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- [00:00]
Ben Shab
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network.
- [00:06]
Stefan Spencer
Looking to launch or scale your podcast.
- [00:09]
Ben Shab
I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice?
- [00:19]
Stefan Spencer
Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for.
- [00:34]
Ben Shab
Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
- [00:38]
Stefan Spencer
Here's today's host of the Voices of.
- [00:40]
Jordan Cooney
Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Stefan Spencer, who is an SEO expert, author and speaker offering innovative solutions in digital marketing and web development. Stefan specializes in helping businesses establish a strong online presence.
- [01:01]
Ben Shab
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health, backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over a hundred technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT Yesterday.
- [02:21]
Jordan Cooney
Stefan and I talked about using AI to build linkable assets. And today we're going to continue the conversation by discussing personal brand building with AI. Okay, here's my conversation with Stefan Spencer, co author of the Art of SEO. Stefan, welcome back to the Voice of Search Podcast.
- [02:38]
Stefan Spencer
Thanks again, Jordan.
- [02:40]
Jordan Cooney
So we're diving in after an amazing episode yesterday on using AI for linkable assets and the genuine pioneering innovation approach that all of US content marketers, SEOs, PR professionals, absolutely have to adopt in order to elevate our link building game. The days of just a, you know, article exchange or blog post exchange are gone because you, as you said in the episode yesterday, you can just put a prompt into any of these systems, any of these LLMs, and voila, you have a blog post. The reality is that you have to innovate beyond that. And if you missed our episode yesterday, please go back. Stefan has some innovative ideas and approaches that he's applying to his own podcasts and businesses, but also some very insightful views into how we can use critical thinking to elevate our link building game. Today we're going into personal brand building and very quickly, Stefan, there's been a lot of talk on this podcast about brand brands using AI to build up their corporate or their business brand to effectively be present in placements like chatgpt prompts or verticalized LLM based search experiences. And so there's a lot of talk about how businesses and companies can do that. But today we're talking about personal brand and how personal brands can build up their presence through AI. Love to start off this episode by really understanding why is it so critical to build your personal brand? What is the value behind that? For a lot of our listeners, especially those who are just getting their career started, I think it's really important to understand the value of this exercise before we go into the utility of AI for it.
- [04:32]
Stefan Spencer
Yeah, great question. Think about this like your personal brand is the only brand that you have from cradle to grave. At some point if you have a business, you have something that you will part with. Because it's not a business if you can't sell it. It's self employment. And that's the worst kind of employment. Because self employment, you pay yourself the worst, you pay yourself last, you work yourself the hardest, much more so than any other employee. So you want to have a business, which means it's an asset. It's an asset that has value. If you were to sell it and walk away, if you have to go with it, then you're self employed. So your personal brand you get to keep after you have that exit. So I had a successful exit in 2010 and the acquiring agency was surprised that after my earn out check cleared six months later, I said I'm leaving. But I couldn't imagine being employed. I mean, I'm unemployable. Most entrepreneurs think of themselves as unemployable. So you need to nurture and build this personal brand so that you can continue to stay relevant and important as things evolve, as AI changes and so forth, if you're going to be able to survive, you know, survival of the fittest, most people think of that as like you're the most strong, most fit. That's not how that law or theory was developed. It's actually the most adaptable. So the species that are the most adaptable are the ones that survive, not that the ones that are strongest and have the most muscle mass or anything. So you gotta be adaptable. And one of the ways you're gonna be adaptable is by continually growing and pivoting your personal brand as this massive amount of change that we talked about on yesterday's episode evolves, you know, because the law of accelerating returns, we have to stay on top of all this stuff. And so. And I'll share one more thing before I let you grill me with the next question.
- [06:54]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [06:56]
Stefan Spencer
The definition of a brand, it's a promise. A brand is a promise, or even better, a promise delivered. So if you think about brand building as creating promise and then delivering on that, then that will help frame what you do so that you're building real value and not just smoke and mirrors when you're creating this personal brand.
