SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

[00:00:00] Jeff Sieh: Hello, folks.

[00:00:00] Jeff Sieh: Welcome to Creator News Live. I’m Jeff Sieh, And you’re not.

[00:00:03] Conor Brown: And I’m Conor Brown, and this is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the world of Creator news and more.

[00:00:10] Jeff Sieh: Have you ever wondered why your content is not getting found the way it used to? Maybe you’ve noticed search shifting under your feet and wished you understood what is really going on, or maybe you’re looking for a clearer path to help your audience discover your work in a world shaped by ai. If any of that sounds familiar, you are in the right place.

[00:00:31] Conor Brown: today we are excited to welcome someone who has been guiding businesses through these challenges For nearly three decades, rich Brooks will be sharing his experience, his practical insights, and the strategies he uses to help creators and companies stay visible online.

[00:00:48] Jeff Sieh: So sit back, clear schedule, clear your mind, and get ready for this week’s episode of Creator News Live. Rich. How are you doing today, my friend?

[00:00:55] Rich Brooks: I am doing great. Thanks for having me back on. Jeff. Great to see you, Conor. Great to meet you.this is [00:01:00] fantastic. I didn’t realize I was, I was honorable enough to get two hosts today, so I’m really looking forward to this.

[00:01:04] Jeff Sieh: Conor is what keeps me in line. ’cause I will go down rabbit holes. But before we get in a rabbit hole, I wanna do a big shout out to our sponsor of the show, Ecamm. You can find out more about them by going to Ecamm dot com slash jeff. You can save 15% on your first purchase. By you to seeing code Jeff 15 there, what makes the show happen?

[00:01:22] Jeff Sieh: So, we are are very, very thankful for them. we just got done with Thanksgiving, so yeah, we’re gonna talk about being thankful for Ecamm today, but, we are gonna do the thing that we always do. now we have started doing these amazing AI intros So without further ado, we’re gonna play a Rich Brooks theme song.

[00:01:40] Rich Brooks: So here we go. There you go, rich. Your very own theme song. Awesome. I love the retro vibe. I love that. You know, I, I often think that AI doesn’t get my face right, but that was actually pretty good. You nailed my dimple, so kudos to you.

[00:01:55] Jeff Sieh: it just keeps getting better. Better. Like it’s really funny if you go back and listen to PA past episodes, just with the music and even [00:02:00] with. We use Midjourney for creating these graphics. ’cause I just like the stylized way that it does it. you know, nano bananas. Awesome. But I just, for the stylized stuff, I really like the, the Midjourney style, but yeah.

[00:02:09] Jeff Sieh: Keeps getting better and better. But we’re talking today about AI search. I mean, AI is changing everything. Search, uh, Conor and I and Masterminds, we’ve talked about this over and over because it changes every day. But I wanna know you guys in the audience, wherever you are watching from, Where do you search first when you need an answer? Is it Google? Is it ChatGPT? is it YouTube or is it something else? For me, it’s perplexity. That’s my kind of go-to one. But I would love to know where you guys search. Uh, just put it down in the comments wherever you’re watching. And, uh, we will try to pull that up.

[00:02:40] Jeff Sieh: But yeah, Conor? Where are you going to get your answers?

[00:02:42] Conor Brown: I feel like for more robust things, when I want a more fulfilling answer, I’ll go to perplexity. If I’m looking for, for something quick, I use this example all the time. If I’m looking to see if an actor is like still alive, I’m just typing into Google, right? Gimme that little AI overview and. But something a bit more robust, I want [00:03:00] perplexity so that I can click out and, and learn more about that.

[00:03:03] Conor Brown: And then for like specific things, like people’s opinions or like recipes or things like that, I’m actually gonna TikTok first and searching in there to see what’s going on.

[00:03:12] Jeff Sieh: what about you? What’s your favorite tool of choice?

