Ep63: The New Chat GPT Feature Your Missing Out On & How to Optimise SEO

What's going on, everyone? Matt here for another episode of the PT Profit, Leverage and a lifestyle show. I'm with an absolute superstar from near Chicago today, Mr. Reed Hansen. How are you today?

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on, man. I'm really excited.

Awesome. Thanks so much for jumping on. I was super early for me but to dive into a couple of things. So just for, just for context, for people who don't know who you are, do you want to give us a little bit of a summary of what you do now, what you've done in the past to give us some context?

Absolutely. So like I said, I'm Reed Hanson. I'm the owner and chief growth officer at Market Surge. So we help personal trainers, online coaches and fitness professionals. In addition to small business and service business owners of various types, we help them with smart marketing, systems, automation and a sprinkle of AI magic, helping you to not be chased between stuck between chasing leads and doing the work that you went into business to do. So before this, I ran a seven figure photography studio and I led growth for some big name agencies. These days I am really interested in helping trainers, small business owners build predictable systems that attract clients, nurture them automatically and help them increase the conversion rates and to limit the amount of cold calling that they have to do. Um, I also, when I'm not working, I, you know, I try to, try to, try to find some time not to work, but I do run marathons. I enjoy lifting heavy things and I've been getting into boxing a lot lately. Mostly class is not, not actually getting hit. Um, so I really love all things fitness and I, I know that the, the hustle is real for all fitness professionals.

Yeah, 100%. Well said, well said. There's a couple of, couple of juicy topics that we'll probably get into today. Obviously, AI, we'll no doubt discuss AI. We've got a couple of things on here about SEO as well, but one thing that I want to just talk a little bit about. You mentioned you're trying to kind of limit the amount of cold calls people are doing or personal trainers are doing. So that's going to be a nice juicy topic for a lot of personal trainers. So how would, how would that work in terms of whether it's for your software or what your suggestions are to.

Yeah, and no, that's a great question. I, one of the suggestions I have is like any good fitness professional, I would recommend warming up before you do anything vigorous. And cold calling is, you know, people have a different relationship with telephone calls than they used to. It's can be startling to get a call from a number you don't, you aren't familiar with and even further startling to be immediately pitched to when you answer the phone. So what I recommend is the use of, you know, as you've talked about in many of your podcasts before, the use of these funnels so you can warm your leads up by prompting them to download something from your site, sharing something from your site, whether it's an email form. I'd say even a cold SMS text is, is a little bit softer than, than a cold call. So by no means am I saying put less effort into outreach. I'm just saying that you want to warm up your lead to the extent possible before, before you get on the call. You know, I still think there's value in cold calling and I will still pick up phone numbers that I don't recognize just out of empathy, I think. But I, you know, I think, I think warming it up really, really helps smooth things over.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm on the opposite, opposite on the empathy type side of things.

Sure.

In all honesty, if I'm like, if I'm like in a zone or something and like, because I work online, obviously, so my phone's just kind of hanging near me, if I see the phone ringer and I'm like doing something that's like semi important, I'm not answering the phone, so I'll call them back but like when I'm kind of ready and available. But you made some really good points there. I have a very similar philosophy. So I agree, like, in terms of like nurturing, nurturing the lead before having to, you know, cold call them and have a, not so much an uncomfortable conversation, but it's a, it's a easier conversation when they already know who you are and, and what you do a little bit more. So in terms of nurturing, is that something that, do you have any certain avenues that you suggest doing that? Is that like through social media? Is that through text message? Is that through email? How would you kind of suggest or.

Yeah, you know, all of the above. I, I provide a newsletter to my subscribers. So both my clients, for current clients, former clients, and hopefully future clients that have, you know, I have a variety of guides for marketing for specific niches or specific technologies on my website that people can download and that subscribes them to the newsletter where, you know, I keep them updated on the technology in our platform and the, the changes in the marketing landscape and in the AI landscape. So, so I, I share, I give and you know in, in over the long term I find that, that there is a great reward. You know, I keep a database of about 20,000 people and I will call the list periodically for those that aren't responsive. But you know, I keep. And then I also have some sub newsletters for some specific niches that I, that I work with as well. But you know, texting I also. Texting is expensive and texting as you probably know is, can be a little bit risky from a business standpoint where if you cold text too much you can get restricted by the telecom carriers. And so I would use that sparingly but, but occasionally and if somebody has actually interacted with you personally or like I said downloaded something from your site or subscribed to a webinar, those are safe people to text occasionally. But people that you have not interacted with, I would, I would keep with the email level and encourage them to opt into something some additional communication you do like, some offer you you have for them.

