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- [00:00]
Nick Loper
How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business.
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You know, Google's market share is shrinking, customer behavior is shifting, and as business owners, it might be a little bit painful, but we got to adapt. The good news is people still need your help and it's just how they find you is changing. So by the end of this episode, you're going to have a proven roadmap of how to get found in ChatGPT and other AI tools. To help out with this, a return guest is back in the house. From rankingonai. Com. Tonya Van Gastel, welcome back to the side Hustle Show.
- [00:33]
Tonya Van Gastel
Hey Nick. Super good to be back. We were just saying right before the show how many people reached out after the last episode and it really just made me think, wow, the side Hustle podcast audience is like the best podcast audience. I hope you're super, super happy with that.
- [00:49]
Nick Loper
That warms my heart for sure. I'm happy to hear it. So where do we start with this? So a lot of people listening are going to be in the content publishing space. They're going to be in the free or consultant or agency or service provider space, online and offline, and they might be in the E Comm space. And it's trying to figure out this brave new world of SEO and generative SEO or geo. So one of the shifts that I've seen is maybe there's not a lot of links, even if ChatGPT is recommending you, not a lot of links in their standard responses unless you specifically ask for it. But we do see more branded searches and so we start to see, you know, side Hustle Nation specifically as kind of the top query now in Google Search Console. But do you recommend people starting with kind of that Google Search console approach or even a chatgpt approach to see what does it think about my brand or my online presence or reputation? As it stands now, there's good news.
- [01:46]
Tonya Van Gastel
And there's bad news. Of course the bad news, like you've said, is we've really gone to a bit of a zero click, zero click environment right now. People are just not getting any clicks. It's not, you know, very clear where actually traffic is coming from. But what you are going to see, and that's honestly huge positive News, is that ChatGPT conversions, they convert at 15 times conversion rate compared to organic SEO. And so that's really good news and it's a really strong indicator for a lot of larger companies as well as smaller ones to to focus on AI answers and appearing there. There's three things that I recommend everybody to do, no matter if they are a service provider, a publisher, an E comm. And I think if you do these three things, you'll already be like 60% further compared to your average person. So those three things are, first of all, even if you are an Amazon seller or you are doing something else, the first thing is create your own source of truth. Create your own website where basically there's everything about your brand. This is really important because it really helps ChatGPT to identify you as an entity. And essentially you want ChatGPT to be like, oh, this is where I can find information about this specific entity. We've seen a lot of companies come to us to say, hey, ChatGPT is spreading misinformation about my brand. And so sometimes that's coming from, you know, older information, things that are kind of out of date, old vetted conversations, and you can correct that on that specific website.
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Nick Loper
So taking ownership of your own digital real estate. And to what depth are you going here? Like the about page? And they're like, well, yeah, I checked the box. I did it. That's my source of truth. But it's. You have to go quite a bit deeper than that.
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Tonya Van Gastel
No, please don't. So I would. I mean, you know, with SEO, it's always the same story. It's a forever kind of thing, right? But we're talking about three basic things to do. One is just a simple landing page and an about page. And on that about page, you can also include an FAQ. Right? So if you're doing a ChatGPT audit, and I'll tell you in a little bit how you can actually do that if you're doing a ChatGPT audit. And ChatGPT says, oh, Nick Loper, he's always wearing a purple T shirt. Silly example, but you know what I mean, Nick Loper is always wearing a purple T shirt. You would then put on your website in an faq, what kind of T shirts does Nick Loper wear? And then ChatGPT can go and see, Nick Loper doesn't only wear purple T shirts. And so, because you are the ultimate source of truth for your website, and ChatGPT recognizes that, that that's how you can go and correct misinformation. The second thing is you want to do outreach. So let's say again, you are the site, you are the podcast, your side Hustle nation. You basically want to go and search on Google on ChatGPT for what are the best podcasts in your niche. What are the best podcasts? For building a business, for side hustles. And when you ask ChatGPT, that same thing with when you ask Google that it's going to show you an AI overview or in ChatGPT, it's just going to answer you and you're going to be able to click on sources in those sources. More likely than not, you're going to see Reddit and you're going to see Listicles. A lot of these are going to be best of listicles. You can go and do that right now. Just search for it in ChatGPT or in Google, your specific niche and then you know best. So specific solutions for your niche. If you are a doctor's practice in Florida, you'd search for best doctors practices in Florida and then again you will find those sources. What you want to do is whether those are Reddit or whether those are different kind of websites. You want to go and get your business listed there. You can do that through a variety of methods. On Reddit, you go and make a Reddit account, you go and post some comments on different subreddits to actually engage and then you're going to start commenting also on some of these Reddit posts that are linked and you're going to say, hey, I am a doctor's practice in this area. Check me out. A lot of people come here and you want to include authority arguments.
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Nick Loper
You gave the example of best doctors in Orlando and so it's pulling from UCF Health, it's pulling from Medical Clinic, Orlando Health and then some of these magazines like pretty high authority sites that might be a more difficult one to be like, raise your hand and be like, hey, I would love to be included in your list.
