscribing to a subreddit about sneakers are sneakerheads. The only people subscribing to a subreddit about fantasy football are fantasy football fans. So why not embrace the time and energy to like go into these communities? So what? Recommending to partners who are in those stages where you might not have the same level of authority in a market is to think about LinkedIn articles. Think about creating Reddit posts that are native to certain subreddits and communities. Do an analysis of the SERP for your high priority keywords and figure out what keywords you should be ranking for that Reddit is ranking for, and then go out and create that content as well on Reddit. Answer the queries that are already ranking in Reddit for your various keywords, and then get yourself some upvotes because you add value to the community, include links to your assets and give those upvotes as well. So a long story to a short question, but essentially there's two components. One Strive for content excellence with the pieces that you're creating and make sure that the old pieces are now great and they're not mediocre. And then two, think about the various ways in which Google as well as all the other LLMs are actually scraping the Internet so you can influence them by showing up in more places like Reddit, like Quora, Facebook groups, even. Like all of these different things you need to be considering as new ways to get in front of your audience.
- [09:21]
Kip
The number one question I get from founders Ross is, all right, at this stage of the game, if I'm coming into it, how much time should I spend on text based content for the Google search engine? That is like full stop, the most popular question I get. I'd love to hear your answer to that. Yeah, I think, and I'll probably steal it.
- [09:41]
Guest Expert
I think as a founder you're going to have a lot of things on your plate. In an ideal world, you can have someone do it full time. Like ideal world, you have budget, you have scope. One person focuses on it full time.
- [09:51]
Ryan
Still above other channels.
- [09:53]
Kip
Is that what you're saying? No, that's what I'm trying to get. The mix I'm trying to get.
- [09:55]
Guest Expert
No, no, that's where it gets different. They're going to spend 50% though on the written side. And the reason why is because the Internet is still foundationally built on the back of written word. It's not yet at a point where the Internet is truly built on the back of video. It's written content within the video and like the headlines, the sub subjects, all those things that support it. But at the end of the day, I would say 50% should still be rooted in the written word because that content should be repurposed, it should be repackaged. And I would say that not everyone is made for video, not everyone is made for audio. Although AI makes it way easier now. And everybody should be more comfortable with those things. I would say 50% of an individual on your team who's driving growth in marketing in an early stage company should be thinking about content production, producing stories. And it's not just Google though. Like when I'm talking pure written, so it's writing social content, it's writing blog posts, it's going into Reddit and writing about things in there. It's writing your email newsletters, it's writing the drip campaigns for lead magnets. Like 50% of written content is still very valuable.
- [11:01]
Ross Simmons
The other 50%, is it like content as well or doing other things? Like do you think people should invest in video much earlier than they are podcasts much earlier than they are. Like, there are much harder forms of content to grow an audience, Ryan. But are they things you recommend people start earlier than they maybe are doing?
- [11:15]
Guest Expert
If I'm a founder in B2B, then there's no question that video is going to be at play, right? Like, video in B2B on LinkedIn is a channel that is taking off, and it makes sense. LinkedIn is incentivized to recognize that if they are able to capture people's attention, then they have more opportunities to generate ad revenue. So they're investing a lot of money in creators to create content that is video based. I'm one of those creators. Like, I have LinkedIn courses and things like that rolling that LinkedIn pays for me to create because they know that there's so much value in having people who produce that type of content. So my recommendation to founders is get on the train. There's a massive increase. We put out a video the other day, and it had like 400,000 views, and it was like a video that was 30 seconds. But, like, that reach in the B2B context is unheard of. Traditionally.
- [12:08]
Ryan
LinkedIn shorts are getting going.
- [12:10]
Guest Expert
They're getting for sure, right?
- [12:11]
Kip
And I think the lesson that you're telling people is like, understand where you're playing and what the incentives are where you're playing. And right now, LinkedIn's incentives is to make video a bigger thing. And so if you publish video, it's going to get unfairly distributed. Their algorithm, everything else is going to pump it up, and you're likely going to get more attention for video than you are if you just go write a text post.