[00:03:14] Rich Brooks: I don’t know that I have a favorite because I think it is very contextual. So there, I spend sadly 10 hours a day in front of my computer. So very often Google is very simple and since I’m getting the AI overviews, whether I want them or not, but that often answers those simple questions and then I can click on things and dig deeper.

[00:03:32] Rich Brooks: But I also have seven, eight. Nine tabs right now with AI tools in them. So sometimes I’ll ask them, and then there’s the actor question. I’m sitting, who was that? What was that guy in? What was, you know? And then I either open up my phone and I go to and look up there, scream out to what I’ll call right now, Lexi, and say, Hey, Lexi, what was that movie with the dog that went to space?

[00:03:54] Rich Brooks: And then Alexa will give me the answer. So really, I don’t think, and I think I’m [00:04:00] representative. people will always search, but it is going to be what is the easiest path to get the kind of answer that you need right then. And so this was a great point. And Conor, you, you’re exactly right, it depends on the kind of depth that you’re looking for.

[00:04:13] Rich Brooks: Do you need to just know when Washington’s birthday is gonna be next year, or do you need to know why Washington decided to cross the Delaware? And that’s a deeper question, and you might look for different place to get your answer.

[00:04:25] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, I still, for some reason Perplexity is the one like on my phone ’cause it’s so easy. It’s got a great app. I go, I even actually use it to read news a lot of times ’cause it’s kind of got almost like a Feedly like interface where I can see the stuff that I want to see, like text news, and all that kinda stuff.

[00:04:40] Jeff Sieh: So

[00:04:41] Rich Brooks: Which is probably why the New York Times is suing them again.

[00:04:43] Jeff Sieh: probably exactly right. Exactly right. Um,

[00:04:46] Jeff Sieh: so,

[00:04:47] Rich Brooks: interesting. So side note, uh, I use Venmo. And I always ignore the, oh, you’ve just unlocked this super awesome deal. But just yesterday it gave me a full year of [00:05:00] Perplexity Pro. So now I am a Perplexity Pro user for at least one year. I thought that was a pretty amazing deal. I.

[00:05:06] Jeff Sieh: I did the exact same thing. ’cause I had been using the free version and then I said, tie into Venmo. I’m like, uh, they already know all my data anyway. I might as well get a free, you know, year fro. Anyway, we’ll see what happens. So, very, very cool. So we’ve got some people answering the question. Uh, so, Ralph says, I searched my mind first, then I go to ChatGPT.

[00:05:22] Jeff Sieh: and,

[00:05:23] Jeff Sieh: um.

[00:05:24] Rich Brooks: searched Ralph’s mind first

[00:05:26] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, so Ralph is amazing and, uh, Dustin says seven to nine tabs of AI stuff. He’s, right there with you. and then, uh, Sean from, but mostly Disney says, I still use Google, but my 84-year-old mother-in-law had me install perplexity on her phone the other day. So, yeah, it’s amazing

[00:05:42] Jeff Sieh: who’s using this one.

[00:05:43] Conor Brown: she, she knows what perplexity is and wants to start using it, but still need help downloading it to her phone. That’s cool.

[00:05:48] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, that is

[00:05:49] Rich Brooks: Yes. Love everything about that sentence

[00:05:51] Jeff Sieh: Yes. So let’s dive into, some of the stuff that Rich has said. So Rich, you wrote that informational SEO is dying. And [00:06:00] what does that particularly mean for creators and small businesses who rely on those top of funnel pages? I know you, you have an agency, you do this for a lot of clients, and I know you wrote that in one of your articles,on the AI and the future of SEO.

[00:06:13] Jeff Sieh: So. What do, what do we need to do as creators and small businesses to, if we’re getting bumped out of those top funnel pages and the ai, we already mentioned the AI results that are coming in when we ask a question, so what is a company or small business to do?

