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The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
From Podcasting To AI: Building Real Audiences That Convert With Chris Krimitsos
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This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet.
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Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started.
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Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, which we are going to brand the best SEO podcast, which we've been running for 12 years. There's an identity crisis that I'm going through that Chris, we can talk about. Chris has also been involved. This is Chris Comitos. He's the founder of PodFest. He's a longtime friend. I can't believe I hadn't had had him on before. For those of you watching, I'm wearing a PodFest shirt. He's also. Let me, let me say you've won the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of podcasts in a certain period of time.
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What.
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What else? Chris, you're doing all kinds of stuff. I would love to just kind of hear what you're doing. But Chris, welcome to the show.
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So, Matt, yeah, just a backstory run. Podfest, it's a very large community of creators that got started about 12 years ago. And during COVID we went virtual and that's when we got awarded the largest virtual event for podcast attendees via Guinness World Records. And then we did it again the next year and broke our record and then we retired it because it's just a lot of work on the accounting side for Guinness World Records. And in the process, podfest expanded. We, we just did one last year. We went to Bogota, Colombia and then it was our second ever PodFest Asia out of Manila. So we've been going to Asia now for two years. So I would consider myself an evangelist for creators, specifically people that consider themselves podcasters. And I started when podcasting was majority of it was audio. Now I would say the majority of it is video. And it's everywhere. So that's kind of my purview. And I've seen a lot of case studies because I see, I've seen thousands of people come across my desk. So when someone gives you their experience, they have it from their perspective. My perspective is literally thousands of creators. So I see what is possible on so many different levels from time to time. When I do consulting, I have a unique vantage point because I kind of know certain things that other people wouldn't think works or, you know, vice versa.
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Well, you know, YouTube, Google even stated YouTube is the shift that it's making towards that. And I, I recently just did a podcast with originality AI founder about, well, the content proliferation that's happening with LLMs. I think the shift to video and, and YouTube is there, there are going to be those and there is today influencers that are all AI, but predominantly the, the, the spam of creation of content is, is not in videos and is not in audio podcasts as of right now. So also the LLMs from a visibility standpoint need a lot of human interaction to train their data sets so the synthetic data doesn't come in. So podcasting or long form content is incredibly important. And like you, we started this 12 years ago when, before podcasting was cool, it was actually like just like a training to the team on how to do it. It wasn't really even public facing and it was just a great way to catalog what's going on and, and, and one too many. Communicate messaging.
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Yeah. All I could tell you is with AI, it's going to get dicey because I don't think people understand the amount of content that AI could create on its own.
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So like, well, that LM notebook's pretty interesting, right? You can drop an article, they talk to each other, you know, you, you open up the parameters and voices on that. It, it's going to be, it's going to be real wild.
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Yeah. So what my advice to anyone is grab your, grab your audience now and carry them into the future because as we move forward it's going to get very difficult unless the algorithms weigh human creators heavier than AI creators. But that's kind of the race we're in at this point.
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So that leads into something that I've talked about, talked about a little bit, but I'm dealing with this issue. If you, anybody watching, if you see my name is Matthew, Matt in parentheses, Bertram. Okay. Right now I've been creating content for so long across the Internet, Google and the Knowledge Graph use me as two different people because I've had different roles, different titles. There's also a couple other Matthews out there. I also couldn't get my name as my handle. So if you can go get your name as your handle, go do that. Go domain.
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B
I have Matthew ber.com for sure. Yeah, right.
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I got Matthew bertram.com but I had gone by Matt. So real, real issues. And then there's also some highly influential people in different industries online as well. So it's getting all mixed up. And so, you know, defining who you are as a real person, as an entity on different channels, unifying that, taking the content. And one of the frameworks we talk about, Chris, a lot of is a framework, I think it was 2004, a paper that Google put out called the 7114 rule. That, that was not what the paper is called but basically that's essentially like the summary of it is create seven hours of content. They need to see your brand four times or sorry, 11 times on four different channels. So 7, 11, 4. So seven hours of content. See your brand logo, whatever, 11 times on four different channels. And that framework helps people understand who you are and build kind of that, that brand lift or that brand association. And I've been telling businesses and evangelizing podcasting for so long because it's the best way to one to many marketing as well as creating that seven hours of content. If they binge, listen to your podcast, look at your website, talk to you, you're at a advantage because you have more content consumption by a decision maker than somebody else that doesn't. And through a podcast or a video podcast, video first podcast, you're going to connect with people on a different level. I mean I know you get this all the time, but, but people that hear you right, they don't even, they don't know you, but when they meet you in person, it's like they know you and then you, you're at a disadvantage because you don't maybe know them right? Like have you had experiences like that?