- [12:33]
Guest Expert
That's 100%. And I think what people need to think about when they're figuring out how to make this mix, Like, I would say 80% of all of the activities that your marketing efforts are going into should be things that you are pretty confident, like very confident are going to work. And then the rest are your experimental efforts. Right. Like, five years ago, three years ago, I would have threw Reddit in the experimental bucket, but now it's like, it's a lock. It works. It's not as questionable anymore. But you might say TikTok. Like, you might say, I'm going to engage with TikTok influencers to see if they can help me scale a B2B product. That's an experiment today. So 80% should be surefire wins. Like, these are going to ring the cash register for you. Let's invest in these things, because we know they're going to win. We know that if we produce case studies, we know if we create bottom of funnel content comparison pages, if we create these types of assets, they're going to drive ROI for us, do those things. But then a portion of your budget, a portion of your energy should be experiments because what you want to do is you want to get a win. And if you can get an experiment that wins before your competitors win, then you now have content, market fit, channel market fit before your competition, so you can start to get an advantage that they don't have. And then you just retain that knowledge and that capacity to drive leads through a channel that they haven't even experimented with.
- [13:47]
Ross Simmons
Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying, okay, like still do the Google thing, right? You still go out, look for the keywords, try to rank for the keywords, maybe do bottoms up, look for the ones that are most relevant, convert very well, and then like work your way up to more top of the funnel. Look at overall, we call them housewives, like surround sound. Look at all of the places you could show up outside of Google for that topic. Maybe it's Reddit, maybe it's LinkedIn. Where are the other relevant places you could appear on the Google one? I'm curious to even get how you use Google versus AI today. So when I think about my own habits, I use AI exclusively, nearly. I still use Google now and again. But it's unbelievable given two years ago we were just using Google without even thinking about anything else. Right. Just Google, Google, Google, Google. Two years later, I hardly use Google for anything that you Google.
- [14:35]
Guest Expert
Right, right.
- [14:36]
Ross Simmons
And so the reason I do that is because it's able to give me clear and concise answers. It's a research assistant. It goes off, it does all the blue links, comes back and gives me clear and concise answers. So for these companies that are going, okay, well, there's still some keywords, I want to create some really great content. Like not just the basic content, but they're all informational keywords. Right. They're informational queries. Do you believe that's even going to be enough? Because isn't the challenge not just that I need to try to rank for these things, but like, no one's even going to see my page because why would I ever go to my website to get the answer in the first place? Like, how do you talk to people about that part? Which is, are we even going to continue to get clicks to our pages?
- [15:14]
Guest Expert
Right.
- [15:14]
Ross Simmons
If the AI is just going to give us a better answer and a better experience.
- [15:18]
Guest Expert
I think we are in somewhat of a bubble in tech where we over estimate how many people have already changed their search behaviors.
- [15:29]
Ross Simmons
Yeah.
- [15:29]
Guest Expert
Is there a decrease? 100%. But if you look at the data, like I shared this a while back, so it's a bit dated, but it's still, I believe, relevant. When you look at the monthly web traffic to sites like Google, YouTube, it is still a giant. It is still at an absolute giant level. And for us to see a cultural shift where this amount gets reduced to even the levels of Facebook, it would have to be decades of decline. Two years of decline doesn't evaporate over 80 billion monthly visits to Google. So that number to be reduced is going to take a fundamental cultural change where a significant amount of people who are doing that search today literally die. And that's not happening for like 20 years.
- [16:17]
Kip
But that number could go down and all the people who are doing it could not click right. So there are multiple variables there.