[00:06:27] Rich Brooks: Yeah, so it’s a great question because what we’re seeing now, and just let’s define informational. So when you do searches, we were kind of talking about this already. Some searches might be informational. Like I might want to ask questions about like, what is a table saw? I wanna know information versus what is the best table saw. Okay? Now I’m saying to Google that my intent is transactional. I wanna buy something. That’s when we’re gonna see a lot of these Google ads that appear at the top of the page. So understanding that informational searches for whatever your business may be.

[00:06:58] Rich Brooks: So we, I run a digital agency. [00:07:00] People may want to know information about Google ads, like would Google ads be a good idea for my business? An informational search. A lot of times now, in fact, I would say in oh 90% of the cases, Google is going to give you that AI overview. It is going to scrape other creator’s content and basically give you that AI summary along with some links that you can click if you want to dig deeper.

[00:07:25] Rich Brooks: So that’s what’s going on right now. And because of that, because we’re getting those answers up front. We don’t actually need to go and look at those two or three websites because we’ve got the answer. So that’s problematic for all of us who are content creators, who have been leveraging the power of Google by creating blog posts and other content that Google then directs people to.

[00:07:48] Rich Brooks: But now Google wants to keep that traffic for itself. So those informational searches, which in many cases were low converting traffic to our website. So if I sell table saws just to stick with that [00:08:00] idea. If somebody wants to know about, you know, table saws in general, like the history of table saws, I might have an article on my website, they read it.

[00:08:06] Rich Brooks: They’re not gonna buy a table saw necessarily from me. But if somebody’s searching for what’s the best table saw or what’s the best table saw for a beginner, or what’s the best table saw for a job site? Well now that’s more of like Google says Rich is ready to buy something. And that’s where you start to see more of that.

[00:08:23] Rich Brooks: About the companies. And so to answer your question, we’re gonna lose a lot of that informational educational content traffic. So we really need to focus then on more of that transactional and even branded traffic. When people are searching for us by name, that’s probably going to be the future of search, at least for the near future.

[00:08:43] Jeff Sieh: Awesome.

[00:08:43] Conor Brown: we’re talking about, you know, optimizing our content and going more towards transactional content and, and creating that first so that we can get the sales and things that we want from, from our businesses. Rich, do you think that. In that context, is Google still [00:09:00] worth optimizing for?

[00:09:01] Conor Brown: Even when some of those pages might, you know, show up in an AI overview, might not lead to a click, might lead to a zero click search result, is it still worth optimizing for Google?

[00:09:13] Rich Brooks: If you’ve been always optimizing for Google, then I might argue that you’ve always been doing it wrong, and I know that that’s the goal of search engine optimization, but really the pure goal of search engine optimization is to. Answer the questions that your clients have in part to build trust with them.

[00:09:28] Rich Brooks: So there will still be traffic and there will be people who will click through, or there’ll be people who hate AI overviews and they’ll scroll down to find the websites that are actually providing that information. So I think there’s value there. I also feel there’s value once people get to your website.

[00:09:42] Rich Brooks: So you. I might decide that as a Google Ads provider, that I would have a service page that explains exactly how we help clients, you know, get into the Google Ads and succeed there. I also want to have educational information and it’s those blog posts and those resources on once people [00:10:00] get to my website, that also build trust and establish our credibility.

[00:10:03] Rich Brooks: And I think that’s true for almost any business out there. So I’m not arguing that people should stop creating that informational content. I think it’s still. Critical. I’m just suggesting that you are not gonna get as much qualified traffic from it as you did in the past. And if your number one thing is to get sales, you do need to optimize your sales pages, your service pages.

[00:10:25] Rich Brooks: For Google still and other search engines, but Google’s usually the one that you know, if you, if you optimize for them, you optimize for everybody. That I think is still important. So maybe, like you were saying, Conor, prioritize optimizing your service pages with your IC P ps in mind. What are their pain points?

[00:10:43] Rich Brooks: What are their questions, all that sort of information. Get that, you know, the service pages really robust. And then start maybe turning your attention to creating the content that establishes your credibility. that might get links from other sources because people are more likely to link to a blog post than they are to a service page on your website, which [00:11:00] also has search benefits.

