The Unscripted SEO Podcast with Cauvee: Turn Content Into Cashflow —SEO, AI and Personal Branding

Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera. I'm here with Kaveh who's going to introduce himself real fast, give us a taste of his history with focus on why we should trust him as an expert.

Appreciate it, Jeremy. You know, Kaveh, Inspiration Engineer here, guys. I'm so grateful, thankful, and honored to be here, be able to serve you with a message today. As far as Inspiration Engineer, I would just say majority of times people are like, "What is that title? What does that mean? Like, how did you get this title?" And it's very simple. I was in a position where I wanted to create my own lane because I had 10 skills I mastered that didn't fall under the same category. So I was like, "Hey, community, help me out because these are the things I've mastered throughout time. You know, what do you see? How do you identify what I do?" And they chose Inspiration Engineer. My purpose is to awaken dreamers to become the best versions of themselves and create a life of legacy and meaning. And so with that said, I'll let that be the introduction that stands for us.

So what does that mean, inspiration engineer, in terms of like, what are you trying to get them to step out of? Like, what's that viewpoint? Where did that come from?

Great question. So, there's two things that I wanna touch on here, especially being that we're on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, we gotta talk SEO first, right? From a domain or from a topic that you wanna become a category king or a category queen for, you wanna have keywords within your SEO scripting that is memorable and when people search for what that topic is, you're the only one that comes up, okay? That wasn't the, that was not the thought, that was not the process and the idea behind, oh, let me just create this fun title that sounds cool, so on and so forth. There's two sides of this philosophy where on the left side, they'll say jack of all trades, and I hate that. I've got a music album coming out called King of All Trades, just to change the paradigm. But saying that to say, on the right-hand side of that, They say the more skills that you have, the more valuable you are to the marketplace. That is, both are, could be true.

Yeah.

However, on the right-hand side, the more skills that you have that don't fall under the same umbrella of the same topic, like let me give you guys an example so everybody's rocking with me. If you're a marketer, and let's say you got copywriting, SEO, media buying expertise, you do graphics, you do CPC, like all these skills fall under marketing.

Right?

But for me, I was in a unique situation. I was a public speaker, I was already locally famous as a rapper, singer-songwriter, and poet. So there's 3 right there. I was an audio engineer, I had mastered sales corporate, in my corporate job. So when I was at the Chambers of Commerce, I was a salesperson, or a mar— like a marketing person, right? When I was around artists, I was a musician, and I would change who I was depending on the community that I was talking to. I didn't like that. I was like, I need something, guys. And I don't know how large my community was at the time, but I was on Facebook and I was like, hey, like, this is a real problem. I feel inauthentic to myself. I needed to have something that is an identity that I can stand on. And so we had 10 titles. They voted it down to 5. We took the 5, voted it down to 2, took the 2. They finally voted, you're the Inspiration Engineer, and the Inspiration Engineer was born.

That makes sense. And it kind of Ties into some of the concepts of branding and personal branding that have become more important in the SEO niche. You know, Google certainly has moved the bar in expectation in giving the field to entities that can prove that they are valuable or prove that they exist and prove that they have a following. And that can be either based off of backlinks, it can be based off of the behavior, it can be based off of number of citations of your name as a business or your name as an entity. So it definitely makes sense to, to try and think about personal branding. So what's been your messaging or your direction as far as advice or guidance in that space to the people that you're working with or speaking to?

Yeah, I think that if you have a resume, you're a personal brand. If you're in a neighborhood, you have kids, how your family sees you, how people that you interface with on a regular day-to-day basis, what comes to mind when your name or your face pops up in their mind, that is already your personal brand, alright? From a business perspective, one of the things that I've been talking about, and we're gonna continue to talk about because now interfacing with a lot of venture capitalists, family office investors, angel investors, and having these conversations, I think we're starting to see the landscape change. Where someone like Michael Jackson, for example, who's been gone and passed away, rest in peace to his spirit, for many years, that brand still makes money as a personal brand to this day for all the royalties and money that collects from every asset that he had when he was here that he's created that has licensing to it. With that said, we're starting to see people like Kevin Hart, The Rock, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, whatever you guys know him by, Jessica Alba, the Ryan Reynolds, the Ashton Kutcher's, these personal brand entities that have what I call extensions of their personal brand, right, that does not attach to their original identity, what we knew them for. The Rock was known for wrestling, he has Teremana, He has a skincare line, Teremana's is tequila, a skincare line. Obviously we know him from the acting, but you have these different variables or extensions or sister companies, brother comp— whatever verbage people like. You have extensions as to who you are. And I feel like anybody can do this. We're also seeing startups in the space that are creating ways, whether through NFTs, tokenization, different things of that nature to give a voice evaluation— this is different, this is new— evaluation to someone's actual value, which is like, what do you mean, Kaveh? Like, you're— you have value, you have worth, yes, but that worth has a number on it. Well, there's starting to be startups that are trying to figure that out. Um, another startup that's really interesting is one that brings evaluation to a musician's catalog, going back to Michael Jackson, which that changes the way in which royalties and music is monetized, so on and so forth. So I tell a lot of people, look, I think we're gonna see a change in what I'm calling and I'm identifying as personal brand portfolios. A lot of VCs now have said that the better startups to invest in are startups that have a portfolio. They have multiple monetization revenue streams attached to their startup. Well, personal brand is is very much the epitome of that in this way that I'm explaining it. So I think we're going to see a shift, but ultimately I tell people that that's at the highest level. On the more moderate, more common, more traditional, we're seeing people that want to be more freelancers, we're seeing people that want more freedom, we're seeing people that want to be more nomadic. And so if these are some of your goals and your objectives and things that you want to accomplish, To me, it makes way more sense to brand yourself, right? Because people see that they interact with the human, they make deals with the human. There's more celebrities than there are corporate global icons as far as like Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, you know, if you wanna name all the top brands, Tesla, whoever it is you like. There's more personal brand identities that have that level of influence than there are corporate brands that do. So to me, unless you leave this earth, your personal brand always goes with you. And as you continue to navigate, change lanes, pivot, go left, go right, do this, do that, as you build your tribe and your community, people fall in love with you, which is why someone's willing to go to a Kevin Hart vegetarian restaurant because it's like, "Well, I know him from comedy. I think this restaurant could be really cool." And to me, that gives you a lot more flexibility with the ways in which you monetize, with the way in which you bring value. And then the way in which you serve. So I'm just all about personal branding and building those.