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I have and I do have a piece of advice. When creating content, I always say think of your, your long form content in terms of short form. And what I mean by that is how many clips, like when, when you're doing. A long time ago I made a documentary for podcasting called the Messengers, a podcast documentary. And we got distribution. Then I took it off and I put it up on YouTube for free. But I remember when I'd interview anyone, if anyone's ever made a documentary, you're thinking of how many sound bites did I get out of that interview? Because you need that to make a movie, to make it all bridge. When you're doing a long form interview, you need to think to yourself, how many five minute clips did I get that are clippable for people to digest? Because the long form might not go viral, but one of the clips might get 3 million views. And then the long form, you know, gets a hundred thousand views thanks to that, you know, funnel building from 3 million to that. Now they want to see the long form. So just when you're creating content, you got to think of it and the, the person that does it the best right now is Shannon Sharp. Club Shay. He, when he's interviewing someone he has notes that his team has prepared for him and he's always asking questions that they know that they can make a really badass thumbnail. So like if he's interviewing, I don't know, wrestler, he's always going to ask him, what was it like working with Vince? They already know that they have a Thumbnail with Vince McMahon. People can click on that. What was it like working with Stephanie McMahon? They just go down the line of all the big names or whatever they could find and his questions. So then he has to do a dance and weave it into an interview process. But he's literally going for clips. And in a three hour show, he might get 12, 15 clips. Those clips now are generating tons of revenue and tons of views because that's what people, the super fans will watch the long form, but the casual fans will watch the clips and might watch the long form.
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Yeah, I see the clips being so important to get people's interest to bring them back. What I see not happening very well is people are putting out clips on a clip channel and then they're not linking to the full interview because a lot of times people watch the clip, or at least I do, and I want to watch the full interview and I can't find it right then there's no identifying way to know who that is. Like there's a lot of kind of technical stuff. And then, I mean, what are your thoughts around that? Have you seen that?
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I mean, I would link it, but, you know, nowadays with, with everything changing so quick, I wonder if there's a strategy, why they don't link it. But I personally would link to the long form because my objective is to get as many hardcore followers that absorb my content as I can if I were to advise a content creator. But there's so many different monetization strategies now. You always want to ask why the person's doing what they're doing, because maybe they're doing something you haven't thought of yet. But I was just advising. I went to a show for avoculture, that's the people that love birds. And I met two influencers there. You know what I found interesting, Matt? They had billions of views. The difference was one of them started on YouTube, the other one started everything else. And even though the other one that's on every other platform with almost 100 million views, the guy in YouTube is making almost as much with a hundred thousand views. So, like, you have to really be careful your platforms because YouTube is a creator platform that pays. Podcasting is also a Creator platform that you get paid through Spotify span different networks you could be on, you could be a giant on Tick Tock and Instagram and barely make a couple grand a month. So it's like you really got to know where the, the levers of, of income come in. So you could be profitable and keep making great content. If you're a full time content creator, that is. Yeah.
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And I, I feel like YouTube is, is the home base. Like that's, that's the home page of if, if you're creating content online, YouTube is.
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Is it? Yeah.
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And, and everything should roll up into that. How, how do you view like, you know, I guess there's different terms but there's like snacks. But then there's like the 10 minute clips. Like I feel like those are like, where do those fit in into the, into the ecosystem? I'm curious like if maybe like think in terms of. Also a business.
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Yeah. So if you're, if you're doing a long form interview. So for me, long form, half hour more, you know, an hour, hour and a half. You, you need to figure out how many short segments can you get. And that could be. For me, a short segment from a long form would be five minutes, maybe eight minutes if it's going really good. For the really short shorts, those are the minutes or less. They can help your long form. But you got to just. What's weird about those is they could be so different and they could still grow your audience. I'll give you an example. I talked to a guy that's a famous short sale trader. He, he short sales the market and he would do shorts that were strategic and nothing happened. So then he's like, screw it, I'm just gonna eat steak. So he'd go to his restaurant and eat steak and he'd record his steaks and then he was like, ah, let me just title it differently. And he would title it Short sale Trader Eat steak. And what would happen was strategically that grew. They're like, oh, who is a short seller? And then it would intrigue them to watch the long form content. So sometimes it's weird stuff like that on the short form that now has a viral audience. And like I like this guy. Let me watch his advice on short selling the market, which is a financial term of, you know, you're betting that the market's going down or whatever, or stock is going down, but it doesn't matter. And then I thought that was a weird thing. But then we had three other creators give us unique examples very similar to that they're like, hey, my short form is a little different, but I make sure they know what I do and then it'll tie back to the mothership, which is what you just talked about. 5 minute, 10 minute clips or the long form.
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You know, I, I put together a book called Know, like Trust. And you have a book. Start. Start messy. Right. Start ugly. Start. Start ugly. Great book. I would encourage everybody to go get it. If you're on the fence. It was, it was really helpful to say, you gotta start and you gotta get going. And even if it's ugly, it's gonna get better, but you gotta start somewhere. It's just like going to the gym.
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Or just don't know. It's not going to be perfect.
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Y. Yeah, but, but no, like, trust is like what you're talking about. People got to know who you are. They got to like have some kind of association or like you before they care about what you say, if anything. So that kind of falls in line is, you know, hey, I like steak. This guy like steak. I like, like, I. One of my best posts on Facebook, I did this Facebook challenge posting every day and I got about 20,000 views. And I have like, no falling on. On Facebook specifically. You know what one of the best pictures I did was that got views was I was making breakfast for like a bunch of people that were staying at our house this summer. And it was just a picture of plates of eggs. Like, I just was like, I took a picture of all these plates of eggs and that picture, I think did better than anything else I ever posted. Right. And so when people are posting pictures of food, everybody can associate with that or like that and build that, build that connection. So that's, that's what you're trying to do. Because if someone can listen to your podcast, they get to know you, but, but if they don't know you, how do they get associated with you? There's got to be a interest trigger.
