Why Should Anyone Bother Reading You?

Google sent publishers most of their traffic for 2 decades. That number is collapsing fast. And the publishers who haven't figured out the new AI game are about to find out the hard way. Today's guest figured it out years before everyone else. Welcome, James. Nice to have you here.

Thank you for the invite, Pete, and a very generous welcome as well.

All right.

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall Podcast is brought to you by LeakyPaywall. LeakyPaywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more at leakypaywall.com. And now for today's episode.

So James Baldacchino, hope I got that right, is from a company called Ellipsis, and their job is to get your business found in AI search. It started as an SEO search company and is now squarely focused on AI. A little bit of background, if you don't know this, James is actually our fractional CMO, our fractional chief marketing officer. He's been working with us directly for about 2 years now. Is that, is that right?

No, it's more than that. I think it's been 4, it's been 4 at least.

Oh my goodness.

Okay. All right.

Well, I'm not getting older, so.

No, no, me neither. Me neither. But I actually was reflecting on it and going, holy.

Yep. And the thing that's interesting is when we ran into you, you had already, you guys had built an AI SEO engine way before ChatGPT became popular and you were able to take a bunch of our content and actually make it rank in search and make sure that it was good solid content and really help move the needle. And not only that, but you, you know, I'm just for the audience, James, what James does for us is work on really high-level branding, positioning, marketing, and digging into all the crazy things we're doing here and kind of being our guardrail for bringing the business forward. And it's been, it's been an amazing ride, James. So again, welcome. Let's get into it.

Thank you.

Okay. So today what we're going to talk about, if you're listening to this, we're going to talk about SEO and I don't know if it's AEO, but it's AI search essentially. We'll dig a little bit into AI tools. Let's see if we can get James to unlock some of the tools he likes to use. We'll definitely talk about sort of general marketing for publishers in today's landscape. And at the very end, I thought we'd try a website, a publication teardown. We'll look at the subscription system and general marketing of a publisher that we picked out and see if we can, we can help publishers learn from that.

Okay.

All right. How's that sound? Does that sound like a good plan?

Sounds great.

All right. Awesome. Okay. So the first thing I really want to talk about is kind of positioning and branding for publishers. I'm going to create a little bit of a kind of a backstory here. The things that we've learned in this space is that publishers have two, and I would say three now, but two superpowers that are pretty untouchable. One is content. They produce incredible content. People want the content. The content lands in search. It is landing in AI overviews. And this is one of the superpowers. The other superpower is audience. People who want to read the content, right? So whether you're on an email newsletter, whether you're looking at search or AI or in social or whatever, every piece of content for publishers is a magnet for a human essentially. And the third thing I'm gonna add to this is trust. And I think that's a big, that has become, it's always been important. You build an audience, you build trust, but with AI today, I think that trust lever is something something that needs to be pushed really hard today. Okay. So having said that, I want to ask you sort of your thoughts based on what you've seen with our work with publishers over the years. You know, I want you to kind of be a little bit of a guide here in how publications should think about their positioning or their brand. And I say that because I'm going to give you a quick example. so let me, let me just share my screen. Um, this is going to be— no, hang on a second. Let me share screen. I guess I can share this screen too. Okay. Tell me if you can see this.

Yep.

All right. There's Ellipsis. Great. What we're going to do is we're going to look at this publisher. So This publisher started out about a year and a half ago. I don't think it was quite 2 years. And The Spanish Eyes is who we're looking at. When he launched, it was just himself and he was producing content for Spain, period. That was his positioning, right? Okay, we're gonna cover all the things that are happening in Spain. Great journalist, lots of connections, really solid content. And we helped work him through the idea that, wait a second, you know, you're competing against big national newspapers. It's gonna be tough to gain traction. You're gonna probably need a giant team. There's a lot of investment, a lot of time, and you're kind of going head to head against established publishers. So he switched. And you can see that, you know, this is now Andalucía News. In English, and he focused on the region of the country that he lives in. And what happened was amazing. Things all of a sudden grew. And in the last 6 months, the, the amount of traffic, the amount of free registered readers, the amount of paid subscribers has been absolutely mushrooming, mushrooming from him. And he went from zero, absolute zero. So. I kind of want to kind of throw that at you because it's a story of, of a publisher that, you know, we spent time with to help them with positioning, but most publishers don't really have that, right? Most publishers are your local news. You're, you're focused on, and you're focused on different topics. It could be crime, it could be food, it could be politics, could be business in your local area. What we're— As a publisher, like, if— where do I start? As far as getting my marketing and branding together. Okay, that was a lot, but—

No, no, no, no, it's a really good lead-in. Look, I am very, very, I'm the kind of person who likes to balance marketing theory with what's actually practical. And I don't like to get stuck in a lot of theory and theorizing and all of that. So for me, my step one would be to actually understand your audience. Now, there are two ways of doing that. There's the marketing way, there's the middle way. The marketing way is to spend months analyzing, figuring out, doing data crunching, figuring out and building profiles and not knowing what to do with that information. Some marketers love doing that. It has its benefits. The middle way, in my view, is spend a reasonable amount of time figuring it out, but you need to figure out. Who is your average reader? Why are they reading you? Why should they read you versus literally anything else on the internet? Why should they, and I don't use this positioning, um, uh, blindly, why should they bother to give you their time in a world which has gone nuts? Okay. What information is, we used to say information is available at your fingertips. At this point, it's far beyond that.

Yeah.

It's the sheer volume of information which you can access instantly is absolutely nuts. And the AI has just accelerated that to another level. And today I can just ask AI about anything and it will answer me. And what's even worrying, what's more worrying, it can even make up an answer if it doesn't know. But let's park that point. So More and more and more and more, especially in a world where such a lot of information is available. Why you? Who's your audience? And why should they give you their time? Why should they bother? What's the most important thing? One of my favorite analogies is the high street. I mean, things don't work that way anymore, but the high street is a really good way of explaining what I mean. In a row of shops, why should anyone going past your shop bother to stop and enter yours? Now, there's the easy answer, which is because they need something I provide. But that's also a bad answer because that, that those are clients which were always going to come anyway, which is with all due respect to them, you, you want those customers as well, but that's not where the opportunity lies. No, you want someone who's walking past your shop, figuratively, to say, "Hmm, you know what? I never thought I could actually need that. Let me walk in and figure that out." Mm-hmm. Of course, it works differently with publishers, and I have to say, I admire publishers because they are doing some really crazy work in a crazy world gone crazier. And I, of all people who work with AI every single day and who work with a ton of content, but a different type to the publishers, every single day, I totally appreciate the frustration they must be feeling at all of the massive disinformation, massive hallucinations that there are out there. And I can totally understand the— The the position of, yeah, but we're good at this one thing, so why does no one want to listen? I totally understand that frustration. But you need to go where the people are. And if the people now have access to that, the answer is you need to work harder to understand what will make them pay attention to you. We can't just hope for the world to change and, you know, when television came along, they worried that radio would die. This is always happening with new technologies. Okay? Things just shift. Things just shift and you need to be able to figure out why they should shift in your direction. If you can't answer the question, why should they bother? That's where I would be worried.