That's interesting. I mean, things are in a very different state in terms of publicly being yourself. Like if you were in the '70s and you're like, you know, I'm just going to be myself and that's— I'm going to make money just being myself. That wouldn't make any sense. So we have all these channels to gain visibility. So how do you couple leveraging a personal brand with the choice of platform? We see that video of the woman in front of the TikTok building crying and begging to be let in because her $100,000 business just evaporated overnight. Yeah. 'cause she no longer was on the platform. So how do you make that choice of building yourself up on visibility in terms of followers or reach or audience when it's a known fact that you're kind of renting that space? You're playing in somebody else's domain, you don't necessarily own it. So how do you approach that part of the equation?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I'm gonna touch on this in a couple different parts. I love how Kanye says, "I think in symphonies." So I've got this idea, this idea, this idea, this idea, and if you allow me to get it all out, it'll all connect. So the first thing that I wanna address is we've seen an evolution throughout time as to what is success. Probably when you were a young kid, Jeremy, more than likely your parents wanted you to be a doctor, or wanted you to be a lawyer, go get your degree. Uh, in my parents' era, it was, uh, pensions were still available. You could go get a pension and retire and live off that. I think that depending on the culture in which you were raised, depending on the parents that you had, the what is success is always going to evolve. Now that AI is as, uh, popping as AI is, that's even gonna change things with what that looks like in 10 to 20 years as we start seeing more and more AI prompt engineers as humanoids are on the earth and all the different things that robotics is about to become, the success is going to consist— consistently change and evolve. So let's first off make sure we're in alignment to that. The second thing I would say, as far as what platform or what strategy, what philosophy, what principle do you recommend that people use, because it is rented territory, we're always going to go back to an email and a phone number, right? As long as emails and phones exist, as many of those that you have collected, that is technically the only thing in which you own unless you build your own SaaS. You want to build your own app, you want to build your own SaaS, and now you actually own the IP that collects all these details. Most people don't have the ability to hire engineers or developers to be able to create those level of assets. So we're talking about for the traditional or common personal brand out there or entrepreneur out there that wants to build community as we're discussing. So the first thing I would say is, can you find a platform that gives you access to the email? LinkedIn initially did that. You could export your connections into CSV and you could actually get some of their emails. Right. Right now what's hot and trending is Substack. I am not affiliated with Substack in any way, shape, or form, but Substack, I think they have about 5 million user base, give or take, and they actually give you access to the email, okay? So sometimes being on those kind of platforms, now you, even though you're renting space on Substack, we're new to the, to the Substack metaverse, if you will. However, this is a good example. Mm-hmm. Question. Um, even though Substack is rented territory, right, it's just repurposed territory, meaning that our content, my content, my team's content, we just repurpose it over— we just repurpose it over—

hold on.

Uh, so when it comes to rented territory, rented territory, uh, going back to the Substack example, yes, we we are renting territory there, we are repurposing our content from other places, and now there's a phraseology in the marketing world talking about omnipresent, right? Omnipresent marketing, being on as many channels and platforms as you can, syndication. That is very wise, challenging to do if you're a solopreneur, solo founder, small team, but saying this to say, going to this question, if you're able to syndicate your content, and put content on a platform that then gives you the email and it's repurposed there, you semi-own the content because you're owning the lead, right?

Yeah.

And we're talking about leads. Ultimately, the goal for any business is to move from lead to conversation, nurture to sale, acquisition, and then advocacy on the back end side. So I say that saying, if you are on platforms that allow you to rent make sure you are getting the email addresses because you are not in control. Just as we saw in America this most recent year with Donald Trump— I'm not gonna go talk politics with you, Jeremy, don't go there— but Donald was like, hey, uh, we're gonna lock up TikTok for American users. And I know China has certain regulations. I'm not an expert on that as to what, you know, apps— I think— I don't think they can use Google, I don't believe, but there's certain apps in China that they don't let you have Your country could shut down shit. Like, you don't know what is gonna happen. So I think to be prepared, it is wise to make sure that you are collecting that data yourself with a privacy policy and terms and conditions. I'm not your attorney, I'm just telling you some things that you might wanna have.

Yeah.