- [06:35]
Tonya Van Gastel
Well, it depends actually. So a lot of these even like yellow pages shouldn't be super, super challenging. Same thing with maybe, you know, UCF Health. So these are things that are like honored. But also with doctors practices, I think they might be a little more careful of this specific query. Maybe one thing to look for is let's say you ask for best AI proofreader, right? So if you ask ChatGPT for what are the best ways to use AI to proofread, probably you're going to get a bunch of links and you can Google that or ChatGPT best AI proofreaders, it's going to give you those sources. And I say this because within the SaaS world there are a lot more listicles. Same thing with E commerce, there's a lot more listicles that are really easy to get. So when you scroll down it's going to tell you which ones it recommends and what that is based on. Right. So when you then go into sources, you're going to see a lot of these are listicles. What you can do with these Listicles is you can actually go to that website and then you can go in and find their email, and then you can email them and you can be like, hey, what about. I always suggest using command F and searching contact, because usually it's going to be in the footer. And what you can do then is you can go and ask, hey, would you like to include my company, my website and you Google them, something like that. But reach out to them, and I'm going to tell you that it's going to take you like 50 outreaches for you to get one answer. You can count on like a 2 or 3% conversion rate to actually get on there. And the best way to increase that, add in your landing page conversion rate and also add in authority arguments in your email. Because these affiliate, affiliate bloggers or, you know, listicle bloggers, they really get so many of these emails every single day. So the way that you stand out is, is by letting them know how much they can actually earn on you by saying how well your business actually performs, because they don't know if you don't let them know. So I really highly recommend doing that. Like, for me, it's like, I've been on a side Hustle Nation podcast.
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Nick Loper
Sure.
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Tonya Van Gastel
And then people will be like, wow, that's great. We have to, you know, make sure that she's on that list.
- [09:00]
Nick Loper
Yeah. So I was looking before we, we got on, and if you ask, you know, what are the best side Hustle podcasts, it tends to recommend the side Hustle show and a bunch of others. But if I go a little bit broader and say, well, what are the entrepreneurship podcasts not always included? So here's a specific thing I could do is go to those sources, go to those Listicles and try and make my, try and make my case to, hey, would you consider including the show in your list?
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Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah. Well, actually, on that note, kind of brings me to my third part, right? So the first one will create that website source of truth. Second one is to outreach Reddit email people from Listicles.
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Nick Loper
What do you recommend on, like, the Reddit side? Would it be literally just replying to those threads and throwing your hat in the ring?
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Tonya Van Gastel
I would recommend being as straightforward and honest as, you know, as you should. And so for a lot of these, for a lot of people, especially if you are the business owner. If it is a side hustle, just be super honest. Hey, I am the founder of X. And actually the thing that you are talking about, that's exactly what I do. Don't put a link in there. That's like the one big thing because that's going to get you banned immediately.
- [10:09]
Nick Loper
All right, so number one, create your own source of truth on your own website. Your about page, your FAQs, your services, your contact info. Number two was to kind of do this mini audit. You know best, you know, ask ChatGPT. Well, what are the best things in your niche? You to fill in the blank. There they go. Find the sources for those and then raise your hand, cast your own vote on Reddit in certain cases and try and do some outreach to the sites that are, that it's pulling from. Uh, what was, what's the third thing?
- [10:40]
Tonya Van Gastel
The third thing is my favorite thing because the third thing is where there's infinite work to be done. And so the third thing is create content that ranks. And so there's a lot of information here, but here are the basics. Actually, let me just give you the shortcut. The shortcut is to make a YouTube video in a format of a listicle or a how to. The only way that you can rank for how to or that you can kind of plug a recommendation or your brand into a how to piece of content is never written. Written content right now is just going to get hoovered up by AI. It's just going to digest it by itself and then spit it out as an AI overview generated snippet. And it doesn't matter, it doesn't care about anything else that you said. It will just give you the how to and not link to your website. Whereas with video content, that's actually where there are no completely AI generated video how tos yet. Maybe, you know, in the next five years or whatever. Okay, but for now, that is really something where if you make a YouTube video mentioning your own business in the title or your own kind of, you know, the problem or the niche in the title, you will absolutely have a really high chance of getting recommended. If you're not somebody who likes to do video content, which I understand, you can also create your own video that is like faceless, maybe with a voiceover, or alternatively, you can write your own listicle. And so listicles perform really well. So that means that you, Nick, you're going to write a listicle that is 10 best, a podcast for entrepreneurs, and you're going to talk about yourself. And nine other podcasts about entrepreneurship. And what I highly recommend is that you are super honest in this. That you just say, this is what it's more about. This is what it's more about. Don't be like, mine is the best and all of the other ones are terrible because it just doesn't work. So mention everybody and also send a link to their website, because in that way Google will also know. Well, actually, this piece of content is actually trying to be very informational, is actually giving a lot of value. They care a lot about, you know, not only promoting other websites, but genuinely being helpful, because that's all that Google cares about, being helpful.
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Nick Loper
Okay. Which it may seem counterintuitive if you are a provider of, you know, custom wooden toothbrushes or something. You know, what's the best? Here are the 10 best wooden toothbrushes. And then it's like, would be the best. I don't know if I necessarily want to link to my competitors, but you're saying, yeah, you kind of need to feed the system with that type of material.