[00:11:01] Rich Brooks: So I think it’s, you’re still wanna do a lot of the same things you did before, but maybe put a little bit more emphasis on optimizing for the bottom of the funnel pages.

[00:11:11] Jeff Sieh: Got it. So I kinda wanna do a little side note here, ’cause Dustin, a couple weeks ago in the comments brought up something ’cause you know, we’re, we all gripe about the ai, you know, summaries and all that stuff and Dustin was made a point like that. All these. AI engines are using Google kind of in the backend.

[00:11:27] Jeff Sieh: Like they’re, they’re going in and they’re pulling stuff that’s already on Google and serving it up that way. Do you think with like, perplexity, I think it’s comment, you know, AI has their own browser. All these things that are rolling out kind of put on your crystal ball. Do you think that Google is still going to be like the king of search and they’ll still be scraping that stuff in the future?

[00:11:47] Jeff Sieh: Or do you think that these AI companies are wanting really to build their own. It’s like search engine or AI or answer engine, for themselves. And Google will start to kinda, maybe fade away.

[00:11:58] Rich Brooks: I don’t think that Google is [00:12:00] gonna fade away because the people who work there are really smart and want to keep their jobs. so I mean, just the fact that they seem to be, you know, if you, you know, a year ago, Gemini and Bard before, it seems so basic compared to ChatGPT and then, and I’m not one of those guys that is, what’s the, who’s the number one in the benchmark.

[00:12:18] Rich Brooks: I literally don’t care about that. I, I’ve, I’ve posted about how unimportant that is for the average business owner. But Gemini has made such incredible strides and you know, is beating ChatGPT mean, this is why the code Red came out from, uh, Altman because he realizes that he’s been overtaken. So I don’t think Google’s gonna go away, but obviously I, or not, obviously I believe that more and more of these tools are gonna be become one, like you said, the AI browsers are coming out, which to be honest, I’ve played around with them.

[00:12:46] Rich Brooks: Don’t feel that different than just talking to the chatbots themselves. so browsers, ai. And search engines, they’re just basically all doing the same thing, answering questions for us. So I think it will be that they’ll, [00:13:00] they’ll start to merge together. But Google has such a headstart on search. I don’t think they’re gonna go away anytime soon.

[00:13:06] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So you know, you mentioned before, and kind of to back to your point earlier, you said that the future is fewer visits, but better visits. and you mentioned mentioned kind of the bottom of the funnel, so how can businesses. Rethink SEO success metrics when the raw traffic tanks, but intent gets sharper.

[00:13:24] Jeff Sieh: Conor did a great thing for our mastermind where he kind of took us through the, you know, Google analytics, you know, search engine console, all that stuff. What do, what do businesses really need to be looking at? ’cause one that can be super overwhelming anyway, but what do they really need to drill down into in this age of ai?

[00:13:39] Rich Brooks: So I’m coming at it from two angles, ’cause one, I’m an agency owner that loves SEO and I want to talk about how important SEO is, but I’m also a business owner. And at the end of the day, there’s a reason they call it the bottom line, right? At the end of the day, I mostly care about are we healthy? In both the revenue and profitability.

[00:13:57] Rich Brooks: You know, that’s the thing that matters most to me, [00:14:00] and that’s gonna come primarily from those bottom of the funnel. Now, sometimes you get the bottom of the funnel by getting people through the top of the funnel. So it’s not that those other phases aren’t important, but I do think that we just need to pay more attention to some of those.

[00:14:14] Rich Brooks: Bottom of the funnel searches and those transactional searches and make sure we’re taking care of those, as well as continually putting out good, valuable content that’s gonna lead people to those service pages. And that activity could happen in a YouTube video, it could happen in a podcast, it can happen in social media.