- [16:23]
Guest Expert
There are multiple variables. The rate in which it will happen though, I believe is overestimated. I believe that we will see the decline in the amount of people who are clicking. I think we're going to see a decline in the number of people who are using Google. But I think the vast majority of the world will still use Google as a central entry point because Chrome is their default browser. Google is their default website that they pre visit. In tech we all use OpenAI. Claude, we have Perplexity. We have all of these things to answer our questions now. Great. But I still think we are very, very early. I was at an event with a bunch of grocers and I was talking to this group of C suite executives and I asked them, I was like, folks, how many of you have heard of or used Claude lately? How many of you have used Perplexity? How many of you have even heard of a tool like Palantir? There was only one hand that went up amongst a room of like 300 of the top grocers in North America. And I was like, we're very early, very. And that was the signal to me that this is still early days. So my message to folks who are even thinking strategically around this stuff is you still have a competitive advantage if you're even listening to us have this conversation because you can one use AI because most of your competitors probably still aren't. Even though it's always talked about on x and on LinkedIn, most people still aren't using it. So you can win that way. And two, you can get ahead of the curve by starting to distribute your content now into these channels where OpenAI has a relationship with Reddit. So seed your content there so the LLMs start to respond the way that you want to. There's this concept of generative engine optimization. In some ways, I don't want to say it's the new SEO, but it is a real reality. And with this, there was a study that was conducted and we wrote about this on the foundation blog where it talks about the ideas that go into optimizing for the LLM. So essentially these students had done this analysis around how you can actually influence the things that the LLMs are saying back, whether it's AI overviews, Claude GPT, all of those different things. And it was clear, very clear, that if you made content that was easy to understand authoritative, with the tone, you use technical terms that are related to your niche, it was fluent. You cited sources, you had quotations and stats that you would actually see an increase in your ability to show up in the response from an LLM. A lot of those ideas are the same ideas as great SEO.
- [18:52]
Kip
Yes.
- [18:52]
Guest Expert
And if you can apply the best practices around great SEO to your content, you should be able to influence the LLMs. Especially if you distribute your content into the places in which the LLMs have licensing deals to scrape their information. That's the icing on the cake. And if you do that now, you set yourself up so as that decline in search, the decline in clicks start to happen, you're now able to ensure that you show up when someone asks those questions to Google AI overviews, Claude perplexity, etc.
- [19:23]
Ross Simmons
Yeah.
- [19:30]
Kip
I want to tell you about.
- [19:31]
Ryan
A podcast I love. It's called Created. It's hosted by John Ushayak. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creating gives an inside look at how to build businesses as a creator, improve your creative process, and stay ahead of the latest content trends. John, an ex YouTuber and Instagram employee, breaks down the creator economy with guests Logan Paul, Paris Hilton, Jason Derulo, Jake Paul, George Lopez, and more. In a not so recent episode I loved was with Liza Koshe.
- [20:00]
Kip
Remember her?
- [20:00]
Ryan
She was one of the fastest growing YouTubers and Viners, growing a fan base well beyond 25 million subscribers. But then she stopped uploading. So what happened? That's a smart woman who made a drastic career decision. You'd want to tune into that one. If you're looking for insights on entrepreneurship and creating a powerhouse business, then this is the episode you won't want to miss. Listen to created wherever you get your podcasts hey, it's Kip. If you listen to this podcast, you know how much I love keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology, but very few podcasts actually give you a dose of the future. The A16Z podcast is the exception. It's hosted by our friend and frequent guest Steph Smith. The chart topping show brings on movers with a track record of being both early and right, like Apple co founder Steve Wozniak, or the CISOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind. Even the very first CTO of the CIA. From the science and the supply of GLP1s to drone delivery to the economics of deepfakes, go ahead and eavesdrop on the future. Check out the a16z podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:18]
Ross Simmons
This is a great point, actually. I do think we're going to see it in B2B much quicker than B2C, and I think we're going to see it in certain B2B niches much quicker than other B2B niches and where there's like much more tech proficiency. Can I just go back to one thing you mentioned? Because I think our audience would really love a breakdown of how you do this. So one of the things you mentioned is definitely have been a big part of our growth, which is historical content optimization which you described that you have a large library and you have to continue update and refresh that library. And you mentioned you use AI to augment that strategy. Can you go through like what exactly you're using AI to do there?
- [21:51]
Guest Expert
Yeah, for sure. So the first thing that we do is we look at trends around our traffic and what we're looking for are any pieces that have started to show decline, any pieces that at one point were like ranking and thriving, had a lot of high quality backlinks. It's kind of like this Simmons hierarchy of Maslow's needs kind of thing where we were like, all right, if these pieces have a lot of backlinks they used to generate a lot of referral traffic. These are the pieces that we need to kind of fix up. And then when we go through the process, we're running like an analysis through a tool like Frase or something like that, which will scan the text and identify whether or not it compares to the content that's in the serp. So we'll do that cross analysis to.
- [22:30]
Kip
See that's really smart.