Yeah, that's a problem. So not only our readers, our publishers, looking for people's time, but they have the sort of, a lot of them, especially with our crowd, is they have the extra challenge of getting people to hand over money, right? So why should I actually pay for something that I might be able to find for free through AI or on the internet?

And that makes it feel very bleak, but in reality, the answer is because your quality is good enough to pay for. Because yes, we can talk about how print is dead or dying or has been dying for a long time and blah, blah, blah and all of that. But ultimately, people still purchase content in whatever format it is, whether some people still prefer print, although that's a smaller and smaller crowd. Some, some, most people want content in their own format, be it on iPad, be it on mobile, be it whatever it is. That being said, they still want good content. So they are still willing, I would argue that people are more willing to pay for good content today in a world of noise.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Think of it as a music streaming business. You can get it for free and be bombarded with ads all the time. But most people, many people, millions upon millions of people pay because they just want the quality. They just don't want to be bombarded by ads. And in fact, you can see how violently some of these people are reacting, rightly so in my opinion, when certain platforms which you pay for are now still including ads, for example.

Right. Right, right.

But anyway, this is another topic and I don't want to veer far off, but the point here is that I genuinely feel that people want to buy good content because that is the basis of buying books. That is the basis of what you do on your phone, what you do on your tablet, what you do on your laptop. There is a huge reason why you should want to buy content. But you need to know why they should buy yours.

So, so why, so what are the signals? What, what if I'm a publisher, I have a website, I have traffic coming to the website. Let's not talk about print, but just, just digital only. What, what should I be doing? Should I be looking at certain analytics? Should I be surveying my readership? Like what, what are, what would be some, some easy wins to figure out what's gonna convert?

Look, I am a huge, and you know this, I am a huge fan of testing. I think that testing should never ever stop, even in your pricing, which we'll get to, even in your pricing, you should never have a price which is static for more than 6 months to a year because you should be testing what's working.

That's a good point.

But again, let me not veer. This is a huge topic I can talk, I can talk for ages about. But my point is testing. So yes, you need to test content to figure out what sticks. What are people actually resonating with? What are people actually, what do people actually care about? What do people, for example, taking the Spanish eye, I'm sure because they use your platform, I'm sure they know what type of articles bring in most people.

Yeah.

Now, of course, there's obvious ones which you need to ignore, which is, for example, breaking news. Fine. Breaking news is breaking news. You can't control that, especially if it's a major piece of news. You can't control that. That's beyond your scope. It also depends which area of publishing you're in. You need to ignore that noise because that's ultimately noise. You need to figure out what you can control and figure out why people care about reading your site. I see you've clicked through to a page.

Yeah. So, okay, let's, before we jump into pricing, which now I'm gonna derail this whole conversation here.

I think you and I could make a podcast last. Probably half a day.

Anyway, yeah. Yeah, so, okay, so keeping an eye on what articles are converting the best. And I will just say that if you have a free registration running, which you should, which you must today to build that email list, you know, you can see what engaged readers, 'cause they're logged in and they're hitting content, they're also hitting upgrade messaging. You can see which ones are engaged and seeing the paywall over and over again and get a feel for not only what content they're going after, but then your paid subscribers, what content is like the best content for your best reader. So—

And even if you've never had gated content, get, because some people might tell you, I've never done this before. I'm scared. I don't know what they want. I, even if you, especially if you haven't done gated content yet, you have the data, which tells you what they like because they've been reading your data.

Right, right. That's right. And what about surveys? Is that, is that something you think is worth it for a publisher?

Like everything else in marketing, they have their use. I don't have anything to say, which is negative about them in the sense of, yes, surveys are important. Important, but also don't make them the literal everything of what you do.

Yeah.

Quick example of why that is important. I used to work in a telco and our most, this is a finding we knew was a fact because it was proven year over year after year after year of every survey we did. When we asked people, for example, how much How much do you spend on your phone every month? Everybody, and I mean everybody, understated how much they spent because that's what they genuinely thought. And we were the circle, we could check. So we could say, if you said $10, I can check you actually spending $20. Why am I highlighting this? I'm highlighting this because people's perceptions versus reality can be very different and you need you need a balance of both sides of that data.

Yeah, for sure. So quick surveys, take the information in context with your own.

Yeah, 100%.

Okay, all right, let's go to pricing real quick, 'cause we both can't help ourselves. I do get asked a lot, what should I price? What are other publishers pricing? Can you guide me? And my general response is, You're, you're, you're too low because most publishers are, um, here in New Hampshire, rural area, our local newspaper, I pay for digital access only, is $15 a month. Some people say that's, that's really expensive. And it's like, yeah, it's expensive. So is Netflix. So is everything else. But I want to know what's going on in my community and it's worth $15 per month. Uh, on the other side of the spectrum, we have publishers that come on and say like they start at like $2 or $2.99 a month, which the Stripe fee is like 70 cents. Like, you can't even make money on something like that. But, um, you know, uh, you have sort of a classic price point, you know, you have €4.99 here for The Spanish Eye. Um, what, what would you suggest to a publisher? Now, this is probably a good example because they're, they're gaining traction. The last 6 months, you know, they, they, they, they turned on, uh, paid subscriptions and that curve has been really going up and to the right for them. Um, they pro— I'm gonna guess they have not even looked at their pricing in 6 months, right? So what do you, what, what would you tell, what would you tell Lawrence here at The Spanish Eye?

So first of all, my first question would be, when did you set this price? Why did you set this particular price? Mm-hmm. Um, uh, again, my mantra is if you haven't even considered your price in the last 6 months to 1 year, it's wrong. There's no two ways around it.

It's not. Yeah, I'll agree with that. Yeah.

Yeah. Because, and the argument as to why I'm sure is, tell me the price of a chocolate bar and how it's changed in a year. If a chocolate bar's price has changed in a year, why hasn't your publication's price changed?

Right.

Yep. So that's the number one thing. But most Most importantly, I see this across many areas and not just publishing, but people are scared of higher prices. Guys, there is nothing wrong with making money. We are not trying to build publishing empires here. We are not trying to, you know, fund our billionaire life. That's not going to happen.

Right.

But we do need to make a living. And there's no shame in making a living, and that means there's no shame in pricing what you are worth versus what you think they would be able to pay you. And there's a big difference between that, which is why, as you said, Pete, they're usually too cheap. And my biggest question to people who price themselves too cheap is typically, Is that genuinely what you think you are worth? Because is that genuinely what you think all your work is worth?

Right.

So one big mistake a lot of publishers and many other areas do is, especially when they have competition, is price themselves under the competition. And that is a huge mistake because what you're saying is my publication is of lower quality than my competitors. Therefore, I'm cheaper.

Yeah, that's a signal.

It's a horrible signal and you should honestly never be cheaper than your competitor if you believe that your content is better than your competitors. I have yet to meet someone who tells me, no, I believe my competitor's content is better than mine. So that kind of answers itself.

You know, I just have to jump in. I think that publishers have this unique ability to become a monopoly in their niche.

Right.

And when you become the number one player in any niche, you have the opportunity to price up. So if you're the best in X, then you just charge more. I mean, you look at pricing across any industry, the top companies are charging huge margins over everyone below them. So going from Spain here to Andalucía, now Lawrence has the opportunity to become the number one publisher for this region, for under Lucia.