[00:14:31] Rich Brooks: but I do think that we need to be really kind of rethinking. How we prioritize our SEO activities and maybe start from the bottom and work our way up. And also, you know, you mentioned Conor, you know, understands GA four Google Analytics and so setting up some things in Google Analytics to track your AI traffic as well.

[00:14:51] Rich Brooks: and I just saw something from Andy Crestodina the other day who I follow very carefully and very closely, talking about how. The conversions [00:15:00] he’s seeing from AI traffic is significantly higher than search traffic. So even though right now it’s this infa decimal percentage compared to search traffic, in some ways it’s much more valuable.

[00:15:13] Rich Brooks: And if you have a product that’s only a few bucks, and that may not matter all that much, but if you have a product that’s 10 50, a hundred thousand dollars. Well then just a couple of good leads from AI can make your year. So you know, that’s something else you want to keep in mind too, and we haven’t really gotten to it yet, but it’s not just these days about optimizing for search, but it’s also optimizing for ai, which.

[00:15:36] Rich Brooks: Really nobody understands, as far as I’m concerned, people have assumptions, and it’s a topic we talk about almost every day in the office because this is our lifeblood. But you know, the it, it’s just as important. So as we’re thinking about what’s most important for a business to pay attention to, yes, it’s the bottom line, but then working backwards, it’s that transactional traffic that can come from both search and ai.

[00:15:58] Conor Brown: I feel like, you know, [00:16:00] back in the day, and, and still so many people use this technique now with SEO, where it’s how do we make sure we’re, SEO is, is, doing the right thing and it was checking rankings, right? It was seen where we ranked versus our competition for certain keywords. And then we are almost treating that as sales after that is a lagging indicator, right?

[00:16:20] Conor Brown: A lagging metric based on as least, as long as we’re on top, people are clicking. And then from there, you know, it’s that funnel that’s that’s going. Through that, with the SERPs changing constantly, hourly, different people are seeing different things all the time. Rich, how can we from the get understand if our SEO is working as we’re making these changes to pages in today’s AI thing, it’s, I feel like it’s just so hard now, especially from SEO and showing up in the SERPs, like what are the metrics you think are are important that kinda lead to the sales eventually.

[00:16:56] Rich Brooks: that’s a great question because you are right. When we first [00:17:00] started SEO, we literally were told every keyword and how, you know, whether or not somebody came to our website, all this information. Then for privacy reasons, Google started hiding some of that data from us, and now we’re in the age of AI where.

[00:17:13] Rich Brooks: AI tools don’t rank websites the way that search engines do. And so I could ask a question like, who’s the best HVAC company in Southern Maine? And I could ask it to four different, AI tools and I could get four different answers. Usually they’ll gimme a few different choices, and some of them are overlaps and stuff like that.

[00:17:30] Rich Brooks: I often will then ask, well, how did you come up with this, you know, decision? So I can kind of think about how they’re going about it. And often it’s, it’s web searches and its directories and things like that. So, as far as the metrics piece of it goes, I would say we still wanna pay attention to things like search visibility.

[00:17:47] Rich Brooks: But we also want to take a look at our Google Analytics and track where our traffic that’s converting is coming from. And these are things you can set up in Google Analytics for goals, so you can see what people fill. For me, e-comm, it’s always a lot [00:18:00] easier, right? But for lead gen sites, which I think are the majority of websites out there for lead gen sites like ours, where my goal is to get somebody to fill out a contact form to ask for a meeting with me.

[00:18:10] Rich Brooks: I can then look in my Google Analytics and see where did this traffic come from? Did it come from social? Probably not. Uh, did it come from search organic search? Did it come from paid search? Did it come from a local search? You know, all this information, did it come from ai? And as I start to see that.

[00:18:26] Rich Brooks: what analytics can tell me is, did that traffic actually convert? Yes, I got somebody saying, I’d like to fill a, I’d like to talk to you. But quite honestly, I get so many spam requests through our contact form. I don’t even know if that’s a important metric anymore. So on the backend, and I say this like I do this and I don’t, to be honest, but what I should be doing, and maybe in 2026 is really taking note of what jobs close.