- [22:31]
Guest Expert
In the serp, what content is Already ranking and what is in this content? Are these pieces 2,000 words on average? Are they 4,000 words on average? What are some of the key points that they have? We'll use way back Time Machine to even look back at like what are the updates that these pieces have made over time to get better and to rank and then start to identify the gaps. Then we go back to our tool and ideally what we're doing is we're not just having a human go in and optimize it, but we're having a human that is augmented with AI to go through a series of checklists that we create around how to improve these pieces. So some of the things that we always do is we always set the bar for high editorial standards, so we ensure that the content reads like a human. We use the Aida methodology as an intro or bottom line up front. We use those as kind of like the starting point over time. In the early days that might not have been embraced by the writer. So we adjust it and we have them improve it. We always strive to incorporate multimedia content. So if we see that in the SERP, there's a lot of YouTube content showing up, we will go one of two ways. Either we will have the client, the partner, create that YouTube video, or we'll develop that YouTube video with one of our partners. Or we'll leverage a tool like HeyGen to essentially take the entire blog post, turn it into a YouTube script, and then have an avatar read that content as an individual representing that brand and embed that at the top. Because we see those as helping rank higher, we embrace those double elite authorship best practices. So we're essentially doing GEO on those pieces. We're adding in stats, we're adding in quotes, we're trying to find edu links that we can incorporate. We're grabbing screenshots from those journals in those papers. We're even using ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, to help us find what pieces could be used to support that optimization. We're then ensuring that there's internal links from that piece to newer pieces. One of those things that happens if a post was published in 2014, it's linking to pieces from 2012. We need to update those links so when they're linking to newer assets, so we would go through and actually update those links as well. And then finally we just make sure that that reads like a human and that goes to an editor who would do that piece in that side of it. Now, one of the things that we also love to do when we're Optimizing these pieces is we try to make sure to ensure that they're adding value. We give away something tactical and very like tangible, utility driven in B2B. One of the best cheat codes that we found recently to do that is to leverage AI to say, hey chatgpt, I just created this piece. Please give me four ideas on a tangible template, guide, resource or asset that I could give someone to make this piece even better. They will then give you a few of those ideas. You then can take that and tell them to turn it into a spreadsheet. Chef's kiss wild that we can do that these days. I like love the time that we live in because it used to take me so long to create them. You get that spreadsheet, you format it, you redesign it, you pass it off and it's game over. You do that over and over again and your content wins because you have the best piece of content in the surf. And then what I love though, guys, like at the end of the day everybody is hating on this race to the top of the surf. I love it because it is a competition to see who can create the best content. And that's what we all should have been doing for in the first place. Every marketer lost track of the fact that this isn't just like a game where you're creating content for the sake of creating content. We're creating content to add value to the lives of the people on the other end of the intent in the search query. So if we all are trying to create the best pieces of content possible, then it is going to be a net positive for the culture, for the industry and for people that consume the content, which is a win win for everybody. So I'm excited for it and I think the race is on and people should double down on it. It's not enough to just create the light content anymore.
- [26:15]
Ross Simmons
If you're listening to this and you don't carbon copy that process, you're nuts. A similar process has been one of the core reasons we've grown. But you have systemized that intertwined AI far better than we have done. And some of the things that you've said there are really, really smart, like the way that you capture the SERP, the way that you actually understand the SERPs update. That's what people don't realize, right? So like you rank a post and over time this Google wants to provide different things to the user because the user wants different things and you're basically scraping their SERPs and saying, well these are the different things a user wants. And then you're using AI to be able to get some of that stuff and provide it to an editor. So they just pick it up and they say, okay, here are all the things you need to incorporate. And then the way you're using AI to create multimedia versions of that, to like incorporate that in the post is super, super smart. One of the things I'm actually interested in there, like have you an app or something you've built for that? Or like we have just these large Google sheets. We're doing all of this somewhat in Google sheets. Have you built something different or are you doing it in kind of sheets as well?