But that's another, but that's another point. You earlier, you said I'm willing to pay $15 a month for my local publication because I want to know what's going on in my community. That's a publisher who has understood the value of their publication for their local community. And rather than say my community is small, they can't afford it, I'm going to price myself low. No, he's thought differently and said, I think that my publication is worth quite a lot to my community because of the services I provide to them. And therefore, I think my price is merited. And he's right. You're a subscriber. And that's the way you should think. The way you should think isn't, can they afford me? It's, do they want to pay? And why do they want to pay? And why should I tell them that I'm giving them enough value for their money?

Yes.

You need to be able to answer all of those questions. And again, my favorite shocking question is, is that really what you think you're worth? Because if you think that you're worth $299 a month, I think you're in the wrong business, my friend.

Yeah. Okay. Back to testing. Would you here simply bump this number up for 30 days or 60 days? Or like, how would you approach testing?

Yes. So first of all, most importantly, when you touch a price, you touch it for new subscribers only. It's not fair to touch a price for old subscribers. It's not fair to bump them up. It's, if you're, especially if you're testing, you should just bump it up for new people only. Now, there's a whole discussion about, yes, but my publication is losing money and I need to raise everyone's fees. Because they're paying $4.99 and my pricing is now $19.99 for the security argument. That's an entirely different scenario. There are ways around that, but we're talking about how to price your publication right now. So first of all, your current customers, as much as possible, keep them on their current tiers. It's not fair otherwise. Secondly, do not, whatever you do, do not declare the price change. People love doing this. People love saying, oh, subscribe now because next week this is going up to $9.99. Do not do that. Do not do that. Why? Because you are testing. You are testing, and that means the test might fail. And people might say, you know what, $9.99 is way too expensive, and I don't think you're worth $9.99, for the sake of the argument. And after 2 months, you might look at the data and go, ah, this hasn't worked. And the egg on your face if you have to roll that back. After declaring it is really bad. It makes you look bad. It makes your value perception dive. You need to do it silently, not tell anyone about it. There's a tactic which people use to raise sales because I'm gonna raise that. It's not a good tactic. That's a really short-term view of how to look at your business, and it is very, very unhealthy. So simply decide the date you're going to raise the price. And raise it. In this case, since he's $4.99, I personally think I would like to have a look at his readership numbers, which I know we can't do on this call, but I would, my hunch is that I would at least push to $7.99, at least.

Mm-hmm.

And see what happens there, go where the data is. But one Absolutely crucial piece of information that you need to keep in mind as well is give it time.

Yeah.

Because there is going to be an amount of people, there are going to be an amount of people who are considering buying, who are considering subscribing, who are seeing the price $4.99 and saying, should I, shouldn't I, should I, shouldn't I? And then suddenly they realize the price has gone to $7.99 and they will drop off. So what you will see at the beginning is a drop-off. This is absolutely normal. Be patient, hold your ground, give it a bare minimum, absolute bare minimum of 30 days.

Yeah.

My favorite is 60 to 90, but scratching the surface would be 30 days. I once had a client who raised his prices and went on holiday.

Mm-hmm.

And actually it was Alex's client, but this is a classic example. Now I remember, he raised his prices and went on holiday, came back and told us, thank God I went on holiday because if I were around, I would have panicked and I would have reversed the price, but now it's settled and holy wow, things are working. People are actually buying more of it. And that's a weird but true outcome as well of pricing yourself higher. As I said before, the value perception with a higher price is actually going to be that it is higher quality.

Yep. Yeah. And the, oh boy, my thought just flew outta my head. So one of the things about pricing that it's gonna influence how long is the volume of traffic, right? So if you're a bigger publisher and you have, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of visitors coming in each month, then that test is gonna not take that long. But if you're a small independent publisher like this, then I'd say, yeah, 60 days is probably a good amount of time to, you know, kind of like clench your hands and hold on tight, right?

Exactly. It also depends on your turnover in the sense of if you are a publication which attracts thousands upon thousands of people every single day and most of them are paid, for example, and you're getting thousands of subscribers every single day, that's a different speed to a small publisher whose target is a couple of hundred new subscriptions a month.

Yep.

So you're playing different ball games and you need to use a different yardstick for each particular case. Particular case.

Yeah. One, one thing I will add, if you do test a price, well, let's say Spanish Eye goes to $999, just as an example. And I'm a big fan of natural price tiers. $499 is $199. Then $1,999. I think, I think from there you bump up to $49, then $99. So these are natural psychological tiers. So, you know, the mental difference between $499 and $999 it's not as much as you think it is. Yes, it's twice the price, but it's not twice the mental sort of emotional price, right? Because you're under 10. So let's, as an example, if you go from, let's say, let's say Spanish High goes from $4.99 to $9.99. I know that's a big one. Uh, and it's, and it works like people are still subscribing and, and I say, you know, raise the price until people complain, then you know you've found the right spot.

Uh, right.

Uh, but if, If you stick at, if Spanish Eye sticks at $9.99, then what I would do is after a few months and you're comfortable with that, then you go back to your existing readers and you say, look, we need to raise our prices, you know, because of all the benefits, all the additional work and hiring and story, whatever, all the things, all the benefits that you do, but you don't have to raise to the $9.99. You can give your existing subscribers sort of a deal for being an early supporter and go to, go to the $799 number instead of the $999. And I'll tell, I'll tell you, we, I just, let me finish. We have raised prices for so much, like so many publishers and we've had publishers go from $29. Uh, this is an annual, a $29 annual to a $99 annual. So a 3x multiplier. We have lots of publishers that go from like $499 to $799 and all that. And And by the way, if you're listening to this and you need to raise your price and you happen to be a customer, we can do this very easily for you. But I have never, ever across, I don't know, let's, let's just say 100 times doing this, right? Never seen churn in excess of a fraction of a percent because of the price. As long as you work within the pricing tiers, it's like free money. If you haven't reviewed your pricing, like James, if it's been over 6 months, which is probably 99% of everybody listening, you know, it's time to look at the pricing.

And look, again, many people start raising their eyebrows. I've had clients who tell me, yes, this is extremely capitalist of you and you're just thinking about making money. And look, yes, raising prices is always a topic which will give you the shivers. I understand that and terrifies you as the business owner as well. I completely understand that, but ultimately your costs are rising as well. And so it is important to reflect that. Now, when you, when you are raising prices for existing customers, that needs to be handled a little more delicately, as you said, Pete Ericson. Yeah. There is where your positioning really, really comes into play. Because the moment you are raising your pricing, you are forcing everyone to think, but do I really need this?

Mm-hmm.

So if your answer to that isn't yes, then you need to figure out exactly why that is, and you need to figure out what other value you need to be are throwing in, and this isn't coupons or whatever. This is what is the ongoing value of your publication to these people and their lives.

Yeah.