But I'm just saying that to say, with that stated, and unless it's on your website where you're collecting the information, unless you are collecting the information from someone else's rented space, space, then you don't technically own the lead. So then the last thing that I would say is you want to pick the platform that is best suited where your audience lives, right?

And— Yeah.

If your audience lives on that platform, be on that platform. Just keep in mind, as Jeremy just told you, you don't own that platform. And so you're at the, you're at the, the risk and reward of what that platform decides to do, which can ultimately impact your entire business if you set it up incorrectly.

Oh, that's absolutely true. I just interviewed a LinkedIn expert guy and we're joking 'cause like, if you are selling like home decor and metal signs that you make yourself and you've got a niche business, then that's probably not a LinkedIn play for you. You're probably looking at Instagram and maybe Pinterest and that might be more your playground or speed, but if you're, you know, like in commercial real estate and you're, you know, it's like Norman commercial real estate agent, well then you should be on LinkedIn because you're trying to have that professional face and professional conversation. He did have a really good point about understanding your audience and LinkedIn's pretty good about surfacing the roles of particular people that you can target. And have conversations with. Um, what do you— how do you work out the difference in social media between broadcasting and having conversation? Because like there's two different sides of that coin. Like I feel like sometimes Instagram leads itself to more just being a broadcast platform versus using Threads, which is very much more connection, collaboration, conversation. So what's your experience or advice when it comes to using those, the duality of social media?

I love it. The first thing I want to touch on is one of the things that we teach when it comes to sales. This is very important. We don't call it sales. Nobody likes to be sold. We don't call it that. We call it relationship acquisition. Position, okay? Because that's what you technically are doing. You are building a relationship, you are creating connection, you are having a conversation, you are nurturing that conversation into a transaction. That's very important to first off have as a pillar that we're going to build on. With regards to broadcasting and the conversation, when you're earlier on, you're going to go one-to-one or maybe one to a couple hundred. Meaning that you can literally talk to that many people. As you continue to scale and the platform is going to get bigger, you have to go more broadcast, which looks like webinars, lives, where you can create this dialogue. But now we're going one-to-many and one to the masses. I would actually say, based on my experience, all platforms give you some level of both, or— Yeah. They're trying to become both. And I'll give you a great example. Prior to Elon purchasing or acquiring X, uh, AKA formerly known Twitter, Clubhouse— the Clubhouse experience, which was these audio clubs that people would get in these audio groups and then share information back and forth, right? Um, X didn't have this audio room, which is now— right now it's popping. It's like Clubhouse on X, but it's not different. It's the same thing. It's the same principle. It's just now it's on X, and now you can bring people into this room and everybody's having audio conversation, right? You can have a moderator and do all the things. So I'm saying that to say, like, with, with what you were talking about, Instagram to Threads, like Threads right now doesn't really have a— not that I'm aware of anyway, not on my account. Uh, Threads doesn't have a broadcast right now where you can go live, right? But more than likely they're going to create one in the near future because That's what we do as humans. We want to create. We want to create, like, what's the next thing? Like, they now have the CapCut. I don't know if you guys have gotten the offer depending on the size of your audience, but now they even have the CapCut or the— depending on what you guys use for video content, the InShot or the Final Cut Pro, like whatever you use to cut up your video. Now Meta, Instagram, whatever I think it's called, I got the invite just like that, that real— Oh, okay. A while ago, it's called Edits, right? That, that's now the way that they're going. They want to play and compete with the Adobes and all the people that do, uh, video production, right? Now you can edit with on their app, right? So all I'm getting at is that's more than likely going to change. We saw this evolution with LinkedIn. Um, LinkedIn went from being primarily posts and then they added in the newsletter piece and then they added in the live. You couldn't go live on LinkedIn initially, right? So I think That first off, understand the platforms are gonna evolve, and because it doesn't have it doesn't mean that it won't have it in the near future. Second thing, understand that if you want a strong engaged tribe, you want a fan base, an actual fan base, you're gonna have to have conversations with your people. No matter how big you are, you have to engage and connect and have conversations. That's what the heart of any business is gonna be, talking to your prospects, talking to your leads, and talking to your customers. Following that by, well, which one should I do? I'm all about syndication. Syndicate to the best of your ability. So I would give you a tool right now and I would say go StreamYard. StreamYard's our jam because it allows you to live syndicate from multiple places. And so whether you're just starting or whether you're seasoned, it's a great way to now, as I'm, as I'm creating the content in real time, comments and things are popping up from the feeds of these other platforms, and I can interact with everybody from one hub versus having to do it on one platform, do it on another platform, do it— ah, that might be too, too much for most. So I think that goes back to where's your audience and where do you focus majority of your time.

Yeah.

And then lastly, if you're like myself, I'm just big on, let me do as much syndication as I can do. And so with that stated, I'm gonna go use a a platform or a tool like StreamYard and be able to broadcast and have conversations at the very same time on multiple, multiple channels.

So a year ago, it's funny, in 2015 I used a tool that was called Jarvis and it was a very early stage LLM tool. And my friend was using it for marketing. His name was Michael McDougald. He was trying to market his toilet partitions. And so it was amusing to me when, was it 2 years ago now, 1.5 years ago, everybody suddenly was like, GPT, GPT is a thing. Go out and do this. And they're like, all of this search volume, all of these news articles, and now everybody's like, oh, did you, you know, did you use GPT? Like, it's now like the new Q-tip, it's the new Google. Um, it's not that that technology didn't exist. I mean, I used a form of it even in 2007 when I was doing SEO for realtor sites, and it was called a content spinner, and it would take a sentence and it would swap out one word with another. And make like 4 different versions of the same sentence, and we'd copy and paste it in, uh, and make terrible real estate sites. Now we have, um, GPT as ubiquitous an experience as Google. Um, what has been the impact of that on marketing? Um, and how should you— what should your headspace be in adopting this tool, leveraging this tool, being aware of this tool, or running away from this tool?