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Yeah. Be like, it'd be like, CMO obsesses over his eggs or you know, marketing expert. I'm always thinking titles. My wife is in the meditation space and she was talking to some other channels like about their YouTube specifically. So I'm talking about YouTube here. And she goes, how are you guys getting views? And they go, you know what's interesting? We did these shorts of behind the scenes. Like, it wasn't even a meditation of like creating children's thing. And one of them went viral and that literally brought 10,000 subscribers to the channel. Because if that thing brings Millions like, oh, I wonder what that sounds like. Oh, I like it. And then it drives them in. So what I found with short form and, and on her short form she creates mini snippets of the meditation. It works, but it doesn't work great. Like you said, sometimes maybe it's a no like and trust. What I'm learning is you got to experiment and find what works for you because sometimes the offbeat stuff, like you said, it's a no like trust and it builds to the, the, the mother content, which is what it is. The meditation itself.
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Yeah, her, her platform is huge and has a ton of people on it doing different kind of meditations. Yeah, she's just got a grab people and bring people in. But, but yeah, like watching a, a clip of a meditation doesn't have the same.
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Yeah. Microphone with the children. Here's my story, here's what I do.
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Yeah, but yeah, let me hear that.
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Let me hear that. What is that? Maybe she plays a sample, maybe just a second or two and then it's like, yeah, make sure click if you want to listen to it. It intrigues people. You know, we did recently, we just launched a birthday and celebration meditation channel. So literally all it is is for people's birthdays, anniversary celebrations, meditations. It's already doing really well.
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I love that, I love that. I want to switch gears and look at this from a company's standpoint or somebody that wants to leverage these creators. Maybe they're, you know, a business owner or their in house marketer and they're like, hey, we have budget for experimental things, we want to sponsor some podcasts or we want to create like a short series or partner with the influencer. But, but they're not the influencer themselves. How have you seen those opportunities work to kind of build the path a little bit more for creators to find revenue outside of just the monetization on the channels.
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So here's my suggestion. If someone that's listening to this is a CMO of a big brand, they got budgets and they want to play in space. The biggest problem is most of them play scared. And the challenge is when you play scared with creators, it doesn't work well. So you want to give, you want to find the creators that you like in the space and you want to tell them that you have money that you're going to invest with them as their partner. But I would lean on them and have them give you suggestions of how they think they could grow your brand and work with them and their vision. All too often What I've seen is brands will dictate every little thing down to the commas and the periods. The creators do their best, but it doesn't really blow up a brand. I would definitely. So the way you would do it is you find if I'm a brand and I want to. I'll give you example. So the best way I could do is just talk about a case study that actually know about My buddy Gabe Eloise. I helped produce his show in the early days. I still help advise, but really he does most of it now. He's the largest golf in the US anyways. Golf Review channel for equipment. There's bigger ones in the uk, but he's like the top American. Top two or three. Golf Review. There was a company called Play Better that sells their supply house that sells golf equipment. And their claim to fame is free shipping. Right. So when Gabe was still. I think he had just hit 10,000 subs, they said, hey, we don't know how this works. Can we create something and test it out? And they were very honest with the creator and then they gave Gabe a lot of latitude. Well, all I could tell you is Gabe has brought in millions and dollars, one creator, millions of dollars of sales into this supply house where they went from half a dozen employees to. They're huge. They're very big. But it was that partnership that worked well. And then they figured out a way to. That partnership's going on three, four years now. So like that long term partnership could literally move seven, sometimes eight figures just with one small creator. As they grow, you grow with them. So I would recommend talking to the brands, finding the creators you like and understanding it doesn't have to be the biggest creator it could be. I like creators on the rise because their fan bases are excited to grow with them and they're excited to try new things. So. And that is a term creator on the rise within like metrics and stuff. They do metric that people that are really bouncing off the metrics.
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I think it would be good to speak to. A lot of times, just when people are dipping into podcast partnerships or advertising, they're just looking at CPMs. Okay, they're just looking at CPMs but like the horse Network or the Equestrian network, like the. Like can you share some of those stories? Because if you have a really engaged audience, the and. And the value of what you're selling, depending on the ticket price, you don't have to have as many CPMs to. To be partner with that. That's what we do at oggn. You Know, it's very targeted towards oil and gas. And so it's not a pure CPM game when people want to sponsor shows in that arena.