- [13:25]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah. Do you do. Because the thing is, the more honest and helpful you are in your content, the more likely that you will actually be ranking very high and you'll still be ranking number one because you put yourself number one on your own listicle. Right?
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Nick Loper
Yeah.
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Tonya Van Gastel
And so that really matters. It's a conversation of would you rather not be mentioned at all or be mentioned?
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Nick Loper
Yeah, the user's not dumb. They understand that you don't operate in a monopoly either. They understand there's alternatives out there.
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Tonya Van Gastel
And we have some stats on how these listicles generally operate and, like, how it's distributed, how the clicks are distributed. Generally, about 50% will click on the first one, and then 30% goes to the second and the third one. And so that's kind of how it works. And then the other ones might get about, like, 20% of the exposure. So that's something to keep in mind. But especially in a brave new AI world, these listicles, specifically for something as niche as best custom wooden toothbrushes. Perfect, because nobody's made that listicle about best custom wooden toothbrushes. And if somebody searches in ChatGPT, what are the best custom wooden toothbrushes? And there's only one listicle on the whole Internet or one YouTube video on the whole Internet. You are 100% going to be in that list because you wrote the only listicle about best wooden custom toothbrushes.
- [14:50]
Nick Loper
Hey, real quick, I put together an AI SEO checklist based on this conversation with Tanya. You can download that for free as a listener bonus. Just hit up the show notes for this episode and you can't miss it.
- [15:01]
We've got a lot more to cover.
- [15:02]
Too, including a big content mistake creating.
- [15:06]
Custom GPTs and more coming up right after this. 2026 is going to be your year. I can feel it with our partner Shopify. 2026 is when you finally make it happen. Time to go from ideas and inspiration to action and results. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person. In fact, millions of entrepreneurs have already made the leap from household names to dozens of side Hustle show guests. You've heard their stories, now it's time.
- [15:33]
To write your own.
- [15:34]
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- [17:31]
You say listicles, not so great for video, but more like how to style tutorial type of content for the video.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Both work and honestly, listicle probably still better. Yeah. Because listicles are. You know, when ChatGPT recommends a tool or a business or a product, it never recommends just one. It will always recommend multiple. Right. So when you're looking at how can you actually get into that recommendation is you want to kind of think about what is the answer that ChatGPT would give, and think about structuring your article that way. So one thing for same with YouTube, same with content, is you want to take an approach where you basically write the entire. Where you give the answer immediately. We call it a bluff strategy. So bluff strategy is where you put the bottom line up front. B L U F bluff.
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Nick Loper
Oh, like poker bluffing. Okay.
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Tonya Van Gastel
No, yeah. Not like poker blubbing for content. Same for, like, YouTube. Because basically all the YouTube content is transcribed and then it's fed into AI search. You want to do BLUF and you do FAQ bluff is completely different from traditional SEO. People will be like, oh, here are 5,000 lines of texts about, you know, kind of a similar topic. And then at the end, they'd be like, this is potentially the answer.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, it's like the recipe site. So what's the best chocolate chip cookie recipe? Well, after I get through telling my grandma's life story about how this, know, these cookies were the best, you know, oh, there it is.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Invented in, you know, that kind of stuff. So we're doing none of that. We're doing none of that. The AI doesn't care. The AI just wants the answer. The AI wants to answer in a way that is direct and that honestly, ideally is conversational. And conversational, that's kind of where we get to the FAQ part. Right. Because if you're thinking about how AI search engines generally work, they're always conversational. It's always a conversation with the user. You're asking a question. Right? And generally, that's the question that is really specific. So it's very different how SEO works and AI SEO, because with SEO, we've all kind of learned how to, you know, talk to Google. And I just gave that keyword best AI proofreader. I would never talk to ChatGPT like that. Generally, I would. You know, I still do that because I'm kind of, you know, millennial child. I have to think of the best keywords and the best parameters so I can finesse the best answer out of Google. But with ChatGPT, you don't need to do that. With ChatGPT, you can actually ask based on what you know about me, what is the best for this or what should I be using? Are there any AI tools for writing that you think are good? And these are all conversational. And so really what you want to do is whenever you do content, whether that is YouTube or whether that is an article, and you want to start ranking and get cited, you want to do bluff, you want to put the answer up front immediately. And then you want to do an FAQ where you answer a bunch of questions that are kind of related to what a user might ask about regarding your content, your product, your this, your that, and then you want to answer those. So really, it is a frequently asked questions section.
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Nick Loper
Okay, Are you pulling those from the like people also ask, you know, to get some seed inspiration for what to include in the FAQs.