- [27:11]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So the way that we've been approaching it, we have a checklist and the checklist goes to the writer, the editor around every optimization and it's assigned to every project. And they essentially just have to do the checks and balances around this checklist around, like make sure that there's charts and graphs to support ideas, optimize the lead using aida, add that YouTube video, and then we have a process around that for whether or not they should use AI video or human video headlines aligned with the intent, optimize embed social content for dynamic content, getting that third party quote, making sure that we're having definitions within each piece, link to high domain authority sites, credible sources, all of these things are broken out into it. There is one part of this that we haven't talked about, which is the distribution that happens after we did create a tool for that part of the engine. So after you do these optimizations, a lot of marketers call it quits and say, that's it, we press publish, we're done, successful, let's pop the bubbly. We've just created a great piece. But as we talked about earlier around this shift to needing a diverse source of traffic, we believe that that's when the job actually begins. You press publish. Now it's time to distribute that content. So we've been working on a tool called Distribution AI where we've been actually like developing this product around you ingest your blog posts and from that becomes a lot of multimedia assets that go into Reddit, multimedia assets that go out onto X, onto LinkedIn, that go into different channels. And that's been ridiculously successful for us in supporting our partners. Eventually we'll be rolling it out completely to the vast majority of the world, et cetera. But today it's something that we use internally to really get more value out of our pieces, where you press publish and you need to turn that same piece into a LinkedIn article. We make it easy to do that. Turn that same piece into a carousel that lives on LinkedIn. Make it easy to do that. Turn that same piece into that video of myself talking about this topic. We're going to do that. Like all of those things are going to be as a part of this product.
- [29:09]
Kip
Yeah. We have a product in HubSpot called Content Remix that does.
- [29:12]
Guest Expert
I love Content Remix.
- [29:14]
Kip
It's a great product. But I think what's interesting about what you're saying is. Hold on. First of all, distribution AI. I've never been more pissed that I didn't buy a domain name in my.
- [29:24]
Ross Simmons
Entire, that is, I always just had to be gonna ping you, kid. I was like, what the shit?
- [29:28]
Kip
I knew you were gonna slack me.
- [29:29]
Ross Simmons
Be like, how did you get that? How did you get that?
- [29:31]
Kip
To me? Sure bought this domain name that I really wish I owned.
- [29:36]
Guest Expert
Sucks. I love it.
- [29:37]
Kip
Someday they're gonna be like, kip, why'd you buy Ross's tool? I just want that domain name.
- [29:43]
Guest Expert
Just need the.
- [29:45]
Kip
Good. It's so good.
- [29:46]
Ross Simmons
I'm surprised Dharmesh didn't get that one.
- [29:49]
Kip
I know Dharmesh has all the sick domain names.
- [29:52]
Guest Expert
Does he?
- [29:52]
Ryan
Yeah, he totally has a bug.
- [29:54]
Kip
The point you're also making is that the content repurposing that distribution, it's far broader than most people think. And it's also very of the moment. Right. Like, of this moment right now, you would for sure have it spit out a short form video script for LinkedIn.
- [30:09]
Guest Expert
Exactly right.
- [30:10]
Kip
But maybe a year, two years from now, that wouldn't be in there. Right. So it's like a very dynamic playbook. Just like the SEO side, you also have the dynamic nature of like the distribution side.
- [30:21]
Guest Expert
Right.
- [30:22]
Kip
And AI is causing that change to happen faster, right?
- [30:25]
Guest Expert
Exactly. Well, you think of Quora, right? Like, if I was to go back to eight years ago, core was, was it like getting Quora Answer with high quality questions and you're going to see some amass, some great referral traffic coming from that site. Over time, things change and you have to change your distribution strategy with it. Right. But if you were early and making your bets on Reddit, ching, ching. Well done. You made the right call investing in that three, four years ago. Because now it's those posts from three to four years ago that are ranking in the SERP today. So I think when you think of AI, though, like, we are all going through one of the most transformational times as marketers. It's influencing all of us. It's going to continue to influence all of us and we all just need to embrace the technologies as we move ahead.
- [31:07]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, I think this is a good place, like maybe to end on. Like, what AI tools do you think our listeners should be using in their companies, either for their personal content or for their company? Like, what ones are you seeing real value in?
- [31:20]
Guest Expert
Yeah, I'll be a good company boy. And first of all, say, like, I do love Content Remix and I love HubSpot's tools. Like the stuff that you folks have rolled out has been great. I'll start with that.
- [31:28]
Kip
We didn't pay them to say that.
- [31:29]
Guest Expert
Guys.
- [31:29]
Kip
Thank you.