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Yeah. So if you're a brand with budgets, I would not. You could do CPMs, that's fine. But if you could create like a true partner. So what happens with YouTubers, I'll just share with you what happens and then I'll tell you the horse radio example. What happens with YouTubers is they might have a video that has 50,000 and the next video has 2,000. The moment you tie them to a CPM, they're all stressed out that they're not going to meet their goals. If you could tie it to a monthly program and say, hey, we want to be your partner, let's just do a 90 day test and you give them free reins that we don't. Let's round up the numbers, you give them the benefit of the doubt, and then you, as the brand, do a test, see how you like it. If you like them, then figure out what they call minimum guarantee. Like, hey, we're going to invest two grand a month for next year, but we need you to mention us in, you know, one video every three times. But that, that repetition, by that end of the year, you're going to see some movement. With the golf example, what that supply house did was they said, listen, we're going to give you access to these, these cool gadgets before they go out so you could review them. Just throw us a mention that we have this equipment at our supply house. And it really exploded the numbers for Horse radio. Net. We have a friend, you and I named Glenn the Geek. He started the horse radio network. And there was a guy that created a vibrating pitchfork for horse manure. And he went to Home Depot. And they're like, dude, $200 for a shovel. He was an inventor, so he didn't know. He went to Home Depot. Ain't no one buying a $200 vibrating shovel. So then he went to Lowe's. He's like, oh, Lowe's is higher end. They're gonna love this. They're like, nah, we're not. This is way over our skew. So then the guy almost gave up, but he's like, tractor Supply. That's. I finally found my home. And Tractor Supply is like, what are you nuts? 200 bucks for a vibrating pitchfork? Somehow someone said to him, you gotta call Glenn before you give up on your invention. And Glenn immediately said to the guy, listen, I'll tell you what, let's do A test. Like, Glenn figured out how to make it like a no brainer. Give me some minimum money, I'm going to make sure it's successful. And Glenn talked about the vibrating pitchfork on Fridays. He knew that his people cleaned out their horse stalls on Fridays. That was like the day they were shoveling manure. And while there, it was called Stable Scoop. The show is actually called Stable Scoop. They scoop out the stables. And while they're talking, Glenn's like, man, I just tried this new vibrating pitch pitchfork. Whatever, it's great. My back feels great. They couldn't keep this fricking thing. The inventor couldn't keep it in stock. People were buying it and it became a long term partnership with this creator network. I think they were together for years. And this guy, his invention found a market and found a distribution channel through the online things. But there's a lot of things like that. And B2B is very easy because there's not a lot of B2B creators. So if you could find the key B2B influencers in your space, you could blow up very quickly because no one is savvy enough to go call them. So I want to be very, I want to share some tips, Matt. That's very important. You have to treat the creator with respect. The problem is if you're working at a big company, you think you're, you know, you know, we manage billions of dollars, the creator could care less. Let me be very clear. What the creator cares about is their content and their audience, which is what you want them to care about. The more respect and white glove service you could use, you could give to that creator. The more that relationship will have really big benefits for you and your business. Because if the creator shuts you off and doesn't like you, you're never doing business with that creator. And there's not like tons of them. There's only a few in every industry. So you want to be very good to all of them because they all talk as well, they compare notes. So you don't want to get a bad rap that you're hard to deal with because then other creators will talk about and it'll be very difficult to create these partnerships.
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So I want to bring it back to something that's really disrupting the SEO industry is LLMs or chat, GBT, stuff like that. And we talked a little bit about the entity SEO and how important that individual is. And as a trusted source when, when you're just doing so. Google used to be the game. Okay, Chris. Google used to be the biggest game in town, 50% of that traffic has now left Google. It's everywhere. It's just all over the place. And so now it's a focus on transactional content when someone comes to your website. But it's not where people get information for. And these LLMs are going everywhere. And people's search behaviors change. They're everywhere. They're looking at, well, how many shares, how many likes, how many follows your business has. And there's tools and metrics out there that, that show you. And I see so many businesses.00000000 one of the best ways to get somebody to talk and share your stuff on social media is get some influencers behind you. One of my buddies who I'm going to bring on started Turtlebox. They he kind of had an opposite, like, I'm not running any ads, I'm not doing any SEO. And he started at the other end of the spectrum and he focused on sponsorships and partnerships and, and influencers and the search volume for his brand, which is important. How many people are searching for your brand because it's about your brand today is like, I, I can't. I don't even want to speak to the numbers. But it was off the charts. Okay. More than, than, than paid ads could drive you, like what he could pay for. And he built it all through creators and influencers. He just got Ducks Unlimited to sponsor him, right? The official radio of Dunks Unlimited and like all this kind of stuff. And he, he leaned into that creator aspect of it. I think that digital marketing as a broad term and SEO like, you need to build a unified strategy on multiple platforms with multiple creators, with multiple voices. Because also you and I have had a number of conversations that, you know, if we talk about, you know, affiliate partnerships or something like that, you can have a small audience over here, you can have a giant audience over here and the smaller audience is more engaged than the bigger audience. Right? Like Kim Kardashian could tweet your stuff. That doesn't mean they're gonna buy it. Right? Like that doesn't mean people are gonna buy it anymore. And so it's about these micro creators and trying out a couple different creators, a couple different combinations. And then there's even like this name, image and likeness that's starting to happen in the sports arena. And so influencers and creators and content I don't feel have got the air time that they deserve and the share of the dollars. But I really think that's starting to change now, Chris, because people are finding their information on social media before they even pick something up like a news article. They find it on social media before. And then there's a fact checking kind of issue of people talking about stuff to get clicks. What, what do you see if there's any of that that you want to speak to but like the peripheral proliferation of, of AI and fake content. Interested to hear kind of your, your predictions or, or, or trends of what you're seeing.