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Tonya Van Gastel
You 1000% can do that. Which, you know, kind of brings me to the next part that I would really like to talk about, which is the biggest mistake that I see people make when it comes to content. People are not going to like it. Nobody likes it. But the biggest mistake is to AI generate your content. Don't AI generate your content, Especially don't AI generate your written content. I know that you and I might both think that it sounds and looks really good and that it's really helpful, but Google has become really good at discerning what is AI generated content, because their whole algorithm essentially shapes the Internet. Right? SEO people are constantly trying to figure out what is Google doing now and how can we change our website, change our online real estate, our online presence, to rank higher and get more traffic. And Google knows that. So if Google would allow for AI generated content, then the whole Internet would become AI generated content. And then their own AI algorithms wouldn't have any data that is human to train on. And so that is part of why they are quite strict about AI generated content in most content types. These content types include reviews, listicles, these types of things. When it comes to how to or informational content, then it's kind of fine. But again, I do not recommend that you use AI for content because generally it will not rank or drive conversion. And so it's way more helpful to either hire a writer or my favorite tip is to download something like Willow Voice, where you can Actually just go in, you download it, you press a button, and then it will transcribe whatever you're saying for you super fast. Another thing that you can do is call a friend and use a AI transcription service. I personally really like Happy Scribe, AI NoteTaker. Use that service to, you know, just put the AI bot in the room and then it will essentially record everything and it will just spit it back out for you. Then you can use that as a baseline transcript for editing the whole text and then turning it into an article. These methods work really well. If you don't like to write or you don't really think of yourself as.
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Nick Loper
A writer, is that just to make sure that it is formatted in a more conversational way rather than, you know, traditional, like keyword plus answer. I was reading something recently where it talked about like, the importance of, you know, feeding, creating your content in. I think they called it chunks, where it was like, you know, header formatted in such a way. Then you know, max three sentence answer and then onto the next header. And it was like very deliberate how they were structuring.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Used to be like that. It still is helpful to some extent. You know, you want to think about your, like your H1 tag, your title tag, your meta description. You still want to put your keyword in it. But I would say the reason that I suggest these things is, you know, I like to use a productivity app called Akiflow and literally I used to write all of my content and then I would write, this is the headline and Here are the 50 things I need to do to actually get a piece of content going. Because it would just take that many tasks, right? It's like research this paragraph, the whole outline. Whereas generally, you know, especially when you're not a writer or you're just not used to it, it's so much easier to just talk it through with another person or to just think out loud and have it spoken out loud instead of sitting in front of a blank screen thinking, how the hell am I going to write 800 words about this thing? Because you just don't really know how to structure it. So I think AI tools are really helpful for helping you think through that structure so you don't look at a blank page. It's just not going to write the whole thing for you.
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Nick Loper
Even then, if you're doing video as well, like now you have kind of a seed script or something that you could maybe massage into a video script there too.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I mean, you know, if you can do the Video, Right? Going back to, you do the website, you do the video or the article, and then you do the outreach. You are 100% going to get cited and get recommended in AI search. And you didn't actually have to, you know, do backlinks or anything like that. So these are my, like, top three things that I would suggest people start doing and how to do them.
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Nick Loper
So do you recommend going back to your example about, you know, I should write the article 10 Best Entrepreneurship Podcasts. You know, put the side Hustle show at the top and then pick nine other favorites. Do I need to make the video version of that too? Would anybody watch that? Or is that just for the fear, for the benefit of, like, double dipping? You know, the transcript is going to go into the ether and somebody's going to chew on that and spit back out the answer.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Double dip it. Triple dip it. Quadruple dip it. Do all the dips. They all stack.
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Nick Loper
So put up on edit. Okay?
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Tonya Van Gastel
Just do as much coverage as you can on different keywords. Right? So, you know, do one about entrepreneurship, do one about E Comm store owners, do one about service providers, do one about, you know, marketing agencies, whatever vertical that you think your business touches upon, create a post around it. And then when you make that YouTube video, also embed it in your piece of content. Because if you're lucky, people are going to go on your article, they're going to scroll down, they're going to see a video, they're going to click on it, they're going to watch the whole video from your page, hugely decrease your bounce rate, and then Google is going to say, wow, that's a really helpful page. This person was basically on it for 15 minutes. And that really helps to improve your SEO as well. Other things that I would say for your content is add authority arguments again, the social proof, the testimonials, and write them out. Don't add images of logos. It doesn't help because AI search engines are not necessarily indexing that as fast or as well. And so you really want to make sure that you type out loud, Nick Loper is trusted by X, Y and Z famous person, or has X amount of, you know, followers or listeners. All these kinds of, you know, top authority arguments, place them up front, place them close to your entity, name your brand name, and also really make sure that you don't do too many, like, vague referencing. Right? And what I mean with vague referencing is saying things like the sentence like side hustle nation is the ba ba ba ba ba. It is trusted by no, make it so that your sentence where you add the authority arguments literally says side Hustle nation is trusted by. These are kind of small things. They're not going to make the, you know, a massive change. But if you structure it like that, you are way more likely. And again, it's about stacking all of these things, double dipping, triple dipping. Make all of these small changes and that's really going to make a huge difference in terms of you being perceived as the authoritative go to product or solution for your niche.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, it's interesting because it's that kind of informational content like the listicle, like the long tail listicles. The best side hustles for attorneys, for nurses, for teachers, for couples, for retirees. Like, we've written that article every which way and that's kind of the stuff that's kind of down like across the board as, you know, just kind of, hey, informational, you know, we don't have a ton of additional context about what this person is looking for. And so it seems like the AI answers just kind of get served up there and even if they're still ranking well, it's just pushed lower and lower down the page.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, well, it just really just hoovers up all of your info. Thank you for giving me a great answer. Now I'm just going to take it and I'm going to give it directly to the user. So people are really not going to these pages anymore at all.