Yeah, and with the, with the email side of things, I think a lot of personal trainers, this is like, this is like the last thing they think about like email market. This is something that I've been doing for a number of years now. But a lot of personal trainers, they don't think it's valuable and they obviously got their own mindset on that side of things. But what do you say to people that think email marketing is dead or no one really opens emails these days? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, there is some truth to that. Over the years I have noticed, you know, when I, when I first got into you know, working full time, I was working at a software company and at that point you just couple anecdotes, you know, you could send a LinkedIn invite to anybody and they would automatically accept they just the novelty of a stranger wanting to connect was, was so cool and you know that that's. Those days are gone. And then you'd send an email and that was almost a, you know, that was worth a notification and worth acting on immediately. And I would get a very high response rate from a one to one email communication. And then as time has gotten by more and more people have access to mass emailing tools that have kind of worn out our email inboxes. And in response the email providers have put greater filters on these emails and so you'll find more and more of your emails land in span. Now the one, there's a few ways to get around that and If I could bring AI into this conversation, there are tools that you can use that help help AI to quickly bring in personalized snippets into your emails. That helps the, it does help the providers recognize you as a, as a unique sender rather than a mass emailer. So if you, so if you're sending personalized messages it doesn't, it doesn't trigger a flag that you've been sending the same message over and over. And so any, any chance you can to utilize those technologies is, is really going to help your open rate. I you know and people do still read email newsletters but they have to be, they have to actually have value. They you know, don't, don't send the, the same one over and over again. You make sure it's fresh news, make sure it's, you know, I like having human faces on there like your, your own face on there is good or videos you know, embedded in the newsletter. Those, those really help your open rates and, and make that email more valuable. But if you have sending 10 emails and getting 10 responses that is probably not going to happen. You you need to think of 10 custom very thoughtful personalized emails and you know, and then be ecstatic when you get you know, two or three Responses to to continue. And you know, I think that's, that's, I guess that's my thoughts on email is like you got have to lower your expectations. You do have some tools that you can send a lot more but, but it's absolutely a great medium to share your brand.

Yeah, completely completely agree. Yeah email marketing is is good and good good long long term game for nurturing. So do you mind sharing what the AI tool is that, that, that does that?

Yeah, you bet. So if you've so it's a combination of two tools. It's Apollo and Clay. Another so one that I'm using right now is called LEM List which has so, so Apollo and Clay is probably the most popular on the market. But I found this LEM List is working really well for me at a, at a very low price point. So what it does is you create these email sequences and you use a domain that is not your own so you can you buy a domain. So I've got like hello Market Surge and getmarketsurge IO so it doesn't pollute my main email sending domain. And then I it allows you to put custom fields with personalized snippets and then this personalized snippets it snatches from like a LinkedIn profile know recent social media Post so very, very, you know it's a great tool and th though I use a CRM and I definitely espouse a CRM the CRM is almost like too precious to use on, on mass outreach. You know just because it, you know you're, you do risk a little bit of authority or credibility on your main domain.

100%. Well speaking of CRM, let's, let's dive into a little bit about CRM. Again like personal trainers don't think about this stuff. A lot of personal trainers that just use like a Google sheet they do like all manual tasks and they don't realize how much they can really, how much time they can really save on a CRM or automations and that type of stuff. So for those who don't know if we just start super basic what is a CRM and what can, what can you do with it? What's some of the benefits of having one?