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B
I mean I'm, I'm sure you've seen some predictions, but one thing we know is more content is going to get created. Like let's just say I don't know what the numbers are exactly, but let's say a hundred thousand pieces of content get created every hour. It's more, but let's just say that's the number. A year from now it's going to be like a billion, like not, I'm not exaggerating, it's gonna be like that kind of exaggerated number because the AI could create a thousand angles, a million angles on the same piece. So then when I, let's say there's some kind of press conference at the White House, they're going to give a million takes. So then each of us, if we want to talk about getting led down a rabbit hole, we're going to see exactly what we want. Now the leaders of these companies have said that they're going to weigh the human creators at a higher level than the AI because what happens is if the AI competes with us, it wins every day of the week because it can over deliver content at a rate we can't, we just can't create. So they're going to weigh the, the, the. So what I would say to anyone is either you're sponsoring and working with brand creators now or starting to, let's say you're a bigger company, you gotta, you like, what's the, the manscape. Those guys were like geniuses. They, they started like five, six years ago. They came across my desk and I remember they had like a little country bumpkin like out of Arkansas doing their marketing. And the guy was a nice guy and everything, but like I could tell you I know how they started because the guy called me, he's like, yeah, we're doing a hundred thousand a month now and it's always great. And I call, it was really nice. You called the influencers, hey, we would like to. And then they got so big they're like, listen, do you want to be the cmo? And he's like, I want to stay in my little, you know, town here in the South, I don't want to move to your headquarters, wherever. But what they did then is they automated their influencer program. And what they would do is they would call every influencer, like, they didn't care who you are. They were just like, hey, Matt, we see that you have a UFC show. We're going to give you some free stuff and 25 gift card. Can you mention us? And you'd be like, sure, no one else is giving me any money. I just started. And they would just. They would ride each creator, like I'm talking about in mass. It was amazing what they did. So you. You either need to start that kind of program. If you're a big brand now, as small or as niche as you want to do, that's fine. But for the person thinking about being a creator for their brand, for their business, you got to get started now because you want to bring that audience into the future. And in the future, it's going to get exponentially hard because there's going to be so much noise and the AI bots are going to be so human. I mean, how many guys are getting catfished now watching AI pictures on Instagram of women in bikinis that don't exist? So, like, it's going to get really crazy. If we think it's good now, forget about it. What? It's going to be like, a year from now. So you got to just invest in. And what does that mean for the creators, the real ones? Their value is going to go up. So right now, you're going to get them at a discount. They're going to be more valuable in the future because it's going to be harder to find great creators with audiences. So whatever price you pay today is going to be a steep discount on what you're going to pay tomorrow. Because what you just said, the image likeness, we had a lawyer, actually a vidfest, talking about it. He kept mentioning that acronym, and I'm like, why do you keep mentioning it? He was like, well, I represent all the college players now, and they can monetize. And he goes, it's the number one thing we have to do is manage their image, likeness and whatever was ILM or something.
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Yeah, Name, image and likeness. It's basically, you know, you. When you get creative.
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And I. All right, that's what.
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Yeah, when you get it, like, when you get somebody to make a clip, it's about repurposing that clip, using it in different ways. Like, it's not like, I. I I see. Like if something runs on the news, like a company will take it and then just rerun it on Facebook to make sure everybody, everybody sees it. Right. I, I am curious. I lost my train of thought, to be honest. I don't know. Tell me, tell me.
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Likeness. And you were talking about what brands could do. AI is going to exponentially make content that, you know.
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Yeah.
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Tough to keep up with.
- [32:00]
A
Well, it, I think a lot of these big brands are losing their moats. Okay. Like a lot of these big brands that used to, you know, utilize their logo, the new, the newer generation that's buying or even the people that are helping people make decisions that are searching the Internet are finding these sources, not, not just on Google. And they want to know how that brand's perceived. They're doing a lot of research and like you need, you need an army of people out there talking about who you are in your space. And I, I think that, you know, people have relied on PPC ads for, for far too long because of the metrics. So like it is there. We, we touched on a little bit. But like if a, if a company is coming in, like how long should they wait, like direct response for to know if it's working. And oh, my question actually was around live shopping. I feel like live shopping is going to be like so big because you know, like it's real. Like we're going to have a crisis of is this real, is this information? Like I did this fact, this fact checker, originality. AI. I just interviewed the creator. So much proliferation of written content. We're talking about video content which has, you know, it's, it's behind it, but it's coming. Like we're not going to know what's real based on personalization and automation and, and then how they personalize it to each of us. And it's just going to be very, very difficult to, to figure out what's going on. So I feel like, like if you're live with the person on a call, you'll, you'll like it's real and you'll know that's there.