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Nick Loper
Yeah. So not great in the informational content space, but it could still be valuable for service providers, for product sellers, for that. Different business models.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Well, I think for informational. For informational businesses, I'm not quite sure because I'm not one myself. But I would say think about the products that you have. Right. Which I think a lot of the time will be things like courses. People are 100% still taking courses and thinking about what does really like that funnel look like and what other potential like info products can you really start offering?
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Nick Loper
Yeah. Going beyond just Q and A informational content, you got to figure out how are we going to pivot this a little bit deeper. What's the model behind the model?
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Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, I think so. Well, I think in different formats, it's also evolved really differently. So for YouTubers, for example, that hasn't really shifted that much and they're getting way more clicks now through things like AI overviews. So I'm seeing a lot of affiliate writers really go over to YouTube because they're seeing way higher conversion on affiliate articles and affiliate content there. Really?
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Nick Loper
Yeah. Is it worthwhile. I saw this Explorer GPTs section.
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Is it worthwhile to create your own.
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That'S trained on your brand or your voice? And does anybody use this stuff? Is this something that people should be playing around with?
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Tonya Van Gastel
I personally, I think it's not worth it for the fact of having the GPT, but it's really worth it for SEO because, you know, you see that fifth one there, AI Humanizer, if you go up a little bit. So I think if you search for AI Humanizer, it's possible that this GPT page will rank super, super high. And basically it's done by this company called mchdigital Solutions. You can click in on that and then that will drive traffic to their website. So I would totally do it if you add in your link you to the company because that's really a great way to drive traffic and rank really high for crypto tv. I rank really?
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Nick Loper
Of course, yeah. Who knows what they're actually doing? But they are ranking well on this page. If anybody's looking, I'm sure they are.
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Tonya Van Gastel
Like, there's been 10 million plus conversations here and 50k plus ratings. I think a lot of that will be because it's actually getting so much traffic from search. So GPTs rank super, super.
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Nick Loper
Well, yeah, this is it. And yeah, I guess I was curious, would it be worthwhile or to feed in, you know, the body of work from the last decade plus, you know, podcast, transcripts, written content, whatever, and like train, you know, the side Hustle GPT. Like if anybody wants, you know, ask the side, you know, here's like fitness coach guy, right? So this is kind of an interesting one. Okay, Are you getting, you know, fitness clients out of this? Are you getting, you know, nutrition clients out of this? Possibly. Right. And so maybe that is a play. I don't, I just never thought about it.
- [32:18]
Tonya Van Gastel
Well, let's go into it. Let's go into, you know, the hacks, the tactics, the, you know, vague, esoteric kind of things that people have done to actually rank on AI or get SEO traffic. Creating custom GPTs is definitely one of them. What you're going to see is that just by fact of this PhD gen coach having a GPT, now they're on side Hustle Nation and now a bunch of people have seen their link. But also when you search for a PhD coach, they may rank really high because ChatGPT has crazy domain authority and so they rank really high for a bunch of queries. And by fact of being on that page, by having something linked to your website from that page, it will be really good for your own personal SEO. And also it really does have potential to get you a lot of traffic. Look for high, high volume keywords. Try to make a GPT around that. That may work quite well. A more popular thing though, that I would actually highly recommend.
- [33:23]
Nick Loper
You need to be on the $200 a month plan for that or is that a month experiment to throw out?
- [33:29]
Tonya Van Gastel
No, I think you just need to be on the plus plan for that.
- [33:32]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [33:32]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, the $200 month plan, I think that's really for like developers. I'm not on it myself. I'm on the regular plus, but.
- [33:39]
Nick Loper
Yeah, yeah, but.
- [33:40]
Tonya Van Gastel
And I have created custom GPTs, although that was like I think maybe a year ago or half a year ago, at least when they came out. So it should be possible. Another thing is to create cloud artifacts. So it's very similar to GPTs. And you basically want to hit publish. And then you could also potentially rank really high for cloud artifact. These are two things. It's called parasite SEO. Parasite SEO is basically SEO where you use an existing website or platform's domain rating to go and bump your own service or your own article. A lot of people do this on Medium. So Medium is super popular with affiliate bloggers because a lot of affiliate bloggers can go there, post their article and they don't need to have their own website that has domain rating 80 or 90 or something like that. Yeah, Medium, Substack, Beehive, all of these places. I think Medium is the most popular. But definitely parasite SEO is huge tactically.
- [34:41]
Nick Loper
What does that mean? Like posting articles on Medium?
- [34:44]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, so if you know for side Hustle Nation, you're kind of fine because you have a very trusted website. If you're a completely new website, you just listen to that tip. You're like, oh, I have to make a website. And maybe you use like Lovable or Bolt or one of the other AI builders to build one. My favorite, by the way, is Lovable. But you did that. Your website is not really going to get that much attention because it's too new. Right. So Google doesn't really trust it yet. And so what you want to do is you want to go and still write that listicle, embed the YouTube piece of content, but instead of only publishing on your own website, or not even publishing on your own website, you want to go on Medium and publish there, or you want to go on substack and publish it there. Because those websites are ranked much higher. And because they are ranked much higher, basically Google trusts them a lot more than. And it's way more likely for your piece of content to actually get traffic.