Ah, I love it. I had a phenomenal conversation with, she was a teacher, a lady yesterday. She's from Brazil, lives like in Canada, and you know, she's so afraid of AI. I want to first off address the fearmongers out there and just the fear around it, okay? And I love this because it gets us to really think. I heard this said, and I forget where it was when I heard it, but when I heard it, I was like, I'll never forget it. He said— and he was referencing really money, but this applies to any and all tools— he said, fire. He said, fire, I can have a barbecue, I can, you know, light a campfire, he said, but I can also burn a house and commit arson. He said, water. He said, water, I can use it to wash my body, I can use it to drink. He said, I could drown a baby. And I was like, oh, oh, hey, he went hard. He was like, money is just a tool. So I say that saying, AI is a tool, and yes, it will be used for evil purposes. Absolutely. That's what any tool that an evil person has access to it. All right, but there's also going to be a lot of beauty and a lot of abundant things that are built and created with AI. Okay, so just first off, I will say that with the fearmongering— Oh yeah, I was gonna take your job. AI is going to take your job. It depends on what that job is. Okay, it depends on what you do. And I'm gonna be very honest with you so that y'all understand. I just posted this the other day. I created— I'm not bullshitting you— 3 different apps in 1.5 hours. That's at least 12,000 hours that a coder or developer would put into creating an app. Now, is it done? No. But now I can take this to a full-stack developer and we can finish the rest of it. So that gives us the— look at that from just an hour perspective. Now, I'll be honest with you, Jeremy, because this is hilarious. It's so hilarious. I built a prompt. I built a prompt on, um, ChatGPT where— and it wasn't my— it wasn't my plan. It wasn't my, like, I'm gonna build this product. I had a client at the time, she did like $5 million to $25 million multi-unit properties.

Yeah.

And she wanted my help to go and get more partners and clients to do all this. I ain't got that kind of time to be your affiliate partner, no disrespect, no arrogance, no ego to that. I just ain't got that kind of time. So I was like, look, I need to do quick R&D, right? And I need to be able to run someone through, understand everything about them, when they filed their company, like all the things. Within a matter of seconds. All right, I didn't even think it could scrape and do the things I was really— and I still do this, this is funny, I still do this one. I try to see what ChatGPT cannot do. I try to put in prompts and try to kind of almost like fake it out, and I haven't been, I haven't been proven right yet as far as like it can't do this. So I put in the first prompt like, hey, can— if I give you a LinkedIn link URL, can you tell me— and I, you know, had all the questions like, could you tell me this, this, and this about the person. It was like, yes, I can do that. These are the parameters of where I cannot do that, to paraphrase what it said. Then I was like, I need you to also tell me what their investments are. I need you to scrape these platforms, these sites where basically investors have to post their public data of accreditations and all these things. I need you to check this. Can you do that? It was like, yes. And I created a prompt that right then and there, as far as R&D, it did— it evaluates— just that prompt by itself evaluates the $4 million if you have a sales analyst or a research analyst does that work. So I'm sharing with you guys, not from an arrogant perspective. I mean, I know it sounds like that because a lot of people are normally like, what's that tool? What was that prop? What did you do? And yes, I will tell you, but it's behind a paywall, just so that we're just straight up honest and transparent about it. All right, but I say that saying that introduces you to the power behind the tool. Okay, there— AI is here, people. It's not a thing that we're talking about in the future that is coming. It is here. All right, humanoids are here. If you saw the movie I, Robot, and you saw that, that movie, it is in existence. You watch Elon Musk present them to the world with his new taxi cab and all the things. It's here. So there's no point, in my opinion, in debating its ethics, debating the integrity, having a conversation around the evil and the good. It is here. So being that it is here, my thing is How do you leverage it to your good? If your job is in jeopardy, it might be wise to start understanding how you can use it within the industry that you already understand. It's no different than cryptocurrency, right? Crypto's here. Digital money's here. We need to start learning how to leverage it to our benefit or utilize it to our benefit to play amongst those that already know how to use it. So by choosing to, uh, disregard it Or by choosing to be afraid of it, by choosing to fill in the blank as far as a negative or pessimistic view, to me you're only doing yourself a disservice. So then with marketing and with its ability to be an assistant, this is what I'll tell you, because I could go on this for days and we ain't got that kind of time. If you think of it, think of it like, I want you to go into your mind and say, man, I don't like, visualize, imagine I don't have the money for an assistant. Like, I'm brand new to this, I don't have the money, okay?

Yeah.