- [33:56]
B
You have to answer your two questions. One is if you want to do a test, I would do a 90 day test with the Creator. Six months would be the longest to see if there's some, you know, legs in that test and try different things. But I would say start ugly. Don't worry about perfection. If you're a bigger brand, I would just have parameters of what they cannot do with your brand. Obviously you want to protect Your brand, but you got to get started and try different things. As far as you mentioned direct selling, there's. Was it offer up or whatnot? There's a bunch of these things now that are much more powerful than qvc because it's the influencers hawking. Like, they're in a room like yours. Like, you're in. You have your shelf behind you. And then they're just selling. Like my buddy Gabe the golf guy, because he does all this golf equipment stuff. He has tons of stuff in his place. So they. They. When they started, they sponsored him. Dude, he was selling. He was moving stuff. I never. I went on there. This was like a year ago. I called him up. I'm like, dude, I'm blown away. I. I can't believe what I'm seeing. And then he helped that audience go into another room of another golf guy. And that guy was like, oh, man, thanks so much for helping me. Because now you share audiences and you. So it's like. It's like a decentralized qvc. It's insane. And then for the females, we had an influencer. She's on Instagram. And women now, the way they're shopping is they follow an influencer. If they wear the dress from TJ Maxx, they could click on the dress and it literally direct sends it. Once they put their size in, it sends them the dress to their home. Based on an influencer. They started shopping at Marshalls, TJ Maxx, you name it, Walmart. And I was like, what the heck is this? And then I forgot the website that organizes all of this. But it's. It's all happening. The largest brands that are being launched now are from creators. You know, you got Logan, Paul's got His prime. You got Mr. Beast with beastables. Here's the thing that I. Anyone that follows marketing, Mr. Beast launched his chocolate candy bars. Did you ever have the first run of it, Matt? Did you try it?
- [35:53]
A
I did. I did. My kids. My kids wanted it. And I'm like, you think who could go up against Hershey's? And. And Mr. Beast is dominating.
- [36:03]
B
Well, here's the interesting thing, though. The first run of his chocolate bars were terrible. They were disgusting. They were bitter. Yeah. Because he tried to make them healthy. Like, he's like, oh, they're healthier and better than all the other stuff. So he literally had to relaunch his chocolate brand. Now. They're really good. They taste.
- [36:19]
A
Oh, yeah. Okay. I didn't try the. The healthy ones. I tried the ones that tasted just like Chocolate.
- [36:24]
B
But what I'm telling you is I don't know any other billion dollar product that the consumer would be like, I trust this person enough to try it again. You know, I know how brutal. Like a consumer product like chocolate on a shelf, competing with Mars, who's been around like a hundred years. And he, he had the goodwill that he could say, hey, we reformulated it, try it again, and that the retailers would put it out again, which was incredible. So I'm. That's unheard of. Like, that doesn't happen usually. If something fails, they don't give you another shot. Everybody knows if you've watched Shark Tank, everybody knows how, you know, Precious that retail space is in these stores. So we are in the age of the creator. And if you're able to get your brand aligned with the right creator, you take a ride for some massive growth and, and you know, name brand awareness. It's, it's ginormous.
- [37:13]
A
Okay. To kind of getting close to, to wrapping up. I really, a lot of people that listen do marketing or, or work for B2B brands that some, some B2C brands. I know I work with a lot of B2B brands. How should they frame this up to like get started like we talked about? But like what does the program look like if they need to start creating content as a brand, right? Like as a big company? Like, how did they get themselves online and people talking about them, like, should they seed it with creators? Should they exclusively partner with creators? Should they start their own podcast, their own channel? Do they get on a network? Like what is like the landscape look like if you're a B2B business to say, I know I need to be in this space, but I don't know how to do it. That's what I heard a lot of times with Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever.
- [38:13]
B
I'm a big proponent of starting ugly. So one, you got to get that noise. And I know you represent a big brand and I know that you're very nervous about your brand being out in social media and out of your full control, but you can't, you can't get left behind because it's going to hurt your brand tremendously. Especially we're past the social media age now. We're in the age of AI. So if you're really thinking about like social media, that's a problem. So, so that's one. So you gotta get in the game. The second thing is if you don't have someone on your team that could create really good, let's say like a YouTube channel. I'm speak to that specifically because with the YouTube channel, you could take shorts and you could feed them all over from Instagram to TikTok. So YouTube would be your home. If you don't have that person, you could make a great relationship with a creator. You like their style and you could pay them to create your own channel. They might be the face of your channel. They already have branding. So I'll give you example. In the Las Vegas world, there's a guy named Vegas Matt that gambles with his son. They have over a million subscribers. Was it FanDuel? FanDuel, yeah. Has them doing their own channel. FanDuel channel. And they gamble on FanDuel. But it's Vegas Madness, son. So they know for a fact that that channel will get at least a hundred thousand subs. So after they're done with their main channel, they go into like a, like a lobby room or hotel room where they fan fan those virtual. And they have a whole virtual gambling session. So you just got to figure out if you could hire the. The creator. Depending on how big your budgets are, the bigger your budgets are, the bigger the creator you can get. But if you have small budgets, find a small creator that you like their content. They have 10,000 subs, subs, meaning subscribers or more, and say, hey man, we'd like to pay you whatever it is, 2,500amonth, 5,000amonth, 10,000amonth, whatever that budget is to create content for us. And then you negotiate how many pieces you know, have them propose what they think the content should be. Because a lot of those people, they know how to make thumbnails. They know how to make what we call catchy titles to get clicks. And then you give them access to make the best videos they can promoting your brand. That's where I would start. Or you could, like what we talked about earlier, sponsor the challenges, let them drop in your name. I'll mention on one or two of the shows.