- [35:42]
Nick Loper
Yeah, okay, you're going back to the double dip thing, or at least like a syndication plan. Like you're going to create the stuff. You might as well put it out there where it's got the best chance to be viewed. More with Tanya in just a moment, including some of the technical, foundational things you can do to set your site up for success and the surprising tactic that could end up getting you quite.
- [36:02]
A bit of exposure.
- [36:04]
Coming up right after this new year.
- [36:06]
New systems, right? It's the time when we all look at some of the messier parts of our business and think, well, what would it look like if it were easy?
- [36:14]
There's gotta be a better way.
- [36:15]
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- [37:22]
I have heard that site speed really matters because the AI crawlers are looking for the cheapest, most efficient way to get the information that they need. And it's some of the technical foundations making sure your site is easy to crawl. It's well structured in a way that, you know, this category feeds into this, you know, relevant topic areas and all of that kind of stuff. And so kind of laying the right technical foundations before, before doing any of this other stuff is like we make sure that it's set up for success.
- [37:54]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yes. It kind of depends where you are in the journey. If you know what we're talking about, you're probably not going to need that information, but you can get really far by going to SEO.SEO SEO optimum.com or just googling free SEO audit. Putting in your website and seeing what it says.
- [38:16]
Nick Loper
I think Ahrefs will do this for free, too.
- [38:18]
Tonya Van Gastel
Ahrefs is amazing, but I don't know if they have it as a free tool. I think Ahrefs has a lot of free tools that are great to check out. If you want to be serious about AI, SEO and SEO, I highly recommend an Ahrefs subscription. In my business, we spend an insane amount of money every year on Ahrefs. I think it's 6,000 or 8,000 now just because it's such an incredibly valuable tool. And if you're serious about SEO, the ROI, in my opinion, is 100% there. I would say, though, that's not what I would suggest. First, do your first three things. Sure, you can run it through a technical analysis tool, but my preference really, when talking about technical SEO and AI search is for you to do schema generation. So what is schema? Schema.
- [39:09]
Nick Loper
That was the next thing on my list.
- [39:13]
Tonya Van Gastel
Great minds. Schema markup is really helpful and relatively important. You know, do it after you've done everything else, right? Do it after you've done the three things. Don't break your head over it.
- [39:27]
Nick Loper
It's like structured data markup language to. Instead of just having text on the page, it's telling Google and these other engines what type of text is it. So you can have an article entity, you can have an FAQ entity, you can have different. You can have a review entity and like just kind of giving it a little hint or a clue or some kind of guidance of, you know, what to expect here.
- [39:50]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yes, that's exactly what it is. It's basically telling. It's like how robots talk to robots, right? Like you have regular text, but with schema it's a little bit easier and a little bit faster for the AI crawler to pick it up. So how do you implement schema? You go and you search schema generator. Nobody does these things just typing them, unless maybe you're a developer, which I'm not, and that's fine. You just search for schema generator. You're going to probably, you know, click on the first thing. That will likely be fine. It's going to ask you what kind of article it is, a how to, maybe something else. But let's say it's an article type format. That's a format and it's going to Ask you a couple more questions about what is this website? What is this? What is that? You just answer it. You're going to get the answer. The markup, you want to take that, you want to copy it. And depending which CMS you're in, you're almost always going to have a little box that says schema. You know, putting your schema markup here, you just paste that in there and you continue living your life. That's the main thing.
- [40:59]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it was probably last year or the year before. Like I just found somebody on fork and it was, I want to say, less than 500 bucks. I don't know what. It's just, you can go, you can test like Google has like their structured data testing tool. You can see, you know, how they're reading it and it'll give you kind of a green flag or say like a yellow warning if it's not fully correct or, you know, what might be missing. But there's, it's a solvable problem. But again, you know, one of these little checkboxes you can do to make sure your site is structurally sound and easy to crawl.
- [41:30]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, a hundred percent. And what I want you to know is that it's actually really easy. Don't overthink it. Just copy and paste. Answer these questions. Copy and paste a certain text box in. You're fine, you're good. Don't make it too difficult. I want to go back a little bit to the technical optimization about your question about site speed and stuff like that. So yes, these do matter a bit. It again is really going to depend on what kind of website you are. If you know your entire like E Comm website, like Shopify, Shopify is pretty good at making sure your website is like really up to speed. If you're using something like framer or lovable. It's also really pretty good, even webflow. Unless you're really working with a custom website, generally your site speed is going to be okay. So I wouldn't worry about it too much. Again, I would put it in the SEO Optima and then I would do a little review. And then unless it's throwing huge, just like red flags where you probably want to copy and then paste the entire report and dump it into ChatGPT and ask it, this is my website. I'm getting this report. Help me troubleshoot. And then I think generally you'll be like 80% of the way there. One more thing I really want to share that I think Google Search Console is a nightmare. It's a horrible place to be. It's very complicated. And so my search tool of preference is called SEO Gets. It's free, it's insanely powerful and it's just a beautiful way to actually get your search data in. It's going to show you very easily all of your clicks, all of your impressions on all of your pages. It's going to help you to divide your website up into pricing pages, your blog content, your this year in a really easy overview. It's also going to show you what the click through is of your pages. So this is something that's really important because when you are looking at your website and you're still going to get certain clicks, certain impressions and impressions are up, but clicks are down again because of AI and everything being zero click. Yeah, but again get that click through up. That's really important because when you already have impressions on something, you really just want people to click. And the way that you do that is by changing what appears on the SERP on the result page. So sorry, I just made a complicated word, but SERP is just a search engine result page. So you, the way to get your click through up is by changing your title and by changing your meta description. And so instead of needing to do a whole new article, you can just get your click through up by changing the title and changing the meta description. And that's super powerful way to really think about how you can get your click through rate way up and your clicks higher.