Sure. So I'm trying to think when the first word first came out but they, they. So it's customer relationship management system and they allow you to monitor so, so keep the activity and communications between you and the customer all in one place because you'll recognize there's a lot of mediums for communication and there's a lot of documents and information shared back and forth but the CRM enables you to store all those in a single place and keep the customer and separately the customer's company as objects within this database. And so depending on if are you selling to a person or are you selling to a company the CRM can accommodate either view the. But it also and actually I, I know a little bit about the history because one of I worked for Oracle and and they bought a company called Siebel Systems that was, was one of the original pioneers of the the CRM and the, the CRM initially just was like a data repository. It didn't, it didn't send anything out but, but in the last 10, 15 years it has been able and in the last four or five years it's been able to text and call out of the system. So you can actually integrate all of your inbound and outbound communications. Those calls can be recorded, those texts can be involved in all one conversation view. And where as a 2025 conversation with any other human you interact with is going to involve some face to face, some phone conversation and some text conversations. It's just nice to have all in, in one place. Bonus. You know these automations you can send when so say somebody's called and asked you for pricing, for, you know, how, how, how would six months of personal training look like? And, and you've done an assessment and given them pricing or maybe you have a fixed engagement and, but then they, then they disappear, you know, like in most businesses, like if you're in a retail business, you'd never see. But if you've made this contact over email in the CRM system, you are now able to send reminders, follow ups, additional information, requests for a future meeting, you know, any, any prompt or additional discount you'd want to send to keep that sale alive. And so it is really the CRM concept, I think. I'm sure there's some study on this, but it has definitely increased the, the amount of sal. Small businesses are able to do 100, 100%.

Like once when, when I started using a CRM, everything, everything changed for me in terms of having everything in one spot, as you said. So it's super easy to manage less, less stress as well, which is, you know, a big value point for a lot of people these days. You don't want to be having to do, jump through all these different spreadsheets to get to the same information that you could get if you had just the one system. I'm super keen to dive into some SEO stuff. Before we started recording, SEO is kind of brand new to me. I don't really understand it, which means probably my audience doesn't understand it either. So I'd love to dive in again. If we start super basic, what is SEO? What can you do to improve it? And what does it look like if you do actually improve it?

Yeah, so there, so SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Now this pertains primarily to having a website. So, you know, I asked Matt and I've seen personal trainers that have their own websites. Some do and a lot of gym owners do, of course, but individual personal trainers may or may not have their own website. Now in order for this to be applicable, you will need to have a website. But don't fret, you know, like on, on the CRM that Matt is using, you can definitely stand up a database or, sorry, a website pretty quickly and, and pretty easily. So you know, just quick plug for Matt's CRM. But, but the. Now when you have your own website, you know, who cares? You know that there are people that can, you know, you know, back to the 90s, they, they type in like John johnsonspersonaltraining.com and they'll. But those people were probably, they probably also had your phone number and could have reached you anyway. But what is really important then the value of search engine optimization. So that would be like a Google Bing, you want to be found for the terms that, that shoppers are looking for. So if you know you, you live in a town and somebody is looking for, if they're looking for a service, they're looking for a service near them or, or that's accessible to them. So they're looking for, you know, like maybe, maybe they actually put in the term personal trainer and that, that would be ideal. Now if you are in, if you're in the number one spot or even the top three, you have a very high likelihood of getting called or contacted from the person searching there. Now below that it drops off massively. I think, I think I saw that like 60% of all search searches, they end in the top three results. And so, so this is, and this isn't even referring to the paid advertising. This is, these are the, what we call organic results. Now there's, I mean I could go. So I just want to keep that at the, the basic level. Now there are reasons that some websites are ranked higher than others. We can talk about those. But what's most important is the, the results of ranking higher, which is more leads, more contacts, more money to your business. Now do you want me to keep going on this?

Yeah, well, let's.

I can dive into what, what helps your ranking if that.

Yeah, I was going to say how do you like obviously and same that's, that's natural, right? If you like, if you're searching something you just going to like, you just going to click the first couple and then the rest don't even get seen. Right?