ChatGPT or AI can be that assistant, and it can be the assistant you command. You tell it what to do. You— with the better you get at writing prompts, you command it. So if you think of it in that way, and then being like with what I just said, I haven't found something that it can't do yet. And I am looking, I ain't lying to you. I really am looking, trying to figure out like, what can this thing not do? It's wild. So I say that saying it can help you with so many things. Copywriting, research, ideation. Uh, they're building therapy tools now, which is wild. Tony Robbins now has an AI clone of himself where it's not even him, but you're talking to him and it's not him, but he's giving you advice as if it is him, right? Like it gives you these new dynamics that we've seen throughout human time. Like, like, we just never seen it as far as computers. So all I'd say is just start getting in the game, learning, you know, what other people are doing, and then seeing, you know, as you're playing, getting in there and figuring out things that you can do and ways that you can use it in a way that feels authentic to you. Here's one thing do not do, okay? Do not do— let's talk about the do-nots.

Yeah.

Do not put into ChatGPT something that you need for maybe, let's say, copywriting, right, or an article or blog or whatever you're writing, and you just copy it word for word and paste it. Don't do that. Don't do that. There are people that will know, A, that's what you did, and it's almost like plagiarism, right? Like, it's unethical. It's like, eh. So understand the dos and the don'ts, but I encourage you and I implore you to start getting in and playing and seeing about all the amazing things that you can do because it can be a phenomenal assistant. Mm-hmm. In so many ways, and it could be a department of a company in so many ways. So yeah, that would be my advice to you guys.

Love it. There's one other flip side of that coin of like using LLMs and using AI as, as a tool, um, directly. But there's also the other side of understanding, um, appropriately how to interpret, you know, AI overviews on Google are ubiquitous. You know, I was just talking to Matt Brooks of SEO Tarik the other day, and we're like, you, you can, uh, our friend Lily Ray in our SEO industry, she asked how old am I. One day it said that she was 98, the next day it said she was 6. Um, so like she There are these consistent examples of where ChatGPT or LLM-powered tools in the search space sometimes get these things wrong, but they also represent a new way of search, a new way of people discovering you. And, you know, a great example is HubSpot. You know, Mike King is— he's the absolute king in our SEO industry. Um, he just did a presentation that showed, you know, for HubSpot, their traffic looks like this when it comes to the impact of LLMs and how Google is, is changing and adjust, like changing and adjusting how it's displaying, uh, content from people, even big brands. But the revenue of HubSpot was still on the up and to the right. And he's like, what is the dichotomy there? Like, what is the difference? Because we now have a new search experience. You know, we have— you can go to Google and there's the AI over you. You go to Microsoft, there's Copilot. You've got Perplexity and you've got GPT, you've got Claude, and they're giving information and advice to people like you about those things. But that also represents, you know, a an opportunity or a process that we have to grok or we have to grok and understand what is happening on the backend of that search engine. You know, SEO isn't Google, Google-o. You know, Google isn't the only search engine. And I think there was a golden age where folk like me, we really were just Google reverse engineers and getting as much traffic to our sites as possible focusing only on Google because they had a huge monopoly. But that monopoly's starting to break, and search is showing up in different ways on different tools and different platforms. TikTok's being used by kids these days. Like, they're not even— like, you're a grandpa if you're going to Google to find things. I'm going to look on TikTok and see what people are, are buying for clothes, you know. Like, so when it comes to that flip side of AI and LLMs. What's your experience? What's your insight? What's your thought on that dynamic?

Yeah, there's many thoughts that are coming to mind right now, which is why I'm smiling for those of you that are watching the video portion of this episode. Because one, my biggest challenge is keeping up and I'm ahead of than most people, right? And that's a challenge. Like, I'm like, man, I need to hire a head of AI at our company that like just stay up to date on all the AI, right? We have— I was, I was, I didn't want to disrespect you as you was talking. I wanted to really dial into what you were saying, but now I'm gonna pull it up on my Asana. We probably have, I don't even know, probably about 200 to 300 different AIs. Uh, I'm going to my AI tool stack right now to actually see like how many do we have. Okay. That is a challenge. Just keeping up with it because of how fast. Mm-hmm. It does move. Um, and there's one side of it where it's like, in theory, there's always the theory of what it is, what it does, what it says, you know, what it creates, whatever. And then there's the application of you actually implementing it and it doing what you wanted to do, and now you have a different experience. Okay, so usually when I— this is just me— when I get introduced to a new AI and it says something to me that's fascinating which, like, going back to this one that I was using specifically for coding, uh, vibe coding, for those out there that like the vibe coding language, uh, it's hooks. The hooks that they were saying that it does, I was like, no, it doesn't. Like, I mean, they just had me from the hook. Like, just straight up, like, the hook was just so good. I was like, it does not do that for that price point. Like, it just does not. Like, I'm gonna buy it just to see that your bullshit radar, because that's just too too much bullshit. It really did do what they said it did. Okay, now I said that saying, I do this with a lot of different AIs. When, when I first found out about Claude, when I first found out about, um, what was the other one, and I didn't like it just because the user face— like, for me, I didn't— I like a really good UI/UX, and if it doesn't have a good UI/UX, for me, I'm just like, eh, like, not for me. And I'm trying to find which one that was. I think maybe it was Po? No, no, it wasn't Po. I did— the which one it was is not relevant. What was relevant to the conversation is, um, I think different AIs are greater at different things, okay? And just like any startup, right, the, the quality of talent that you get to develop or code or build is going to impact dramatically the quality of that resource, okay? And so there's everybody right now in the VC world— I should say everybody, that's a stereotype, but generally speaking, every startup's like, well, let me try to figure out an AI that I can build because VCs are so gullible. That's where they want to put their money because it's such a hot topic. All right.