- [07:21]
Jordan Cooney
I have a bunch of different directions in terms of questions here, but one that I think is really prudent for our listeners is if you're working at a company or you're working at an agency, does this still apply? Does this effort of building your personal brand still have the same merits? If you're not an entrepreneur or you don't have, you don't have the ambitions to run your own company, is it still important as an employee in a company, let's say even a big company or a small one, a family run business, maybe even. Is it critical for you to be building your personal brand?
- [07:54]
Stefan Spencer
I think so, assuming you want to stay employed. I mean, realistically, an agency with, let's say 60 people could do as much work, produce as much value, create as much output, deliverables and all that with six people and AI in a year's time, as with the 60 that they have now.
- [08:17]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Stefan Spencer
So are you going to be one of the people that's left or the one who's cut? Most likely, statistically speaking, you'll be one of those who's cut.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Stefan Spencer
So how do you stay at the cutting edge? Well, you've got to show that you can be more creative than the AI. You can merge in all these different kind of expertise and experiences and ways of thinking that it's not the strong suit of an LLM.
- [08:48]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [08:49]
Stefan Spencer
So for example, let's say that you could apply principles of. I'll just for my, from, from my personal standpoint of biohacking. Right. Constantly quantify, like to quantify itself and the, the wearables and constantly trying to improve brain performance and longevity and all that sort of stuff. Applying those principles and methodologies to, let's say, I don't know, link building. They're very different. Like you could also say, well, I'm going to apply basket weaving. I know how to basket weave and I know how to scuba dive. So how can I merge those two together and figure out ways to be a better scuba diver using basket weaving? Yep, that's possible. I'm sure. I can't, can't think of a way that that is possible because I'm not a basket weaver or a scuba diver. But this is how we need to think differently outside the box, beyond even an AI.
- [09:47]
Jordan Cooney
But even better yet, use your own expertise. Right.
- [09:50]
Stefan Spencer
I think one of the experience. That's the thing that the LLM doesn't have. It hasn't basket weaved and it hasn't scuba dived.
- [09:59]
Jordan Cooney
Correct? Yeah. I mean, for me, one of the pivotal points when I realized AI was going to be transformative was we were working with AI with an AI startup that exclusively built technology for the construction industry. And they would set up all these devices on these big, huge, complex construction sites. And all they do is monitor risk situations. Right. Like this is dangerous here alert. You have, you know, a weight problem with this section of your construction site or, you know, you know, the way that trucks are entering this zone is gonna be very risky for your business. And I mean, these are huge, complex sites. Right. We're talking about thousands of employees working, you know, around the clock on building these, these, these infrastructures. And that's when I was like, oh man, this is crazy. Cause if you can apply this to construction, you can apply this to just about anything. To your point. And, and as we talk about personal brand, what does that application look like when it comes to leveraging AI? And where do you take, especially for our listeners who are earlier in their career and they're still refining, say, their craft and their areas of expertise, how do you start to use AI to build up your personal brand? Where are some of the key points that you can go and test or utilize AI to expand your footprint?