So doing that price move technologically is super easy, as you said, especially with LeakyPaywall, but how you handle it with people needs to be strategized really, really well, and I wouldn't do it too often either.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd say the last comment on positioning is if you haven't read the book StoryBrand by Doug Miller, that's where we started with you years ago, and that was a real eye-opener. And if you're trying to figure out your positioning, your branding in your niche, that book will open doors for you and you'll help you figure it out. Okay. Let's jump to SEO and AEO and Let's talk about AI. Let's talk about your wheelhouse here. Get to this, this juicy stuff. So back in the day, the old SEO was, hey, let's, let's, let's stuff keywords into articles. And that evolved into, okay, let's make sure we don't stuff the keywords, but let's work them in there. Let's do the research, which I know you guys are really, really good at, and look at reader, you know, reader intent for things, searcher intent, competitive analysis of, you know, what are the top 10 for a key phrase, what are the top 10, you know, matching websites for this. So, but now we're, we're in a different place. It's not 100% different, but it's becoming very different, I think, with with the need to, the desire to, for Google, you know, Overviews and ChatGPT, et cetera, to, you know, produce a link that says, hey, you can go over here to find this article. And, you know, the only thing I know is that ChatGPT and Claude and Google and, you know, Gemini and all that, they don't give out a lot of links.

Although, and I haven't managed to tell you this, Pete, so this is a great place to tell you this. Although Google has, like they do, shifted the goalposts again, and they have actually started including plenty more links in the EIOs in the last 2 to 3 weeks. So that's great.

Okay.

Interesting.

I wonder why.

I have my own theories as to why.

Is it a trust? Is it a trust?

I have my theories as to why, but yes, trust is also part of it, I'm sure. Look, ultimately, Google is always testing. Google is the ultimate testing machine. And they keep testing and testing and seeing what sticks. And you've seen it. I'm sure you've used a Google product which they shelved at some point in your life.

Oh, yeah.

And they keep doing this and they will continue doing this and they're very smart at it. So right now, their tests have shown them that few links at the top isn't great and they are sticking in plenty of links really well into your AI overviews. So that's great. Let's talk a little bit about SEO, AEOG, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah.

Does SEO still work? That's like the big question right now, I think. Should you spend time and money on—

First of all, I think that the renaming of SEO is greatly overblown. I don't know, call it AEO, call it GEO, call it whatever the heck you like. It's ultimately just another upgrade to the way SEO works. Why? Because SEO is about being found by search engines. That's literally the title, and that's what we're still doing. We're still getting your content found by search engines so that the humans can see it. It's just that the way the search engines are working has changed. Yeah. Entirely. So I do not like to say AO or GEO or whatever it is, is an entirely different category. It's not, it's an evolution and the old, let's call it the legacy way and the new way go very much hand in hand. There are a few differences with legacy SEO, for example, you used to care most about ranking high. And that to an extent is still a thing, although it's kind of getting more and more difficult, A, to do so, and two, to get any return from that. But now it's about making your content very extractable for the reader.

Mm-hmm.

So I love analogies. This is like lying in bed and having someone read the story to you. When you write the story, you're writing it for the person in bed, but you're also writing it so that the reader knows how to read it.

Mm-hmm.

So you need to cater for both. That's slightly flimsy analogy, but kind of works. So, but you need to keep in mind that the reader can actually look at your data and pass it on. Well to the, to, to the person who's listening and the person who's listening can actually appreciate that that's exactly what they wanted.

You're talking about the SEO bots and the AI bots that are reading publishers' content. Exactly.

Exactly. Now, one piece of amazing news. Yes, there are tricks. Yes, there are, well, tricks, tricks is a big word. One of my pet peeves is I hate these, what I call LinkedIn hacks. Which is, oh, this is the one thing you should do and it will fix your SEO.

Yeah.

Even if that does work right now, Google will remove it in about 5 minutes.

Yeah.

So these quick hacks never work. What does work and what always works is keeping your reader in mind. What are they looking for? What do they want to read? What information specifically? What's the intent behind their search? What specifically would they like to find out? Okay. And especially in a world where information has become A, cheaper, B, much more muddy with bad, with bad information, your being able to give the unique and good information has actually just become much, much, much more valuable, especially for the AI.

Yeah.

And for the LLMs. Think of it this way. The old way was I wrote a search, it gave me the 10 blue links. I went through 1, 2, 3, 4 of them, figured it out, understood, said, I don't like this publication. I came back to this, then to the second one. I went, I had this journey of doing all of that and figured out what I like, what I dislike, et cetera, et cetera. The new journey is you do none of that. The AI does it for you, which means that if If your content is exactly the same as everybody else's, the AI is just gonna dismiss you because you're not showing it anything particular which it should care about. So once again, we go back to the start of this conversation, which is what makes you unique and why should people care? You need to be answering that question and you need to be answering that question incredibly well. Right.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's funny how, how if you can position yourself super deep in a super narrow niche, especially today, then you're, you're gonna have a monopoly on that niche or more of a monopoly on that niche. And then, yeah, search AI, that you're going to be one of the only players. So you're going to come up in that, in that niche. I see this with— use an example the other day, the— we have the Fisherman magazine, right? So they cover fishing off coast of, uh, uh, everywhere from Maine to Delaware, right? Uh, 3 editions. It's, uh, they've been in print a long time, but now they, they've had a big digital push for quite some time. And they do, uh, live, you know, live fishing reports, right? And so like, where are the hotspots essentially today, right? Or for the week, or like, where are the fish biting? And they publish these reports. They have captains out on the water. They publish these reports. Guess who gets, guess who gets the link in AI Overviews, right? They do, right? Because they don't have a lot of competition. You know, not a lot of people with captains in the water that are, you know, saying, hey, this spot is great. And then they publish that spot. And even though it's not real time, it's almost real time. It's like, this is very unique information.

It's extremely useful.

Oh my God. Their fishing reports get hammered. So much traffic going to them. Anyway, just thought I'd throw an example of a super nichey niche. That they figured out.

Yeah, and this is the story. Now, obviously, the frustration usually is, okay, but I'm a more generalistic publication. How can I actually just give something? If I'm just talking about things that happening, how can I give something that does stand out? The point there is adding quality to your work. The point is the difference between having a junior write a piece and having your most senior writer, write it. You know the difference in quality there. And so does AI and so do LLMs. The great news is AI and LLMs, all they are trying to do, so their number one criteria, their number one goal is to make the searcher happy.

Yeah.

Okay? At any cost, which is worrying for different reasons, but let's park that.

So what is, what is happy? How does AI know that?

Happy means Yeah. That AI predicts what your question actually— so before, if you wrote in a search term, we would kind of figure out that you want this information and that's what we would surface. That's how search engines work. AI is now taking that to the extreme where they say, okay, you're looking for X, but X, I know from all the content I've read, I know that X always leads to Y and always leads to Z. So I'm going to push X, Y, and Z into the answer so that this person will be very happy because he doesn't need to do more search.

Gotcha.

So, and that's where the opportunity for unique information, which actually is important, is. It's not about just writing it differently. It's also about what do people care about? What do people care about as re— I mean, this is really hard to to answer when I don't know what type of publication we're talking about, because it varies so widely, of course. But the fishing example is a great one.