- [40:31]
A
And how long should you let it run before. Before you measure, like the brand lift that you're getting? Like, I mean, I would do 90.
- [40:39]
B
Day, test that you like working with the creator and then extend it for six months. And then at six months, you should have some answers if the needle is getting moved. Two things. My buddy Gabe, who promotes his little let's Play through Golf Channel, he promotes Play Better, which is not his company. It's a supply house. There's a lot of people that don't use Gabe's affiliate code, but they go outside the affiliate code and buy from Play Better. Well, Play Better knows when they're answering the calls and they're calling and they're like, how'd you find us? Oh, Gabe, Gabe, Gabe, Gabe. Gabe's accounting for many, many times more than the sales that we can't. We could account for through the affiliate links. So you need to pay attention to who's calling you, how they found out about you, and you need to have your team attuned to that because you might get a 5x but you're not realizing it. And then you caught off that test and you're like, hey, things dipped. What happened? It was that influencer driving sales. You just didn't see it because you didn't. It wasn't necessarily 100% track. They would then search on their own when they were at their desk, and they'd find you after they're watching that show, let's say.
- [41:42]
A
I think that that's a great point. Okay, last question for you. I wanted to get your opinion on this because I think that a lot of brands don't want to work with creators because they're. They're stuck on their brand guidelines, how their logo looks, what it says on the. On oggn. You know, it's got to run through legal. Like, if there's anything that. That. That there's any ambiguity at all, we got to cut that part out. There's, like, heavy editing, and I feel like it kills the experience. So I feel like today in the era we're in, people are familiar with the brand, and that brand logo or whatever it is can come up organically homegrown in a lot of different ways. And that's beneficial in my eyes to the brand. And so I wanted to get your opinion on companies that are very concerned on, like you talked about at the beginning, to bring it back full circle, they need to be in control of everything that's happening. I think those organic breakthroughs are where the. The biggest opportunity is.
- [42:50]
B
So, Matt, I agree with you, and here's what I'll say to you. If you're a CMO that's worried about your brand, hire someone like Matt as a consultant to help be the translator. And I'll say, because I've seen this firsthand, My wife and another friend, they're big creators. They got hired by an ad agency to do ads for Chase Bank. They literally had my wife correct the ad 10 different times because the shade of blue was off. And I'm going to tell you right now, they use the shade of Blue that the ad agency gave them. So what happens is it's not even the brand, it's the ad agency so afraid of losing Chase that they start knee jerking everything. And then the creators worn out and the brand's like, how come it's not working for us? Sometimes the brands are so big they don't even know this is going on. So if you're a cmo, I would do like, like a little, what do they call that, like a little ragtag team to take care of the influencer program yourself, keep an eye on it with the teammate or a consultant like you, Matt, that kind of knows this space and allow the creators room to breathe and you could fix things. What you're looking for right now is signs of life that things moving the needle. And then you and I mentioned something before. You need to pay attention because when an influencer is talking about you, you might be looking through click through rates. But here's the problem. You're not, you're not counting the branding you're getting because they're talking many times to millions of people or hundreds of thousands. And your brand is getting free play in those people's minds over and over and over again. Maybe they don't buy right away, but if you're, if you know, all of a sudden you got like, you know, I don't know, small percentage starts to buy. What about the million or 2 million that now are listening to your brand that might not be ready for your product today, but six months from now. So you also have to account the double. You're also getting a double impact because these big brands pay for branding and all kinds of stuff. They're throwing money out. But now with the influencer, you're not only getting direct response, you're also getting branding that you're paying for alongside that. So you got to account a value to that outside of the click through rate. And if you're not doing, if you don't evaluate it right, you keep doing these starts and stops, not realizing why it's not working. It was working all along. But you starting and stopping is killing all your momentum every time you do it.
- [45:03]
A
No, I, I love that, I love that in the back catalog, right? It continues to play. So you're, you're getting this accrual over time. So Chris, we're about to wrap up. I wanted to have everybody know what you're working on, how to find you, how to follow you if they want to know more.
- [45:22]
B
Last tip and then I'll do that because yeah, last, you Got my brain working. You got my brain working.
- [45:26]
A
Well, I can tell you this podcast, I'm like so intensely listen to you, I forget what I'm going to say next because I was going to ask you, is there anything else we need to talk about before. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:38]
B
You know, one of my hobbies is I have an aviary and I breed birds. It's just a hobby of mine and I was very fortunate to help some of the largest influencers in that space recently. And my brain was like thinking like these guys have such brand credibility. And you might be like, oh yeah, that's funny. Birds. Well, think about it. What do people have to do with their birds? They have to feed them. You know, that's like a billion dollar industry. You know the food, right?
- [46:02]
A
Oh yeah.