- [11:25]
Stefan Spencer
I think you're trying to expand your footprint in three different ways. One is through experience, through establishing that breadth and depth of experience. Another is your creativity. Not just problem solving, but really crazy outside the box thinking that AI is not good at. And then intuition, which also AI is not good at. Intuition is like that still small voice, the whispers of like, you know, the kind of psychic thing. AI is not psychic. AI is not intuitive. So how can you demonstrate those three pillars in profound, impactful ways using AI? Well, let's say that you gave a Talk@brighton SEO or you wrote an article for Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land or whatever and you're just working in a company. You're not the entrepreneur, you're just an employee. But you want to build your personal brand, started doing these things, speaking and writing articles. Well, that's a lot of work and there are a lot of people who do that too. So you need to differentiate. So I gave you an example in the previous episode about how I differentiate myself from other podcasters by creating entire full blown video based courses from the material of the episodes. Well, if let's say you gave a talk at Brighton SEO and let's say that you created a slide deck in Google Slides or SlideShare or whatever and now you want to post that to your website. Well, that's okay, that's a good idea. But that's table stakes. That's pretty basic. You could use AI to expound on your recording of the talk and your slide deck and maybe use Your voice using 11 labs and have it create a whole set of materials. So much more than what the. So somebody who didn't attend your talk would fomo. They'd feel like they missed out by not getting all this material that you posted on your website. It's that good. See if somebody goes and looks at your SlideShare deck, your Google Slides, and like, wow, I wished I would have attended your talk. We want to flip the script on that and say, wow, I attended Jordan's talk and it was really good. But boy, now I'm really blown away looking at all the materials that he has created based on that talk, the workbooks and the plans and the SOPs and the tools and the videos and all of that that he created. And they're not thinking, wow, he must have used AI to create all that. They're just thinking, wow, this is phenomenal. This is mind blowingly awesome.
- [14:18]
Jordan Cooney
Right?
- [14:18]
Stefan Spencer
You know how some people, they just seem to be always on LinkedIn posting amazing stuff like they must never sleep.
- [14:25]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [14:26]
Stefan Spencer
We want to give the person that love, that kind of impression going to your website because we don't want to send them to a flash in the pan sort of destination where they've forgotten about you in two weeks time. Nobody goes to old stuff on any platform other than YouTube. So your Instagram post from a week ago is dead, right?
- [14:45]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [14:45]
Stefan Spencer
So we want to create stuff that sits on your website that is mind blowingly awesome and that establishes your personal brand in those three areas specifically. Remember, experience, creativity and intuition. Yep. And so let's say you wrote an article for Search Engine Journal, but it was five years ago and the world's changed. Well, you can update that article. You using AI, you can expound on that article was, let's say a thousand word article and let's make it a 20 page ebook using AI. Now let's take that ebook and turn it into an online course. Let's turn it into all sorts of other materials and do other videos and listening material and so forth. You know, because people are in a different frame of mind if they're listening to like an audiobook or an audio training versus on video. Like they could be at the gym, they could be driving their car, they could be running on the beach.
- [15:47]
Ben Shab
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you could work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [17:15]
Jordan Cooney
Yep. One of the things I hear from a lot of individuals who are starting off in personal brand building. And I think it's really more of a mental block in my opinion than anything else. It has nothing to do with your number of years of experience or any of your capabilities. Especially in a world now where AI can help us drive much of this creation repurposement of our own personal brands is where do you get started? How do you get started? And so how do you get over that first hump and that mental block of getting started and building your personal brand?
- [17:56]
Stefan Spencer
Well, there's an expression. I don't know who came up with it, but I know Brian Tracy popularized it. And it's called Eat the Frog. He's got a book called Eat the Frog. And that means the thing that you're procrastinating, just do it first thing. If you hate being on video and you don't want to build that YouTube presence, but you know, you need to just eat the frog, get it done. First thing interesting, no checking email. None of this nonsense that just is other people's busy work assigned to you.
- [18:29]
Jordan Cooney
Right?
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Stefan Spencer
Do the thing that matters. Eat the frog. And do that. Rinse and repeat every day. Eat the frog. So that that's going to move you forward and it will keep you on purpose. What is your purpose, your mission on this planet? It's not just to be a cog in the wheel on some corporations, SEO department or whatever you're doing. Sure, you're here to make a difference. So what are the things that will make the most difference? And. And pick that. You know, it's an 8020 rule. It's the Pareto principle. But what most people don't know is that Pareto. The Pareto principle is actually fractal. That means that there's an 8020 of the 8020 and an 8020 of the 8020 of the 80 20. So what's 8020 of 80 20? That's 5% generates 56% or 4%. You know, it's like, what's that 5 or 4% that generates the majority of the value? Start there. So you need to be. Again, I shared this in the previous episode. Discernment. You gotta be super discerning. Like this is a skill that will help you be future proof as things evolve. Discernment in everything. Discernment and what you work on and what you don't work on.