Yeah. Yeah. And there, if I think if you're an enthusiast publisher, a niche publisher, magazine publisher, you have picked your niche, right? Like I think that's the power of that. I think that I've seen publishers get in trouble on the news, kind of the local regional news front where they're trying to cover— and this is, this is a problem. This is an age-old problem. And even back in print, when you're covering stories that are outside of your local community, so you're not really— and I think that it feels like the punishment today is harsh, is harsher because there's so much competition. And if you're not really razor-focused on, on your positioning, um, and know it and stick to it, it's easy to not stick to it. You get in trouble, especially with AI today. Does that sound about right?

I have an example I was working on literally yesterday, which blew my mind. Not a publisher, but long story short, one of my clients had a competitor publish a complete and utter audacious lie about their product. Which was so audacious that AI thinks it's true and is pushing it across all of its answers.

Whoa.

Because nobody else had claimed this about the product. It's a completely new lie. And the AI said, ooh, this looks unique and ran with it. Of course, we're going to fix that. And that's absolutely fine to do. But that shows you the importance of what you just said in the sense of, yeah, stick to what you know and do it really, really, really, really well. And I have a very strong feeling that in the case I've just given, I have an extremely strong feeling that this competitor is actually harmless, but let AI do the work without actually researching it. I have a very strong feeling that AI made this up completely and they did not fact-check it and it's become a self-perpetuating cycle.

That's amazing.

So yeah. That's about also about how you use AI to write, but that's a different discussion as well.

Okay, so to wrap this up, I think the takeaway for me here is that you really have to get, it really starts with your positioning and figuring out who your audience is, what their needs are and solving the need for that audience. What do they really want? They'll pay you for it. They'll be on your newsletter. They'll do other things. And once you're really solving the need for that reader in your niche, because you're positioned strongly in the niche, then that kind of takes care of itself. As long as your content is good, right? As long as you're actually solving the need and delivering the information, you stick to it, you play the long-term game, and AI figures out, yes, this is content that matters, this is trusted content, it's answering this need better than anything else.

I'll add a final layer on top of that. So that is the absolutely most important parts of the foundation layer, but then there's a layer on top, which is how do you want people and AI to talk about you? This is a part most people miss because most people are looking at metrics like how many times they're mentioned or how many times they're cited. We also care about how they talk about you in the sense of, is your content good enough to be cited in an authoritative manner? Because you can also be cited in a disparaging manner in the sense of this piece of information comes from this source, but this source cannot be trusted.

Right.

So, so do keep in mind Why am I mentioning this? Because this also reflects on the importance of quality. And most people are looking, especially are looking at quality in a way, in the upside-down way. They're saying, oh my God, AI can spit out such amazing quality. True. But what that actually does is it means your quality needs to be higher. In a world where everybody's quality bar just raised significantly, your quality needs to rise of that.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. So keep the eye on the prize. I mean, this is content is the superpower, you know, keep it and keep it targeted to the audience.

Okay.

All right. I think that's a good, good spot. Now, I have a question. I just jumped into my brain. Let's say I'm going to give you an example. This is Upper East Side we're looking at. This is a neighborhood, urban neighborhood, local news site, New York City. And They publish and have had success with crime and new and food. Those are kind of the two big buckets of content that has, that their readers have responded. Now it's an, you know, urban neighborhood, Upper East Side of Manhattan. And they do a good job covering the crime. They also cover, you know, what's going on in food, right? Like new restaurants and reviews and, and, you know, whatever, whatever.

Food is always popular.

Food is popular, right? Right. So let's say I'm thinking, okay, I have all this great content. How would you repurpose the content to produce, maybe it's a piece or a series of pieces that would do well in search, do well in AI, just maybe in general. Oh, this is lovely. Do well, yeah, do well for the readership. What would you do here? Like if you were the publisher and you're like looking for a nice, juicy content piece?

I love this question. Why do I love this question? Because this is the piece that, this This is a very, very good question, very intelligent one, because this leads me perfectly into the piece that everyone misses. And I'm gonna sound like a LinkedIn hack myself, but this is the piece that everyone does miss, which is you have tons of information. You being able to process that information and bring out serious reports, analyzing that information is something only you can do. So to take this example, what if this publication had to take all of the reports of crime, since crime is one of the topics in the last year, and publish a map of where most of the, most of the crime is happening and a study of what time it's happening and the study of I don't know, a million different types of questions.

Right, right.

That information is extremely rich information. Why is it rich? A, the amount of stories you can bring out of that is just nuts, but also B, people actually care about that because who doesn't want to know whether their neighborhood is scarier than others, for example.

You know, right? Oh boy, talk about a pain point.

Oh my God. So this is genuinely my LinkedIn hack.

Yeah.

Are you actually using your information intelligently enough? Because you have tons of information. The longer you've been in publication, the more you'll have. Are you actually bringing it all together in a way only you can?

Right, right. And then you gate that and that's part of your pitch for paying for access. Exactly.

I can bet you that people would actively pay for some form of a crime monitor map or something of the sort.

Absolutely. So just as an aside, so I live in a forested area of New Hampshire. We live in the hills. We have bears now and they visit our house and they visit other people's houses in the neighborhood. And somebody in the community started a bear sighting map.

Great.

This is— and I cannot tell you how popular the bear sighting map is. You have people that are like, wow, this is great. And it's super interesting. And you want to know where the bears are and are they coming closer to your neighborhood or are they not? And then you have people who are like, this is, you know, this is too much information. And we're just scaring people. It's necessary. But the bottom line is this map has generated a lot of conversation.

I have a weirder example to you, for you. In Malta, in the country where I live, a fireworks factory exploded last week, unfortunately. Thankfully nobody got hurt, but it was a massive explosion. And I mean massive. The damage done was insane. And somebody started a fireworks factory map in Malta because nobody had ever mapped where all the factories are. And all of Malta is now going, how did we end up with so many?

How many fireworks factories? And why are they so big? Oh, that's hysterical. That's hysterical. A little sad, but hysterical. Hopefully everyone's okay.

Yeah, but to the point here, Maybe because earlier I said people would be willing to pay. Maybe they're not willing to pay because this is a community service, the Blair thing, what I said. This is a community service, so they kind of ethically might feel, uh, if you try and charge them for it. That's also fine. You're getting people to your site, you're getting people to trust you, and that's what's important.

I love it. I love it. I love the idea. Take your content and find a way to make it a database of useful information that you can, that becomes part of the magnet. And the paid conversion journey.

Okay.

All right. Let's do a teardown, shall we? Let's jump to a teardown. And then afterward, I'm going to ask you about the tools you use for AI. So we're going to— we'll jump back to AI. But okay. What I like to do here, and I do this for a lot of our own customers, is not— this is not a customer. This is The Ankler. They've gotten some traction. They have— oh my goodness, what do they have? They have I wrote down— I did write down how much traffic they have. Oh, here we go. So they have 230,000, 243,000 visitors per month. Their average page, their average pages per visit is 1.63. So articles per visit, which is super average and normal. We always quote 1.7. And they write about the business of Hollywood. Hollywood. So that's their, their more, more in the B2B space. And they're basically talking about like what's going on in Hollywood. So what I'd like to do, I'd like to get your opinion on what you would do to improve the site really in any way possible, like whether it could be, it could be, I'm going to certainly lean in about their subscription setup. But here's, here's what we got. I have my ad blocker off. So there are some ads here. And as far as a reader experience, I went here, I looked at an article, I was able to read the article, and then I went to a second article, and then I was told, uh, hey, don't stop here, you know, unlock the full story. I went back and I read a few other articles, some of which were open here. This one, oh, this one is somewhat open. And then again, I'm getting the don't stop here. So I think the way this is set up is you get one article for free on the Ankler, and then really you have to pay to get kind of the rest of the content.