- [46:02]
B
So if I was a brand in the food space and there's only like six of them, it's not like, you know, all these, all these, all these industries, everybody knows each other and the one CMO goes to the next company the next day. So everybody's very friendly the way it works, right? If I was a food rep, I would call this guy and say, hey, we love you. We want to create a signature line with your name on it. Do you want to talk about being like a category killer? The influencer doesn't know how to do it. But you already have distribution. You're taking basically the same stuff with the influencers input and you create a signature line that now all of a sudden his fans that might be casually watching are buying. So like there are opportunities to. Mr. Beast owns his chocolate, but there's smaller Mr. Beast that want to do that and you might be the one that has the output that you could partner with them. But I would only do that after you have trust and credibility and work with the person for a year on other projects. But imagine if you private label with a really big influencer some of your stuff. I mean, it's just such a big opportunity for me. I'm like the chairman emeritus at podfast. We have a CEO named Nick Pavilides who's running the show. I'm the community manager. You can find me@podfest expo.com or just spell Chris Chromitzos. I'm on all those socials, but I love what I do. I love helping creators. I'll be in. You know, I love the Texas tour. It's one of my favorite things to do. But what I would say to anyone thinking about this start, it's really tough to get a hold of brands. So you Might want to go to some creator conferences, whether it's Podfast or VidSummit, that has a lot of the YouTubers, go and meet them and see what it's like, just as an exploratory with your team to get a feel for what it's like dealing with creators. And then I'll say, hey, I'm in this industry. Do you know anyone in this industry? And if they refer you in or you talk to the agents, there's a handful of agencies that represent these people. The challenge is once you go the agent route, obviously they got to make their 10% and there's a, there's a gatekeeper. It's a benefit and sometimes not a benefit, but if you can find the influencers that you like, deal with them directly, that's always a huge plus.
- [48:10]
A
I've sent one of our clients to PodFest and had a absolutely great time and great experience. So I definitely recommend it. Go check it out. Chris, you do podfest, like, when is it usually in the year so people can.
- [48:26]
B
This year it's January 15 to 18, 20, 26. It'll be our 12th pod podfest. I'm gonna give you a shout out because you helped us. A while back, we needed some SEO help and you. I was very suspect because I have just, like a lot of us, we've been burned by a lot of people and you're the real deal. So I always appreciate that about you, Matt. And I would say if anyone needs like someone to help in this space, you're the go to guy. Because when it comes to the B2B side, there's not a lot of people understand the complexity, the, the red tape that everybody has to jump through. And I know that's something you spent few quite a, quite a while perfecting. And I know you and I are in T shirts and stuff, but they don't realize, like, we've been doing business on the B2B side for a very long time, but we also have to relate to the creators. So we're, we're, we're bridging both gaps. And it's, it's interesting that you and I could talk shop, but this creator economy, you're right, people aren't using. Google is sweating. People don't know. But all the tech guys just went to the White House and they said Sergey Brin is back to work because he's paranoid that Google's about to lose everything. And across the table from him is the guy, Sam Altman from ChatGPT Zuckerberg with Meta. That's not to be. Don't sleep on him. He's got glasses. I got people doing filming First Perspective, you know, with the meta glasses, and they're incredible. So, like, the innovation that's happening right now, I'm telling you, next year is going to be every. The foundation is getting laid this year. Next year it's going to move so fast. You're going to be you. Just what I would say is just call Matt and let Matt handle it, because I'm having trouble keeping up with it. And I always used to pride myself on, like, knowing what everybody doesn't know yet. And at this point, it's anyone's game. It's crazy how fast it's moving.
- [50:08]
A
Well, I appreciate that. We've been getting a lot more advisory engagements where I'm coming in as a fractional CMO on different issues. And to your point, there's a lot of unification. Like you have multiple agencies or multiple team members that, that are not working together. And then if you're managing a variety of different brands, it's kind of a mess. So, so I've come in with some publicly traded companies to kind of fix their process to, to pull it together, to build sops, to workflows, to pull in some of the new technology because it, it is moving so fast. So, yeah, you can, you can check me out at Mathber Digital course. But yeah, we're having, we're, we're hiring. We are hiring, we are scaling. Congratulations. Yeah, and so, yeah, reach out to us if you have work or if you're awesome at what you do. We're, we're getting deep experience in all these different verticals. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet, call EWR for more revenue in your business. But we are incorporating LLM Visibility and we are incorporating ChatGPT and Grok and we're building MPC servers for clients and AI is built into the workflows. Becoming an AI first, business is really where it's at. It is taking off exponentially. You have to keep up with this. It's no longer about ads in Google anymore. That's why. And I had brought Chris in to advise. We were trying to look at a different name because it's spreading out and we'll talk more about that offline. But we are launching a LM Visibility certification. LM Visibility is really where I think it's going in the short term. I think AI discoverability is where it's going in the long term. And that's all different components coming together. Thank you so much. If guys, you like what we're doing, if you like people I'm bringing on, like Chris, please leave me a review. Please share a little clip. We're starting to do clips on social media and YouTube. Like, I asked for your engagement. I want feedback. Please ask for review. So thank you so much for sticking around to that till the end. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.