That's right, that's right. Now so it would make it, make it seem like it's like an endless loop. Like you just can't break out of that. Well, there, there are a few things that you can do now. There's technical so on page SEO or technical SEO now it's basically making your website easy to read by the Google and Bing search engines. And most, most of the time if you sign up for a squarespace or you know, a website built on WordPress or you know, that is on Matt's CRM. They are organized in a way where you have like these H1 headers and they have title tags. So you don't really need to worry about all that. That, that's kind of advanced. But you just want to make sure you do in fact have descriptions of your web page and what, what you do. You make sure that every field is populated that, that you're given an option to on the initial setup. You can continue to refine that but you just don't want, you want to make sure there's no blanks. And you know it's helpful to have your business titled similarly to the URL or you know, make sure that your business matches your, the way you've registered and then, but most important for local SEO is to have your Google my business page set up. And that's, that's very simple to do. When you go into a Google search, you're logged into your Google account, click on the nine dots at the top and then it'll say my business profile and you go in and you complete that. That will help your local SEO more than, more than anything you know and make sure that's current and updated regularly beyond that. So that's the technical part. Beyond that there's the off page part which is really about authority and, and your, the strength of your brand. That so that includes backlinks which is the, the people that have linked back to your website because they say like so maybe you were featured in a local newspaper for you know, like a grand opening or a you know, something you did. You've, they've linked back to you in hypertext, let's say like local fitness, fitness professional and you know, it's hyperlinked that goes back to your website. Those are great links and tells Google that you're worth referring to. And the more of those that you have, the, the better you will rank. I'd say on top of that the, the, the better ranked that site is on the hyperlink. The, the, the better it will affect your. Sorry, the more beneficial it will be to your site. Then there is also the, the nature of the site, the how frequently it's updated. Google likes that it likes when you have text on your site that is very relevant that you're not that, that it's easy to use and that you're not doing like you know, a bunch of off topic things on your website. Like so like if you're a personal trainer, you're not. You don't have like big sections of your website talking about other side projects. You know that it's very focused and easy to, to understand what you what so you know, and so those are the basics but seeking out opportunities to speak in public. My wife who's a photographer had an opportunity to do a TED Talk which was a fantastic backlink, you know and, and getting an opportunity to be listed in your local chamber of Commerce or you know, you know, anytime you're quoted, you know, these are all, all great opportunities. So you can request opportunities to guest post on other people's blogs or.

You.

Can do backlink sharing with other fitness professionals or you know, friends. And that, that helps you both. So cool.

Sounds like obviously definitely worth looking into by the sounds of it. Especially if, you know, obviously if people are searching specific keywords, you obviously want to take advantage of those people because they're always some pretty warm leads as well. If they're specifically searching for a specific thing, they're probably ready to buy pretty, pretty quickly. So I want to, I want to dive into AI and ChatGPT. We're talking before we started recording about an exciting new feature that I think happened yesterday or the day before or something like that. Do you want to give us some insights into that feature and how we can utilize that for our business?

Absolutely. So ChatGPT, which is facilitated by OpenAI, so they just released the ability to create very high quality images in their basic tier. So even the free tier, you're able to access this. So now why is that important? You know, a big part of marketing is your, your brand, your visual branding. And you know, honestly like some people have a knack, some and some people have training. I have neither. So I'm like totally stuck. And so you know, I, I hire out that kind of expertise. But, but they're, you know, they can be very pricey projects and time consuming. What Chat GPT? So these, these AIs have been working up to this. Now you've probably seen AI generated like spoof videos like you know, somebody, you know, like a goofy politician doing something, something goofy and then you can figure out it's not, it's not real. But when you know, and then you've probably seen the poor quality AI images of, of recent years where they have seven finger and you know, part of it's blurry randomly. And the, but honestly what this has been, and I've seen dozens of these people in the AI space that I follow, they're saying that this is, this is like the level that it's truly becoming disruptive for, for marketing visualization. You can actually design, you can upload a photo and say, you know, make it look like a Pixar version of me. And you know, the, the quality is, is fantastic. You can add text, which has been hard to do in other image engines, AI engines, and the text is like spot on. It can read the font, it can recreate the font, it can, you know, it just does it with such hyper fidelity with this new release that you can generate beautiful images for ads, social media posts, blogs, your website. And it takes like 30 seconds and you know, whereas if you hired it out, you know, you're minimum 24 hours and you know, I don't know, this is, it's very exciting. It's not going to put graphic designers out of work and I'm, I'm never pro, like trying to put people out of work but, but this will really increase the amount of high quality branding, you know, like creations that we can, that we can generate as small businesses.