- [44:35]
Nick Loper
This is where look, we're already getting a lot of impressions. It's already ranking, it's just not getting clicked. So how do we make that listing more compelling? Well, we do it by changing our title and a little preview snippet and hopefully more people click on it as a result.
- [44:47]
Tonya Van Gastel
Exactly.
- [44:49]
Nick Loper
Okay, I have a note here about Bing Webmaster tools. Because of Microsoft's apparent relationship with OpenAI. Is this a thing?
- [44:59]
Tonya Van Gastel
Absolutely, 100%. I think also your like easiest, like among your easiest wins.
- [45:04]
Nick Loper
Yes.
- [45:05]
Tonya Van Gastel
If you haven't yet, add in your website to Bing Webmaster and adding your website to Google Search Console. Some people don't do that. It's the easiest thing to do. Do the Google one first because then you can just go to Bing Webmaster and automatically import. You can automatically all of your websites.
- [45:23]
Nick Loper
I can't remember if I've ever done this, but yeah, Google's been set up for years.
- [45:26]
Tonya Van Gastel
Google, Bing Webmaster. It's going to take you less than 60 seconds.
- [45:30]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [45:30]
Tonya Van Gastel
Bing Webmaster is really like thirsty for people to add their website there because nobody does it? And so they've made it extremely easy, you know, because nobody thinks about Bing, but it's a very easy setup.
- [45:44]
Nick Loper
Okay, nice.
- [45:46]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah. Ah, one more thing. Content refreshes. Content refreshes are basically where you go and, and you look at all of your content. You pick one that you think has the highest potential, but that maybe hasn't really unlocked that potential. And you know, change some text, you add paragraphs, you, if it's a listicle, maybe you like update a bunch of the text and the images and the title and whatever you update that, you refresh the content, you just hit publish. And it's way more likely that piece of content is going to get picked up because studies from AHREFS show that content that has recently been refreshed gets 60% more pickup. And so with HubSpot, I think there's a study on HubSpot showing that like HubSpot has been refreshing their content way more and they've seen huge gains in terms of getting their content cited in AI. So contact.
- [46:41]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's interesting. This has been a process for, really for years, but have almost completely paused publishing new like SEO focused content, but instead are, you know, investing some time in keeping the archives up to date and going back and refreshing these articles exactly like you said and changing the publish date or you know, last updated, you know, this week or last week and just trying to kind of. It's still time consuming to go back and do it for all the archives, but it's still, it's easier than creating something new from scratch.
- [47:15]
Tonya Van Gastel
And it's a really great time also to start implementing your bluff, your bottom line up front and also your ethics.
- [47:22]
Nick Loper
Got it. Yeah. Add to those pages a little bit.
- [47:25]
The other type of content I think.
- [47:26]
You mentioned before was like high citation content. And I was like, well, what kind of stuff? The example that comes to mind is like the statistics page, you know, side hustle statistics. How many percent of people have a side hustle? Like that stuff probably has more citations than anything else because journalists find it and then they link to it. Is that the kind of thing that you're talking about or is there. Am I off left field?
- [47:47]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, no, absolutely. That totally helps. And again, it's going to depend on what your business is. Pages that are like, you know, independent studies by X and Y are really likely to get cited, but we don't. It's not my top recommendation because now you got cited, but it might not necessarily be directly helpful for your business. Right. So if you do a study about These are the top most popular side Hustles and this is how much they earn per kind of industry. Now you've shared all that informational content, you're going to get cited in AI Search, but it's not necessarily going to drive people to your business because it is informational content and it is not necessarily a brand recommendation. So it's a really great way to get sighted. It's just maybe not the best way to improve conversion rate or drive sales and revenue.
- [48:39]
Nick Loper
Okay, for that you need to do more like bottom of the funnel, like this product versus this product. This, you know, that type of stuff.
- [48:49]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yes, bottom of funnel, your own content again YouTube or articles outreach and also make that website. There are some like fun tactics here and there that people love to talk about. One of my favorites is to do a press release. We've seen that press releases have a huge uptick in terms of being cited because of course generally press releases get syndicated in various publications and then they might get picked up by AI search. So doing press releases about maybe new product release, a product feature and then also maybe like a milestone. So side Hustle Nation hits 5 million listeners in latest podcast. The way that you want to do that is you want to kind of think about the main key point that makes your business, you know, look interesting to your potential target audience. You can use ChatGPT to draft a press release because it's a press release always reads like it is AI generated to be honest. And that's fine. Just a prompt could be like write a press release about these things, structure it like an Apple press release. You want to add an images and then you want to use a news wire. You want to use a newswire to distribute that press release and that's the.