So I go— That's already a problem, if I may interject.

Why?

Because as the reader, I don't know that I got one story. I now assume that everything is locked down. I have no context on whether others, there might be other free articles. I might have more free articles. I have no context. I'm just meeting a gate every, at every turning, which is a frustrating experience. So, uh, to make it less frustrating, if you tell them what they have, you can tell them, look, you have another 2, 3, would you like to unlock? I mean, you have another 2 articles left for this month, for example, and not so not surprise them with your gate is about, your gate is now shut, you're out. And that is something I know that you guys also push quite a lot. That is, in my opinion, giving people a better experience.

Yep. Yeah. So just to flesh that out a little bit. So this is a hard wall, essentially. Well, it's a, you're metering one free article, but then, then you have to pay. So there's no relationship building happening in this journey. At all. So yes, the recommendation would be to, instead of just telling people to pay, it's, it's, which is very binary. It's like, oh, I gotta pay. Goddamn it. You know, and you've run into these, these paywalls all the time. I hate paywalls. And you know, that's, I hear this all the time and I get it. I say the same thing when I run into a paywall. But yeah, put up a registration, right? So give away this article for free, but in trade for an email.

Address. And that's a really important thing you just said. If I've landed on this article and it's locked, there's a, the reader is literally telling you, I read something and now I'm interested in reading something else. And what you are saying is go away.

Right.

Whereas if you say, hey, as you just said, hey, okay, so you're interested in this. You're showing me you're interested in this. The signal could not be clearer that they're interested in this. Sure, you can have this one for free. Give me your email address and come in, come on in.

That's right. And you'll get the newsletter too, right? So you can, in this space, you can sell the fact that you're gonna get this article. Maybe you'll get a couple articles or a few articles afterwards, but the key is to get the email right up front. And then I also do know after, because I looked at this earlier, is there, there is, there are other content types that are available for free, but I'm not sure what they are because I'm new. So it's a little confusing. But the newsletter is a, is a benefit too that publishers, like if you're listening to this, your free newsletter is a high value item for somebody who drops off an email address because now they're gonna, they're interested in your positioning and your niche, your expertise, your content, they are going to, even if it's just teasers that they're getting, which is generally what happens, they'll have an idea of what's happening in your space. That's valuable to them and you're sending it directly to their mailbox every day or a couple of times a week.

The worst thing you can do is not pay attention to your own newsletter because what you're doing is effectively you're saying, I'm not caring about what I'm telling people literally where they are.

Right.

So you should pay attention to your newsletter and obviously if you don't have one, you should have one. If you do have one, you should spend a good amount of time making sure it's worth opening. Once again, we go back to the very beginning. Is it worth opening and why?

Yep, exactly. All right. So let's move on. So we've established that a free registration would be handy here. Before I click this subscribe button, anything else on this? Let's shoot. I clicked the wrong thing.

Hang on. If you go back to the homepage, I have one protest here.

One protest.

Okay. I have one thing which comes to mind immediately.

Yeah.

Who's the Antler and what the heck do they do?

Right.

Yeah. It's not clear. The Industriean Span, with all due respect, while a really smart tagline I respect, says absolutely nothing. The Ankler, unfortunately, while a cool name, also says nothing. And you are assuming that everyone who enters the Ankler knows exactly what you are. Now, To an extent that is true, especially if you are a big publication. To an extent, my favorite example is Wired. Everyone knows what Wired is, but at the same time, Wired as a magazine has repositioned its content quite a lot.

Right.

And especially when you do that, you really need to tell people, hey, this is what I'm good at. Now, of course, that doesn't mean just pasting a really boring sentence. You are on a site which does XYZ. No, no, you can be smart about it. It, but again, with all due respect to The Enquirer, and I'm sure it's a great publication, but the industry on spun says, at what industry are we talking about?

Yeah, yeah.

Of course.

The business of Hollywood.

I know it's Hollywood, but—

Yeah.

I know, I know.

I had to go to the about page to figure it out. I wasn't really sure what they were publishing until I read that. And then I was like, oh, okay. But that was some work to scroll all the way to the bottom and click the, you But not only that, I would take it a step further.

So, okay, one, what the heck do they do? Two, why are they a good publication for what they do? I still don't know that.

Yeah, what's the pain point, right? What pain are they solving? If I'm in the business of Hollywood in some space, I have lots of pain points probably in my business, we all do. So which one are they solving?

There's a hint of it with the Industrials one. It kind of hints to me that maybe they have, I don't know, gossip, juice, something which is a little more realistic. But again, you're leaving it way too— I'm not a huge fan of these highly intelligent taglines which don't say much.

You got to be a little blunt on the internet. Yeah, people don't— it's not just— it's just not the knowledge, it's the time. Like, we're all so busy, we're flying by.

But people mistake being direct with being boring. You can be really direct without being boring.

That's right. Yep. I like it.

In my opinion, on the marketing side, for example, the toughest jobs I've ever done is write the copy for a billboard because you have less than a second to grab someone's attention and send the whole message.

Right.

And it's usually 6 words max. And those 6 words need to really count.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Is that a billboard strategy, 6 words?

Is that the— Yep, 6 words is usually the happy place for the size of billboards in my country. For bigger billboards, it might be different. And it really depends on the distance between billboards, how long it takes you to see them, how long they spend and how long time they spend in your windscreen. But typically, typically, from what I know, 6 words is the happy place.

Right. Unless traffic is always traffic jammed at the billboard.

That's why I'm saying it really depends. But in my country, billboards are relatively small, the roads are relatively small, and you go past relatively fast. You cannot afford to have more than 6 words.

Yep. Yep. Okay. That's cool. I learned something new today.

All right.

So let's, let's say I'm interested. Hey, you know, well, okay. Maybe I'll take a look at subscribing. What do we have here? We have 3 choices. We have, we have an ad up top. We have an annual card. We have a monthly card and we have a free card. This is where I realized that there was some free content available. I still don't really know what what these categories mean, but there's a little bit of free content here. What— let me, let me scroll down a little bit here. So what's included? The news you need to succeed, sharp commentary, essential reporting. And then we have a couple of other subscriptions here, standalone subscriptions, the Wake Up Series Business. Oh, we have a couple more, 3 more options, groups, groups, early career discounts, and gifts. So we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It looks like about 8 choices here. I have a suspicion on one thing you might say, but I kind of want to let you noodle this a little bit. So now I'm an interested, you know, potential subscriber here, interested in maybe, maybe joining.

Okay, so if I've come here, I've shown, yeah, I've shown high intent that I'm interested in subscribing.

Yeah.