And it's just another reason to you know, jump on board with AI. Like it's not, it's not slowing down anytime soon. In fact it's only getting better. So you know, especially with people in business, you know, you either adapt or you, you know, fall backwards and go back to doing something else or you know, go back to another, another job rather than running your own business. So yeah, that's super exciting. I, I have played around a little bit with the images and you are right, some of them are a bit, bit average. But I haven't tested it since the new, new update came out. So I'm super curious to see how it all works, especially with the text messaging because what, what happened previously was. So I got AI to generate an image for me. Like it was, the image was great but the text, it was like some of it was, I just said before some of it was blurry for some reason I'm like why, why is that small part of the image a little bit blurry? And then it duplicated some of the, the words so it was just like those little things. I'm like, oh well the image is great but it actually, it's stuffs up the whole image by having these little, little things that are not, you know, you're not, not clear. And especially if people are doing like paid advertising and stuff, you know, it's going to be a big difference in terms of, you know, getting a cost per lead down or even getting, getting new clients. Speaking of like ads and stuff, let's dive into a little bit about funnels. So we're talking earlier about different funnels and lead magnets and that type of stuff. Why do you think most funnels, well, most funnels fail. What are some of the drawbacks funnels that people are making these days?

Yeah, that's a good question. So for one, I think they're not thinking about the top of the funnel as much now as you know, the funnel concept is, you know, you start with the most amount of reach and you filter them and qualify them until they become a buying customer. Now, you know, you have to really work hard to get the, the top of that funnel filled and because obviously the more people you have at the top, the more potential that gives the, the bottom of the funnel, which equals revenue. So, so that some people assume that they have like a great website or a great webinar, you know, like they've, they've done all the touch points correctly but they haven't filled the funnel. So as you mentioned, like, if you're going to go to the effort to create, you know, a high, high quality piece of content or a high quality offering or a very exciting offer, you need to, you may need to pay, advertise, you need to definitely reach out to your network to, to share and you know, to participate as well. But it, but it is that, that's where a lot of the legwork comes in, is getting the top of the funnel filled. Now I think also the other concept is some people don't pay attention to the middle of the funnel very much. And that's, that's the part where you're, you are. So you've gone from giving them something free or something very exciting to giving them something that's a little bit more about your, your service or your brand. And have you created good, or have you shared good testimonials? Have you shared like yourself on screen, have you, you know, offered like free consoles, you know, spent some time with some of these people in the middle of the funnel? And you know, and then finally like when, when they are ready to start talking pricing, like, you know, are you, are you looking at, you know, are you holding them accountable? You know, you're setting deadlines, you know, not deadlines but like, you know, you give them time frames that they agree to and are you holding them to it? And you know, like, you know, are you, are you able to talk to them like they're an equal? Like you are an equal to them. Not you're begging for their business because you've already given them so much value. You have the right to ask for their business at the, at the bottom. So one framework I like to think of is tofu mofu bofu. It's top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. You know, so if, if you elements right, you're, you know, you're going to have a successful funnel. And it's, you know, nothing simple. It's, it's, it's all hard work but, but having the funnel concept in mind helps you organize yourself. I would also add you know, like some, okay, so, so the, the offer sometimes is in question. You know, is your, is your offer unique? You know, are you simply just offering free, a free session and you know, is that because I think a lot of personal trainers probably, probably do the, the same thing that, you know, or, or you know, a percentage discount. Like why not make that something unique about you or like a unique thing that you are able to offer or like a unique challenge, a unique way to frame what you can do like package your, your service a little bit different to offer. At the very least memorable. Like, like they will say oh that's the guy that does the 37 day guarantee or you know, some, something like that you know, like that would just stick in their, in their skull and, and you know, and you know that stickiness is, is good for an offer. So at a high level those are some of the problems I've seen. But I, I imagine that, that there's some, there's obviously, there's obviously some nuance to the, the personal fitness world. And you know, I, I mean I, I, I, I've worked with a lot of personal trainers and you know, I, I'm just really glad to see that they, that Matt, you have created a community where they can do something that they love and you know, and make a lot of money doing it.