- [50:07]
Nick Loper
One that you like.
- [50:08]
Tonya Van Gastel
I like EIN Newswire. I like EIN because you can still get into things like AP News. They still have really wide circulation. They have circulation also per industry. So if you are in retail, you can get circulation in retail. You can select specific region and they're not super expensive. I think it's 200 or $300. There's definitely an art to the press release that gets pickup that you know, another topic that like you can talk about for hours but in, in, in short make it not interesting, make it factual, make it factual in sense of if I don't know anything about you, why are you interesting? Right? Because here you are actually trying to, you know, convince again with social proof, with authority arguments. And you need to be very honest about what your proper social proof and Your proper authority arguments are because with press releases, you know, your newswire could do really well and could get picked up in 40 different publications. Again, boosting your backlinks, boosting your whole website's SEO, boosting your AI search visibility. Or you could do a press release newswire, a distribution, pay 300 bucks and get picked up in exactly zero publications because none of them were deemed, you know, authoritative enough. So make sure that you make it genuinely really interesting. Add in all of the big partnerships that you have and whatnot, and you're going to really improve your odds.
- [51:40]
Nick Loper
And it can't just be like a self congratulate, self congratulatory thing. It's got to be somewhat relevant to like the broader world, right?
- [51:50]
Tonya Van Gastel
It can absolutely be so congratulatory. For example, a milestone. Right. So a milestone is a very common time for businesses to start doing a press release. Let's say it's, you know, again, side hustle nation celebrates 5 million. 5 million viewers.
- [52:10]
Nick Loper
Sure.
- [52:11]
Tonya Van Gastel
I think that could get some interesting pickup. Probably not in AP news, but yeah.
- [52:16]
Nick Loper
And maybe it taps into the larger zeitgeist of, well, maybe more people are looking for side hustles and I could see it working, but I've never done a press release, so that's kind of an interesting strategy.
- [52:25]
Tonya Van Gastel
Think about the angle really well. Use GPT to brainstorm what the angle is. Ask, you know, get it to prompt it like this. Prompt chatgpt. My business is blah, blah, blah. I would like to do a press release, but I'm not really sure about what. Can you help me to think of some angles? Ask me questions until you have enough information to suggest the angles. Yeah, go through that process. You will get a lot closer to where you need to be to actually have a really good press release done. For sure.
- [52:56]
Nick Loper
Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I'll have to give this one a shot. That sounds fun.
- [53:00]
Tonya Van Gastel
Yeah, I think it's really great. Like you've got on some clients, like really great pickup in huge publications, not even pitching individual journalists. So I highly recommend it.
- [53:13]
Nick Loper
Well, Tanya, this has been great. I've got a lot of notes, I've got a lot of homework, a lot of action items. What's next for you? You got ranking on AI.com. what are you excited about going into this year?
- [53:24]
Tonya Van Gastel
I think probably the most exciting thing for me this year is that I am on a content journey on Instagram and YouTube at foundertania where I'm talking about all of this and more. So please go ahead and give me a follow a like a subscribe that we really appreciate it to keep me going. I'm also really excited about continuing to build my AI search marketing agency where we help tech SaaS businesses between 2 million and 200 million ARR to get recommended by ChatGPT. Doing everything that we just talked about and more. We're now a team of 10 people, which is kind of crazy.
- [54:05]
Nick Loper
Wow.
- [54:05]
Tonya Van Gastel
But yeah, yeah, really excited about it. Also excited about taking a bit of a break for the holidays. So that's going to be nice.
- [54:15]
Nick Loper
Very good. Founder Tanya. We'll link up those resources in the Show Notes as well. In addition to ranking on AI, let's wrap this up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation 2026 edition. I know it's only been a few months since the last episode, but see what you got for us.
- [54:33]
Tonya Van Gastel
The biggest learning that I'm going into for 2026 is to not be too hard on yourself. You probably have a ton of things on your plate. You're, you know, maybe stress kids are running around going crazy. Maybe you just don't feel that good or you're like low energy. It's probably because you've done a billion things in the last year. You know, don't beat yourself up. Take it one day at a time. Relax. And I think a lot of people are doing side hustles because you kind of want to have that freedom. Skip to the part where you're super stressed and get to the part where you feel, you know, good about what you're doing. And it's, you're doing it on a pace that actually works for you. And so yeah, don't be too hard on yourself.
- [55:17]
Nick Loper
Yeah, make it sustainable. Give yourself some grace. I appreciate that. Because it's, yeah, everybody wants more, more, more, faster. It's like, oh yeah, it'll be. And I still, you know, I'm telling this to remind myself of this too. It'll be this model. It'll, you know, even though the to do list is never done, it'll still be there tomorrow. Well, very cool. Again, founder Tanya ranking on AI. I put together an AI SEO checklist based on this conversation that you can download for free at the Show Notes for this episode, just hit the link in the episode description. It'll get you right over there. And if you want more Tanya in your life, check out episode 700 we did just a few months ago that was all about building this really cool AI powered headshot business from zero all the way up to an exit. Really cool story in that one. Episode 700 in your archives. Big thanks to Tanya for sharing her insight today. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. Fire off that text message, let them know they should check this out. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hasawan.