- [19:46]
Ben Shab
Right.
- [19:46]
Stefan Spencer
It's more important what you say no to than what you say yes to. There are a lot of good ideas, but those good ideas will keep you from your greatness.
- [19:53]
Jordan Cooney
And it's Interesting. I think that one of the misconceptions, and I know, Stefan, you're an entrepreneur and you've built various companies and now have a variety of different ways that you spread your message and your experience. But for a lot of our listeners who are working at an agency or working in house, what I find interesting is they fail to recognize that sometimes the number one place to go get help to build your personal brand is the place that you are at today. It's your own company, your own experiences, your own adventure in terms of where you're at in life is probably the easiest place to get the help to get started. For me, when I was in my earlier in my career, ebay was the foundation, was the bedrock by which I was able to build my personal brand, because it was very easy to say, I work at ebay. And it was. And it was very evident that I had different experiences than everybody else in the SEO world at that time. And so I could leverage that to create a message and build up my personal brand. And I think that that's often forgotten by a lot of our listeners. As you think about this concept of help and getting started, what's some of the advice, Stefan, as we close out this episode that we can give our listeners to get started? What are some of the key ingredients? How do they start eating the frog? Is it fried? Is it sauteed? Is it. How do we get to the vegan frog eating? Where's the journey on that eating the frog effort? And how do they. What are some of the key advice that you give our listeners as they get this journey started?
- [21:30]
Stefan Spencer
So start small. Like there's a book called Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, also Atomic Habits, same concept, but BJ actually is the guy who came up with it. So you're going to start small, but you're going to build on these habits. You're going to habit stack. And one of the habits I'd like to encourage our listener to do is to start getting on videos, start getting on their YouTube channel or on other people's podcasts and just make this a regular thing. Maybe do a 30 day challenge. 30 day YouTube challenge. Every day for 30 days, you have to post a YouTube video to your channel. Okay. Or another example of a challenge is for the next three months, I am going to get on, let's say five podcasts a month as a guest, and I'm going to pitch and pitch and pitch until I get a yes. And I'm not going to stop until I get five of those in A month. And so now with AI, you can take that wonderful content of the interview on the podcast where you were a guest or the YouTube videos that you've posted, and now you turn that into long form blog posts using AI, using the transcript. So there are transcription tools that will take. In fact, YouTube automatically creates a transcript every video that you upload. And so now you got the transcript, you turn that into a long form blog post and you drop in some imagery you can use Midjourney or OpenAI Dall E, which is built into ChatGPT. You have these or free stock photo sites too, like Pexels or Unsplash or whatever. So now you've got something that looks really visually interesting.
- [23:26]
Jordan Cooney
Sure.
- [23:26]
Stefan Spencer
It's not just a boring wall of text transcript. It looks like a readable article, maybe pull quotes and so forth. And a lot of this can be done with AI, Right? Right. They're tools. They're AI tools that are designed for podcasts to turn the transcript into a blog post and have table of contents and episod episode summary and timestamps and all this sort of stuff like Cast Magic, for example. So now you've got something that looks really substantial. You post that to your website and you're off and running. So leverage AI to take those videos and turn them into something that's way more substantial. Because just a YouTube embed on your blog is not going to rank for anything.
- [24:16]
Jordan Cooney
That's right. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. A huge thank you to Stefan Spencer for joining us. If you can't wait until our next episode. Would like to learn more about Stefan. You can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his podcast website, marketingspeak.com or his personal website, stefanspencer.com okay, thanks to Jordan.
- [24:40]
Ben Shab
Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter. Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J, T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO Health helps you keep track of your backlinks and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which will answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.