Yeah, 104. I was going to say for a second but I completely agree with the, the final stuff. Oh, this is what I was going to say. I was going to say even, even if, you know, to be a little bit different to what everyone else is doing. Right. Use CHAT GPT to come up with some different ideas for you as well. I use CHAT GCP all the time for brainstorming ideas because if you just brain dump everything that you're thinking about and say hey, can you just summarize the key points of what I'm thinking about and you'll be surprised. It gives you a lot of clarity in terms of what you're wanting or the next steps for you. Even brainstorming a guarantee, you know, it's really, really good. You pretty much have like a 24,7 worker like alongside your business essentially and they can pretty much do most things not up to a standard of a full expert. But you know, I personally use ChatGPT for a lot of brainstorming and clarification on certain things. So yeah, if, if you're out there and not using it then you're missing out. But I wanted to quickly dive into CRM again. So obviously as people know we have our own CRM. You've got your own CRM as well, which is similar to the one that I use, which is, which is great. What are some of the things that your CRM does that is working well for your clients?

Yeah, so one, you know, tell me if, if you've already shared this with your audience, but I'm, I'm really liking the voicemail drops. So this goes back to our initial question about cold calling. So the, the CRM system actually has the ability instead of placing an outbound call, you can record a voice message and simply drop it in their voicemail inbox. And so as a part of a marketing funnel where maybe they've filled out an inquiry form or this is on a long term nurture, sometimes the novelty of a different form of outreach is just enough to make that switch. So you create an action, it's called a voicemail voicemail drop. And it has this technology where it rings the phone twice, hangs up the first call and the second one automatically goes to voicemail and your pre recorded message just gets planted in their inbox. I've also enjoyed so using the chat bots. So there is one that's native to the CRM that we use and then there are other third parties that you can plug in with a webhook. So basically you instruct the, the chatbot with information about you and your business and give it objectives and it can field either, so it can set, it can book appointments for you or it could answer basic questions and you can set up workflows that send out an initial SMS text and then if they respond then the, the chatbot can take the conversation from there and go either into qualifying the lead or booking. And so you could potentially trigger this with 100 different people at the same time and your chatbot can handle that. So these are great tools for reach and for time saving. You know, like I said, with so many businesses the, one of the biggest problems is you're, you're working all day and like when are you supposed to, to market or to take those sales calls? Like you, you need, you need some assistance and you know these platforms just make that so much easier.

So yeah, so most of our audience are doing, they're working in the business, you know, 30, 40 hours a week. They've got no time to work on the business or to do the lead generation or the marketing or you know, potentially take on more people. So they're literally missing out on potential business. Because in my experience, and I don't know how accurate this quote is, but I heard someone say it previously, it's like 80, 80 of people buy from the first person that gets back to them on their own.

So something similar. And you know, the, you know, the first thing you can turn on in, in the CRM that we both use is the missed call text back. And that immediately when you miss a call, the text goes out and says, hi, I am Jennifer, and I'm sorry I missed your call. How can I help? And transforms that lost call into a live lead. And, but, but with the AI chatbots, you can take that the next step and respond to their response. So, you know, these are, these are definitely technologies you should leverage.

Yeah, 100%. So if people want to get more information about, about that software, whether they go, do you have a website or do you have Instagram or Facebook that they should go to?

I do. I think the easiest would be my website. It's Market Surgeon. And then if you're interested specifically in the AI, just go MarketStar AI Slack, sorry, MarketSearch, IO AI. And my, my socials are linked at the bottom of those pages, but we'd love to start there. And, you know, if I could be of any assistance. Matt's doing great work and, and if you ever just want to chat, you know, I'm, I'm happy just to consult. I love talking marketing tech and I love the fitness world as well. So it's a, it's a happy marriage here.

100%. I'll, I'll link those. I'll put the links in the bio as well. But thank you so much again for, for jumping on. That was really insightful.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Matt. You know, I appreciate it and happy to continue the conversation anytime.

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