- [31:30]
Guest Expert
I know they didn't pay me rent, but like the AI writer tool is pretty good. I love it, I'm a big fan. But if we want to get a little bit scrappy with it, I'd say some of the tools that I'm a fan of right now would include. Of course a lot of folks have heard of Descript. I'm a big fan of Descript. I'm a big fan of riverside. We use 11 labs is fascinating to me. It was the first one that I used probably two years ago now to like create a synthetic version of my own voice. And even some of my podcast episodes on Create like the greats include AI versions of my voice and people love them and they don't know all the time that it's not me. And it's fascinating. So 11 labs is cool. One of my personal use cases for 11 labs that I found very valuable is using it to read things. So 11 Labs gives you the ability to find a blog post, submit the link and it will read it back to you kind of in any voice you want. I've been using it to read it back in my own voice, which is weird. I was going to ask that. It's cool. It absorbs a lot better for some reason. So I've been like using it as like a weird way to learn and study. I'll also have a conversation with ChatGPT of something that I'm trying to work through and then I'll have the AI like read it back to me in my voice. And it's also been valuable. I'm a big fan of leveraging tools like of course the good old fashioned ones like figma is great. Their AI tools have been awesome notion. I'm a big fan of what they've been doing. I think Canva has slept on a lot when the work that they've been.
- [32:52]
Ross Simmons
Doing with AI, they have some great AI functionality.
- [32:54]
Guest Expert
Yeah. To, like, automate the creation of images. Like, one thing that I did recently, I went to ChatGPT and I uploaded, like, 20 of my tweets, and I was like, Write another 20. And then I asked it to create a spreadsheet, and it gave me a spreadsheet, and I was able to connect that to Canva. I was able to use Midjourney to create hundreds of images that were all different. And I was able to get a connection between those two via zapier or zapier, depending on what you want to call it. And then from there, it essentially was uploading a bunch of these different images on my behalf. So I think combining a lot of these tools is also very powerful today, and they give you a ton of opportunity. Runway is also interesting, where you're able to, like, take a graphic and make it move. It's gotten so much better. Kip and I were talking about Italy a little while ago, but I found Runway while I was in Italy, and I took a photo of the beach, and there was somebody on the beach walking and something like that. So I uploaded this photo, and then their hand started to go through them, and, like, they turned into a monster. And I was like, oh, this is horrible. This is brutal. I'm never using this again. But you fast forward. And I started to use it again, and it's fixed.
- [33:59]
Ross Simmons
So much better.
- [34:00]
Guest Expert
Problems so much better. And the rate in which things are getting fixed is the coolest part about all of this. You're seeing the improvements across all of these tools so much more quickly. Hey, Gen. As well. Like, we were talking about how early days you put on hey Gen. And it's like, oh, this tool doesn't work. One example of hey Gen in the capabilities is like, I was literally running an experiment where I recorded a video of myself talking into the camera, and I talked to the camera just like I normally would. And then I created an hey Gen avatar to say the same thing. And I put it up on social, and I was asking people, like, which one is the real Ross? My assistant got it wrong. My colleagues got it wrong. My own mom got it wrong. Like, and my mom went into deep denial. She went into deep denial. She was like, I know my son. There's no way I know my son. I know who you are. I was like, no, mom, that he be. So now we have a secret code. And I'm like, mom, if somebody calls you with my voice, hang up and call me back. And there's a secret code that you have to say, because that's what you need.
- [35:02]
Ross Simmons
You're going to need to start doing that stuff. Yeah, it's crazy.
- [35:04]
Guest Expert
It is wild.
- [35:05]
Ross Simmons
I'm going to try to play around more Han, because my dream is like to join meetings that I don't really need to be in and send my avatar and the avatar can just be there. Yep, yep.
- [35:14]
Guest Expert
It's true.
- [35:15]
Kip
I've been in meetings now where there's sometimes where I'm like. I think that person's like got a hate. Keep going.
- [35:20]
Guest Expert
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:20]
Ross Simmons
They'd seen the video actually.
- [35:22]
Guest Expert
Here it is. It's like the mannerisms like this one here is like the real me. This was the AI me. And look at this video. Two is AI, Am I right? Two is definitely AI. No, folks like me and the kids.