But nothing in these pricing points. So let's start with what they get right. What they get right is they hit you with the price because that's what I want to know. And they make it really obvious what the tiers are and how you can get them. That is great. That is a wonderful way of putting it because people can't bear fluff. They want the price. He gave it to them. Excellent. That being said, I have absolutely no idea what I get with that. Because with all due respect, total access, what does that mean? Are you going to remove ads? Are you going to give me a reader on my phone? I have so many questions. And the problem is the questions I have, I probably don't even know I have, which means you need to tell me why. Yeah. I should pay you the $14 a month, right? Much more clearly. That doesn't mean a huge list of here's what you're getting. No, no. It just needs to be significantly less vague than total access. What does total access even mean? What are you finding?

The features.

Oh, it's obvious.

I don't know.

Yeah. It's obvious. You can read all our articles. Sure. But is that it?

Yeah. Now, I suspect, especially in the B2B space, that people in B2B are generally looking to improve their businesses. They're trying to save time, make money, save money. So how, what's the pain point here that you're solving for me as a business owner in this space or an employee in this space?

Again, why should I care?

Yeah, why should I care? Is this make me, do I get a promotion if I read this? Do I, am I better at networking? Like what's my, What are you doing for me here?

This is the point in the analogy of the high street shop where somebody has walked in and told you, I'm interested in giving you my money. Why should I?

Right.

And in fact, that leads me to the other thing, particularly, and I have no idea who these people are, so I offer them all of my respect, but For a Hollywood insider product, which is, I assume, dropping names every 5 sentences, which is normal, it's Hollywood.

Yeah.

There's no social proof. There's no names, there's no subscriber count, there's no readers saying, there's nobody saying this is an amazing publication.

Just numbers.

You should actually they buy into it. And that is the most important thing you need. When a person is about to purchase anything, think about your own purchase journeys.

Yeah.

When a person is about to purchase anything and they're not sure and they're still making up their mind, the most comforting in the world is to be able to look around, be it reviews, be it whatever, look around and say, other people have done it and they loved it.

Okay. Yeah, I feel good.

You need to be able to provide that.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Testimonials. Yeah. Logos. I mean, this is B2B, so what companies are buying access here?

Exactly.

All right.

How they found it useful.

Yeah. Yeah. The benefit, get the benefits out there. What's like, how do you, I like to say, how do you make the life of your subscriber better? That's the real benefit.

That's the real benefit. And with all due respect, again, that subheading is pretty obtuse, and if I may, slightly arrogant. Never miss an opportunity. An opportunity for what?

Yeah, for what, right?

And subscribe to join the smartest people in Hollywood. Eh, tell me why you're the smartest people in Hollywood though. You might be right and that's cool.

Yeah.

But you need to tell me why.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My turn. First of all, too many options. If I actually did scroll down now, I'm really confused. I need a slick, I need one. Honestly, the best would be one plan, but I know you can't do that today. Three cards is fine up here, but it's just, it, I, when I'm going down here, I agree with you. I'm looking for testimonials, I'm looking for social proof, I'm looking for logos, I'm looking for FAQs, like, you know, can I cancel? Like, you know, what if I want to change my plan? Or like all these things to help me feel more comfortable. I would recommend for, for B2B especially, is to have a core, a group page, a dedicated group page. Gift subscriptions, if it's really B2B, that's not usually not a big seller. Um, anything that's like early career, group subscription series, business. I don't know what the Wake Up is, but like, these can be like, hey, get your group access. That's its own page, right? The last thing I'll say is free. Gotta get rid of this. Um, last thing you want to do is like somebody's interested in paying you, but you're giving them the free out. Like, don't do that, right? The free needs to happen on the registration wall. Yeah. Way ahead in the funnel here. Somebody hits the article, they read the next one, oh, register for free. And I get that one. I get the newsletter. Great. Now they're in the funnel. Now you're sending them back to the website. Now they're seeing the upgrade messaging. Now when they come to pay, they're seeing annual and monthly, or maybe they just see one big card with all those benefits we just talked about that has the toggle for monthly or annual. You take your pick and off you go. That's my— Oh, and I got one more thing. I got one more thing. So when I go to checkout, I'm gonna hit monthly here. I end up on this subdomain called Passport. Okay. So I'm no longer on the Ankler, I'm on the passport.ankler. And this, when you're leaving domains, it throws a little scare into people. Like, where's my, did this get hacked? Like, yeah, it says Passport's kind of friendly, but this is like a different website. Like I'm not, and then—

It's generally a bad experience.

Yeah, it's a bad experience. So, and then I know from experience that you're sending data off to a SaaS platform and you're using APIs to manage logins, which get a little screwy and there's some friction here, but the main point is don't send people off to a subdomain. To pay. And then this screen, honestly, log in or sign up. I'm like, this is really eerie. There's so almost, there's nothing here.

So— This is somebody else's rule, but it always resonates. Don't make people think. That is the most important thing. If you want them to buy, don't make them think. They are not, that doesn't mean cheat them. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying don't make them think because if you made them think about, okay, what do I do next? You've lost them, right? They need to be, their journey needs to be seamless. All you're interested in buying, look at Amazon. I don't know whether any of you have noticed, at least in Europe, Amazon have lately, literally, they already had one of the best checkouts in the industry. Now they've taken it a step further and they've even removed the cart page.

Right.

So now you go instantly to one screen and the checkout. It's frictionless as heck.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I will say if you have the free registration funnel in there, you have someone who's already logged in. They put in their email. That's another thing. Next step, at least the way we do it, it's just, it's an email, but then the next step you choose a password. So now you're logged in, you have the email, you have the login. So your checkout is literally put your name in and then put your credit card in and you're done.

And that's what it should boil down to. And that's another pet peeve of mine. I mean, when you're trying to buy something and they're asking you for, it feels like the name of your pet hamster when you were 6. Just get the very basics. Anything else you might need or want, get it after they pay. You just need, again, it's not about hiring people. It's just about making it really easy and really frictionless.

Yep. I agree.

All right.

We're going to wrap up here. James, with tools, AI tools, as I promised earlier. I know that the AI tool universe is exploding with, I'm going to just say the word, millions of tools because somebody's working on it.

It seems like it, for sure.

It's every day, it's like I get an email or I see a video and it's like, oh, this new tool does this one thing and it's just crazy. So, but let's, let's, what I'd like to ask you is what do you, what tools do you like? And in the frame of, you know, we're dealing with publishers that are basically dealing with huge content loads. You know, they could be going to town hall, they could be recording, you know, the sessions at town hall. There's journalists are going out in the field, they're doing research, they're interviewing people. There's a lot of data that's coming back. I hear from different people in the industry, oh, AI, you know, we don't really wanna use the AI, you know, for writing. And of course you don't wanna use AI for writing, but you do wanna use AI for editing and workflows and making things better and if you're still on the fence for AI, you need to get off because it's still your content, it's still your positioning, but you wanna make yourself work 10 times faster than you're working now. So what do you use? What do you like? What's hot? Like what do you think is here for the long term for a publisher?