Yeah.

So I say that, say you gotta keep that in mind. A Groq that's backed by the financial capability of Elon Musk versus somebody who just started out, there's a lot more developers and quality, quality talent they can leverage to build a Groq. All right, so we want to keep that in mind. I think that it's— it's— there's— in AI, there's too much trust, in my opinion, that the information is accurate and valid just because it's artificial intelligence. All right. Right.

Yeah.

Also, I think we have to be wise around what we choose to do or how much access we give it. And let me give you a great example. Right now, a huge problem throughout the world is already identity theft. Identity theft is a problem, is it not?

Yeah.

So now that we have AI cloning your voice, cloning your image, if it's already a problem, don't we maybe think that the possibility of somebody being evil, going back to the evil use of it, do we think that somebody could use that technology to your disadvantage and be you? And now you've got a whole nother problem, proving that that wasn't you. That's a whole— that's like identity theft 5.x, 10.x.

So are you saying that I shouldn't say who my mother's maiden name was?

I mean, exactly, exactly. So all I'm saying is, like, I have been very cognizant of where Colby is going to put his voice, and especially with the cloning and doing all that, because I'm aware if I don't own that tech If I don't own that, that could go bad real quick. So you gotta, I think, be— have some discernment. What tools you're gonna allow, what things you're gonna allow, what things you're gonna do, and understand the big picture, okay? But then within what you were saying back before, if we just take it at face value, "Oh, like, this is accurate," I think that's not wise, period, no matter how we look at it. Most of these deep search thinkers of AI, usually cite their sources. All right, so when you're talking about this lady that was 98 in one and 6 in the other, did it cite any sources? Did it give any links as to where it grabbed and scraped that information? Ultimately, these are, from what I understand, they're scrapers to some extent. I don't even fully understand how they work, but as they are scraping, they're like Grok specifically. I love Grok for deep search. I don't use ChatGPT for deep search. I use Grok for deep search. Then, yeah, the ability for it to think which I've been told like, well, AI isn't actually thinking. I'm like, okay, but it's creating. So how is it creating without thinking? Like, that's a whole nother conversation for another day.

Yeah.

But I said that saying, there are fascinations for me with understanding a little bit of code, and that's not my expertise, but then how they build these engines to be able to do what it does is fascinating. So I think that it makes the most sense just so that we have a common like, Hey, stamp it. This is what I said and take it, leave it, love it, throw it in the trash, makes me no difference. But I think that we have to fact check, like anybody that is just going at face value that this tool— and you mentioned HubSpot, we use HubSpot, we don't use Copilot. So we, we, we have other tools that we like that, uh, integrate with HubSpot. So I think you start just finding the things that you like, the things that resonate with AI and the way in which you use it and the way the way in which you command it, and then that becomes a part of your tech stack, that becomes a part of your regiment, if you will, and the habits and the ways in which you use it. But that would be my thoughts on that.

I think an addendum to, like, fact-check it, but also if you're a business owner, if you have a website, you really need to go back and secure your fundamentals 'cause there's so many small business owners, so many site owners that Uh, you know, you'll have them create like a site for their salon and like, yeah, I made a website for myself. And you look at it, you're like, okay, you put a really big picture of your lobby and then like, we're the best at customer service, we'll— we're happy to serve you. And you know what, you take away the images, you leave the text, that's the— that could be a poop scooper site. Like literally take the text, it could apply equally to somebody that's you know, doing eyebrows versus doing mani-pedis. So you actually have to say what it is that you do here. You need to go back to your About page and instead of saying, "Oh yeah, we're happy to be in this community," say what community you're in. "We're happy to be in Cookeville. We've existed for this long. You know, this is why you should trust us." Add some testimonials. And here's how we compete with our competitors. Here's our value proposition. Making sure that you have a page that compares— if you compare yourself to another competitor, if you know they're more popular than you, then you should be listing what's the difference between SEO Arcade and Ahrefs. If you've got a SaaS that you've created, put your value proposition into content because that's going to be picked up by these LLMs now. So people that are doing that research, you flip it on its head. You take what we just talked about of, hey, I want to learn more about this particular industry. Think about what that output is, uh, based off of the content that exists currently on your site. And if it's not satisfactory, you need to make more resources. You need to think outside of just basic keyword research tools Because we're going to go into a season now where search volume isn't something that's as easy to look at, and that the Google search volume for these terms and phrases is not going to reflect the common zeitgeist of— because you were talking at your phone, they just turned on Claude talky-talk ability, so you can talk to your AI now in your phone in a way that Siri cannot do. In a way that Google Assistant doesn't get anything. It's crazy to me how detached Siri is from reality, how detached AI or Google Assistant is from an LLM tool. I can do so much more just talking to Claude because it's connected to a whole responsive business model, but it's tapping in, it's crawling your site. So if you as a business owner, you as as a service provider, you as a personal brand, aren't putting out a resource there that can be consumed by those LLMs, they're going to hallucinate. And when they ask for, you know, what is it that you do here, there's a good chance they're going to get it wrong 'cause they digested half of a piece of information about Jeremy Rivera as a pastor And, but Jeremy Rivera is actually an SEO expert. And there's also Jeremy Rivera, the baseball star. You know, he's like on the Padres or whatever. So I asked one LL, you know, at the beginning, I asked about myself, what do you know about Jeremy Rivera? They're like, oh yeah, he's a pastor and he plays for the Padres and he also does digital marketing. I'm like, no, those are three different people. And so I had to work on my profile and put my stuff up, update my bio. Mm-hmm. I published a book, you know, and putting those details out and trying to get Google to get that right, um, is a whole thing. But it, it should put you into that mentality of like, hey, if L— if I'm using LLM tools to do this type of research and trying to find this type of stuff, if I own— if I own that type of, uh, place where it's going to be crawled What can I do, what should I be creating in my content campaign that's at the bottom of the funnel? 'Cause Google is going to eat your lunch if you're creating what is SEO article. You know, that's— you type that into, it's fundamental, it's 101 stuff. But what it's not going to have is what is your custom approach to your CPR class that you're running? What's the secret sauce? Did you hire 12-year professionals? Or, you know, if you want to give that information about what it is that you do, you gotta say what you do. And people are crazy about their websites 'cause they're like more obsessed with the color, the font, and which picture they're choosing, and they didn't say what they do.