- [35:35]
Kip
They got a lot of the jerkiness out of the model.
- [35:37]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, they got jerkiness out of it. That was a big thing.
- [35:39]
Guest Expert
Yeah. They didn't see that glitch, but there was a moment where it was obvious but nobody picked it up.
- [35:45]
Kip
It used to be that the moment was like every other frame and now it might be 1 second out of 30 seconds, which is a massive change to your point.
- [35:53]
Guest Expert
It is, yeah.
- [35:54]
Ross Simmons
You didn't mention any of the core tools. I'm curious, have you? Like, I'm obviously a pretty large clawed fan person and so they really. I don't. Did you see their release where this is November 27th. We're probably going to do a full video on this. But the Raiden style release.
- [36:08]
Guest Expert
So good. It's so good. Yeah.
- [36:09]
Ross Simmons
I just want to say that I think they stole this from me. I'm being serious. I'm being serious here. In Zgok, I did a whole video series on like the things that I figured out with Claude and the big thing I had figured out was like how to create writing styles and pair that with post templates. And so you could say, well, here's the different posts that do well on a platform and then here's different writing styles and you combine those things. And we have Simon coming on who leads Claude.
- [36:30]
Guest Expert
Cool.
- [36:30]
Ross Simmons
Product development for Claude next week. So I'm going to ask him. But that's what you can do now, right? You can just create any writing style.
- [36:37]
Guest Expert
It's true.
- [36:37]
Ross Simmons
Either your own content, anyone else's content, pick the writing style and then you can actually go in and custom say, who are the audience? And all of this stuff. And I'm curious, do you think the writing tools like that are valuable? Do you use them? Are you excited by these kind of features.
- [36:50]
Guest Expert
I'm ridiculously excited by them. I think that they are a game changer. And every writer who doesn't use them is essentially just like allowing those who do use them to have a competitive advantage.
- [37:02]
Ross Simmons
100%.
- [37:02]
Guest Expert
I am a massive believer that these tools should be viewed as an augmentation of human skills. And if you are a great writer, using AI makes you a greater writer faster.
- [37:13]
Ross Simmons
Exactly right.
- [37:14]
Guest Expert
If you are a bad writer, though, I will tell you, AI can't save you.
- [37:18]
Ross Simmons
No, exactly. This is the point. Yes, 100%.
- [37:21]
Guest Expert
If you are bad, AI will not save you. Get back to school, go take the course. Learn the fundamentals of copywriting. Like, the fundamentals still matter. But it's kind of like any other tool. Like, everybody gets this whole thing twisted. If you give me a hammer, I can do some things, but if you give somebody who has literally used a hammer one million times a hammer, they are probably going to be better than me. So the tool can give everyone value, but the value is really connected to the talents behind it. And if you can empower talented people to use these tools, they can do ridiculously valuable things. And if you don't believe that, just look at YouTube. Like, there are literally YouTube channels that are AI generated content that have over 500,000 subscribers. There are AI TikTok accounts that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It is no longer an opinion that can be, like, held responsibly that AI is not good for people to use if they want to get more done and be creative and be more successful. It's impossible to say that. Yeah, it's literally wild that people still have that debate. It needs to be used all of the tools. Long answer to a very short question again, but yes, I'm a big fan. I think Claude's going to go far. I think all the writing tools are beneficial, but I think we still need to remember that the people using them need to be really good at what they do.
- [38:45]
Ross Simmons
Yeah. AI creates immense amount of leverage for people with real domain expertise and creates a huge amount of problems for people who are lazy and bad at what they do.
- [38:54]
Guest Expert
Yeah.
- [38:54]
Ross Simmons
Because AI can do their job better. That's how I see it is like there's never been a better time to invest in domain expertise because AI can actually help you to do more and be way more productive. I think that's a great ending message for the listeners.
- [39:06]
Guest Expert
I love it.
- [39:07]
Kip
This was an awesome show, Ross, because we got deep in the details of everything that's changing and I think this is probably one that if you watched it, you need to go back and watch it a couple times to really understand and get everything out of it. And, Ross, thank you so much for coming on the pod again. We look forward to having you on again soon. Thank you. Thank you. We'll see everybody next time. Time on Marketing against the Grain.
- [39:27]
Guest Expert
Thanks, guys.