First of all, get used to Google AI. Because they're not going away. Google is in this to win this and Google is not going to park them anytime soon. They are going to keep changing them like they just did with the links, but they are not. So get used to it. Don't stop fighting it. It's here to stay. Maybe it will evolve again in the future, but right now, just this is the way things are going and you need to get on board. When it comes to tools, again, unfortunately, there's so many tools and And it really depends on your scenario and your situation. But the way I would, rather than specifically call out a tool, the way I would do it is first figure out what information you need. What information do you think is really important for you to make decisions about your business? You should do that before you start researching tools. What information would be valuable to you? What would you like to know? Armed with that, you should go and figure out which tools you should be using in order to achieve that. AI is here, AI is not going away, and there are a million ways of using AI. Some of them are really the wrong ways of using AI. As you said, yeah, just churning out hundreds of thousands of pieces of content using AI, somebody literally anyone can do now. And that is the wrong thing to do because that will give you nothing. Actually, it will get you penalized heavily by Google. So don't even try. On the other hand, one way I use AI all of the time is, for example, I give it huge datasets to crunch and to find me really interesting insights. What's the advantage of that? The advantage of that is that where before, and this is true, I have a client for whom I used to do a huge deep dive every 6 months about all of their data. And I, it genuinely used to take me a week, a week and a half just to build the analysis. I can do the analysis now in a couple of hours and I can find more insights than I ever used possible, purely because AI can actually do that and do that well. The caveat here is you need to know what you need. You need to know how to present the information to AI. You need to know what to ask. You can't just plonk it in and hope for the best. That's not gonna work out well.

What do you use for deep analysis?

I use Claude. Claude has become an insanely good machine. They've launched a new model today and it is nuts in a good way. 5.0.

Right.

Yeah. It also eats your tokens like crazy, but it's really impressive. Look, Claude is extremely good and is one of the best tools, in my opinion, out there, one of the more accurate ones and one of the more reliable ones, but they all have their uses. Gemini, for example, I find is extremely good in search, in deep research. Why? Because Google literally owns the index. So of course, Gemini is gonna be the best at that.

Yeah.

So again, you need to figure out what you want first and then figure out how to use it. Most people start from the tool first, and that's a disaster. Faster. First figure out what you want. So for example, when it comes to measuring your AI footprint, what data do you want? Because there's a million different, there's a million different tools out there which measure your AI footprint and they all measure it differently.

All of them.

Trust me, I've been through a lot.

What's an AI footprint? Why don't we define that?

An AI footprint is is, again, it's defined in a million ways. So there's many ways. My way of defining your AI footprint is for the questions where you should be present, how present are you, how are you spoken about, and what shows up.

Hmm. Gotcha.

So there's a lot of layers of forgetting out there. You can imagine. But there's a lot of tools. I have a client who subscribed to 3 different AI tools and then came to me and asked me, why, what is going on? I cannot understand a thing. Of course, because these 3 tools are using 3 different algorithms and they are asking different questions and they're presenting different data and they will never agree. Figure out what you want and figure out which tool answers it best.

So your AI footprint is what, how you, your business ranks in AI, essentially how it's—

How your business shows up. How it shows up. Yeah. How AI speaks about it, how AI refers to it, how AI links to it. These are all really important questions.

Do you think a publisher, you think it's for like a local news publisher, regional news magazine publisher, do you think that's worth, is that a road worth going down, you think?

I'm not sure yet. I'll reserve that. For every other business, 100%. For publishers, I assume so, but that area of AI is evolving so rapidly right now. The area, when I say news and AI, is evolving so rapidly right now that I'm still unsure which tools are best to figure that bit out because there's always, when you're talking about content, you're always talking general content and then you're talking news content.

Yeah.

If your publication falls on the general content side, which means no breaking news, no and stuff like that, then yes, definitely. You need to figure out how much you definitely need those tools. You need to figure out what tools you need and how you need them. If you're on the breaking news side, that is where I hold fire a little bit right now because things are changing too rapidly there.

Gotcha. If, let's say I'm a local news publisher, I haven't really, I've been messing around with ChatGPT. I mean, I'm ready to like maybe I need is I have transcripts that come in that I need to make sense of. I have— That's a great use. I have ideas that I maybe need help fleshing out. Maybe I need some research done. What tool or tools would you start with if you were just stepping into this?

If you are giving AI a solid piece of information and asking it to analyze it, it typically does a pretty good job and there's no AI which is gonna be significantly better than the other one at that. That. So you can use any one of those. For example, when I have a meeting, I have, like everybody else, I have a service which summarizes what it does. Some services are better than others, but they basically all do the same job, and that's fine. So when you're giving it, but the old adage still applies, garbage in, garbage out.

Right.

So give it the right information, ask it the right questions, and you will get the right answers. Alex, my colleague, puts it the best way. Having AI available at your fingertips is like having a very intelligent 12-year-old.

Yeah.

He's extremely intelligent, but he's still 12. You need to tell him exactly what he needs to do.

Yeah, context is key, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, okay. I'm a big fan of Claude, as you know. I find that I've been, and I think it's worthwhile to get Cowork installed and Cowork is essentially an app that just runs and lets you run simultaneous processes and queries and the tasks that you need to do, but it's easy to set up a, um, and it can connect to like your Gmail and your calendar and it can, you know, it can scan, you can just tell it, hey, look, tell me every morning I want to know what's happening for the day. Look at my calendar, go through my emails, flag emails that are important, you know, things like that. Um, but, uh, I think the idea that really strikes me is building skills for different things. So as a publisher, uh, to me, and I don't know what you think about this, but I would Like I'm building a voice skill. So I constantly am beating Claude over the head, you know, saying, you know, I don't say things like this, say things like that. And yes, we produce content like this podcast, we write original content, but we definitely use Claude to help process and get the workflow forward. So it's original content and it's, you know, to be honest, we're really trying to figure out the voice, but it's a skill, right? So you build a skill, then you have like, let's say you might even have an interview skill to break out a transcript from an interview that kind of helps you put together the pieces the way you want them. And you train your skills over time, right? And so you build this nice assistant that gets, maybe you can get from 12 to 13, you know, in age, but that's sort of the way we do it.

Can I share the favorite skill I've built for myself, which I use all the time? Sure. Yeah. I call it James QA. It is a violently skeptical version of me. So what I do is when I'm doing a piece of information, particularly when I'm sending something to a client, I call up James QA. And the job of this, and it's a very complex series of questions, is to basically bully the AI into checking its facts. Where did you get this from? Is this a problem I was trying to solve? Are you just making up stuff? Where did you get the data from specifically? Which links? It's a violently skeptical version of me.

That's hysterical. You should put that in the marketplace, right? Like bully your AI.

Honestly, it saved my skin many times.

I bet. Yeah, pushing back. It's something AI is not not generally great at doing. All right, James, I think we've done it. We've gone a whole hour and a half, which is amazing. If you're still listening to this, congrats to you. Hopefully this is helpful. So where can someone wants help with marketing, positioning, branding, AI, SEO, where can they reach out?

Drop me an email at james@getellipses.com or our website getellipses.com. And by the way, that's not only, that's an invite, not only if you want to do business with us, I'm always happy to have a chat. That's how—

feel free. Awesome. Thanks, James. Hey, we'll see you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall Podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription strategy, go to leakypaywall.com. See you next time.