I wanna unravel this a little bit 'cause this is Really funny. Again, I'm smiling, I'm laughing because it made me think about— don't make fun of me as I show my age here, but back in 2004, 2005, this reminds me of websites that had Flash design. Remember when Flash design was so high?

No.

And it was terrible for what Jeremy's talking about is indexable content, right? And what's really interesting is indexable content has gradually changed even on platforms that are very common. LinkedIn, not that long ago, was not indexable, meaning that the post that you posted, the, the articles that you wrote did not index on doing a Google search. Now it does. Instagram was the same thing. It was not indexable. X, uh, formerly AKA Twitter, same thing. Now these are indexable platforms where that content shows up. Most, uh, businesses— Jeremy, it blows my mind that don't have it. I don't know what it is about different— even like country-wise, right? Like I lived in Mexico for a year and some change. Majority of people in like Playa del Carmen do not have Google Businesses or do not have websites. Maybe have a Google Business, not a website, or maybe have a website, not a Google Business. And everybody uses like WhatsApp versus this over here, right? And so I find it fascinating that people don't even have the Google My Business, which is now on Google Maps only, as a way to create content that is already indexable. By Google. We don't even publish there that often, and we'll pop in, check it, or at least I'll check it every now and then, and I'll see like, oh, you got like 500 views on this like piece of content. I didn't even know, like I ain't published on there in a decade. No, I'm joking, but you understand my point.

I do.

One of the things that our challenge was, which is hilarious as far as indexability goes, Calvé with an E, with, excuse me, Calvé with an accent on the E, pulls up different search results than Kobe without the accent. Didn't think about this when I was putting out content. My actual name is spelled with the accent. Well, how many people do you think are going to put an accent when they're searching for me? Nobody. Now we got to change all this content that we have out there because you're getting a different result. I think it's very wise. Uh, Eric Thomas and some other people say like, don't search yourself. I'm like, nah, you need to know anytime you need to know what is going on with your brand. Now here's something funny, something that I looked up yesterday. So when you ChatGPT Inspiration Engineer, it will pull me up. Awesome, great job. But now what I'm seeing is a lot of content around the Inspiration Engineer, which is funny, about Engineers who need inspiration. This is new. When I say new, like, we've been the category king for this for a while, and now there are other entities popping up talking about, um, you know, engineers specifically that need inspiration. It's like, nah, don't try to come in my, my domain and try to do what I do. Like, we're gonna keep it separate. Like, y'all go grab something else. So I say that saying Um, it is very, very wise for you small business owners, for you large business owners— usually the large business owners, you just got this covered— but for SMB specifically, solopreneurs, solo founders, for you to have someone in your circle like Jeremy, or for people like that do SEO who understand it at even a greater level than I understand. And I understand to a baseline level. You can use ChatGPT to help you with this as well. But I'm saying this to say to make sure that your content is indexable from a local, regional, national, and international level, right?

Yeah.

You mentioned this earlier in the top of our conversation about being on sites that backlink, that have high domain authority. That is super important if you want people to find you. Now, understand that's a pay-to-play situation. It's an invest for success situation. People hate it. It's like it's vanity. I don't get leads necessarily from backlinking to Forbes or Entrepreneur or— TechCrunch or VentureBeat or whatever platform you are. I sell— one of our agencies sells these things, so that's why I'm sharing this with you. I know what I'm talking about. It's a, you know, $5K investment up to $152K investment for just an article placement. It's quite ridiculous if you think about it, but the truth of the matter is it does help that content to stand out because now the crawlers and all the things identify that this site over here, like our TED Talk for example, uh, my TED Talk is on TED.com. Mm-hmm. It was a TEDx, but it's on TED.com. So I get the domain authority reciprocation or the love from when people pull that up because that pops up immediately. Understand that people— and this is unfortunate, but it's the truth— people want to get the information quick and they want to make a decision quick. They do not want to do a lot of research. They do not want to go down the rabbit hole. They want convenience.

Yes.

So the better you are as a business owner at giving them the things that they want to know, and my goal, our goal is to make sure that you're saying yes to a sales conversation before we even have a sales conversation. You've done, did your due diligence, you're like, oh, Colbey's the guy, I see him on this, I see him on this, he must be doing something fantastic. That's for any business owner, that's just wisdom. And so I say that saying, if you're creating content and you're not thinking about the narrative and the stories that you're telling and making sure that those create almost like a recyclable, if you will, perspective of who you are, what you do, what you sell, how you serve, right? In addition to an indexable— the taglines, the hooks, and the things that you want to create. And this is an ongoing thing, guys. I am an edutainer, but you don't see much content about COVID in the music space. Oh, best believe I'm about to buy a Rolling Stones article with some new content that we created, to also grab that domain, right? And so all I'm getting at is you want to be very strategic, have a strategist, and have people that understand SEO, and map that out, whether that's content calendar, whether that's batching, whatever that is, to where what he's saying, what Jeremy just said, is that people can find what you do. And that's ultimately what you're trying to do with the game of SEO, is make it very simple to where you rank, make it very simple to where very simple to where people can get it in a really quick, uh, assessment. So look at what you do, like, oh, that's my person, that's my guy. And one other thing we didn't touch on, but this is super important— I don't know why people don't do this— you need to testimonial stack like crazy. What is testimonial stacking? I'm glad you asked. Incentivize people to have 5-star reviews. Incentivize— not, not do anything unethical— incentivize people to give you a Trustpilot score, a Google Rank score, a Facebook score, a LinkedIn endorsement, a LinkedIn review because the more reviews that you have, that is credibility that is very hard to fake. I'm not talking about Yelp where you can buy reviews. We ain't talking about that. No disrespect to Yelp. Yelp, don't sue me. We know what y'all did. But I'm saying it's hard to fake influence and credibility from that angle, getting actual customers and actual people to write about you. All right? Even the podcast that we're doing now, getting podcast hosts to review Corbett. Corbett was a great guest, okay, that's even on guesting, something as simple as that, that I don't sell. So I'm just saying, it is so important that you understand these different pieces and these different layers because that impacts your personal brand, that impacts your level to be influential, and ultimately that's going to impact your bottom line and how many sales you're going to generate in that year based on how many people you interface with and you have conversations with.

Love it, and that ties into the the last piece as we're kind of around the corner here, starting to wrap up. I know you talked about having something for my audience of learning how to monetize your content. So everything that we're doing to outreach, bringing them in, emails, you know, so what does that money-making process look like? What's your take on that piece of the funnel?

Yeah. I don't want to give you guys too much because it'll be a spoiler alert, but I'll give you high level. The first and foremost is the framework. You have to have a system, systemizable content, right? A framework to your content. There are so many people's— podcasters specifically— that create content, but they're not thinking about how do I monetize it. For all you listeners out there and viewers out there, first and foremost, thank being here. Secondly, the gift that I'm gonna provide for you— let's talk podcast for a moment because that's one of the gifts that there will be— is there's 100 ways to monetize a podcast. 100 ways. It's all in this resource that we give you. Majority of people only think about sponsors, or they think about maybe an affiliate, or maybe selling their own offer. So most people think about 3 ways. There's 100. So I want you to think about that and let that sit.

Mm-hmm.

Secondly, with content, going back to what I was saying about having a system and a framework, so many people spray and pray and they think that's gonna work. And maybe it used to, right? You send out 1,000 outbound, hey, go check out my whatever I have, go to the link, boom. And you send it out to 1,000, maybe you convert 3%, 6%, whatever it is, right? That does not work. People now are educated buyers. They want a relationship, they wanna do some due diligence, and they wanna work with somebody that's gonna deliver, okay? So, spray and prayin' is what majority of people are doing and they are failing. Matter of fact, every time somebody spray and prays us, we counter pitch them. Hey, you might need this relationship acquisition course so that you understand how to sell. But it's to make sure that you understand that from the content that you create, very buzzword, aka Russell Brunson, shout out to ClickFunnels, made this very, very popular verbiage, having a funnel. Another word or verbiage you'll hear, phraseology in marketing, is a drip campaign. So, like I said, without giving you too much spoiler alert, you wanna create content that inevitably nurtures that prospect over time, right? Whether it's newsletter, whether it's social media, whatever it is, or all together. Long form, short form, you want to educate them to get them to ask questions. And you'll see people doing— going back to our broadcast, you'll see people doing the ask me anything or like ask me a question, you know, FAQ, fireside chat, whatever, to where you can solve problems in real time, right? And know that people know that you know your shit. Like, as you guys are listening, you know without a doubt, like, oh, they know something. Let me see. Let me figure out if— how much does he know? Let's go down that rabbit hole. But that's what you want to create. That's That's what you wanna build. So the guide that you're gonna get walks you through the process of what that looks like as you're creating content, and especially as you're being omnipresent. So I wanna give you guys the actual formulaic way that you can create content, batch content, make content, and then ultimately be able to convert from your content. And that's the key, is actual acquisition.

Love it. Go ahead and shout out, I think you gave me an unscripted code where, where are they going to go to use that?

Yeah, that's hopefully, I'm assuming that's gonna be linked up in the show notes for you guys. The website is Inspiration Engineer. There will be a link, a direct link to where you can access both of those assets, and then you'll put in the code unscripted and it will be on the right-hand side. And as soon as you put in that code, it'll immediately negate the cost, so you guys won't have to invest for these resources. You'll be able to get them right away just for being here and just for being appreciative of your consciousness and your time.

Thanks so much for your insights, and I'll see you around.

Awesome. We appreciate you guys. Much love. It's your boy, Kawbe. Boosh!