[00:18:50] Rich Brooks: And then trying to track them back to how did somebody find me? And that might give me a better sense of, ’cause I can, I think when Andy’s talking about AI converts at a higher level, what he’s [00:19:00] saying, and I haven’t asked him, this is a higher percentage of people fill out the contact form. But filling out a contact form and signing a contract for a 10 50, a hundred thousand dollars website and SEO and Digital marketing package are very different.

[00:19:14] Rich Brooks: And you may get a lot of people who fill out the contact form and then they’re like, yes, I need a $500 website. Well then go to Wix because I can’t help you at this point, kind of a thing. So I think you have to really start to spend more time after the conversion, the website conversion, and start to draw lines to see where your best traffic is actually coming from.

[00:19:35] Rich Brooks: And that’s extra work and, and people need to be able to do that.

[00:19:38] Conor Brown: And I think for so long too, people were optimizing for those long tail keywords, right? For those queries where it was a specific person asking that question, but you could create content for that, that your product or service or whatever solved their issue too, right? That wasn’t necessarily around your brand, it was just capitalizing on somebody that had a question, [00:20:00] and you’re answering it right then and there.

[00:20:02] Conor Brown: But you’ve talked Rich a lot about,branded search, right? People actually seeking you out because you’re an expert in X, Y, Z, and your product or service can help them with their problem. How does a small business actually build enough authority? Enough? EEAT, right? Where people are gonna search. For them by name verse, just typing in a long tail keyword and stumbling upon them.

[00:20:26] Rich Brooks: That’s such a great question. And so I was just at the main, public relations council, uh, for their annual event and I had the opportunity to speak for five minutes and I said, I think you guys might have the most job security in the nation right now. Because the two things that I am telling people to focus on right now in this age of ai and, and how do you get cited by ai?

[00:20:49] Rich Brooks: How do you get recommended by ai? Are things that we haven’t really talked about as much in the past, in the past decade or so? at least us personally. One is PR because when I [00:21:00] talk to the chat bots and I say, how did you come up with this? What did it look like? You know, this sort of things. they look at the website.

[00:21:06] Rich Brooks: And they look at outside sources, third party reliable sources. So in my mind, and I can’t prove this yet, but this is the kind of work that I’m doing, and this is the, the path I’m following is that I want my website to tell the story of my company in terms of what we offer and why we’re the best and all the sort of stuff that we’ve always kind of done.

[00:21:27] Rich Brooks: But I’m also putting even more, import. On external citations, it’s great if they link to me, but even if they don’t, so, making sure that you’re listed in all the directory. So I, I went through this experiment this week and I asked, who is the best digital agency in Maine and all the AI tools that I use.

[00:21:47] Rich Brooks: I, I use perplexity, I use Claude, I used Gemini, and I used, ChatGPT. And I basically asked that question and none of them said, there’s one. They said, it depends what you’re looking for. It was a typical marketing answer. It depends. and then they listed the [00:22:00] top ones. I was very happy to see that in every single case flight new media was mentioned.

[00:22:04] Rich Brooks: So that made me feel like we must be doing something right. But then I would ask like, what directories or resources did you use to determine this? And I actually created a Google spreadsheet to track all this, and I found that in my industry. Probably the number one cited source was a company called Clutch, or clutch.co.

[00:22:24] Rich Brooks: design Rush was another one. SEM Rush has theirs as well. If, I mean, I am a business owner. If I were a business owner of my own company, I would then make sure that I’m listed and optimized in all of these resources that it’s going to. And then I’m saying the same thing. Consistently, it’s called being an entity.

[00:22:43] Rich Brooks: So the entity of Flight New Media is that we are a top tier digital agency offering branding, web design and digital marketing to small to medium sized businesses in Maine and beyond. Like that’s basically what I want every AI to think about. Or to say, when people ask, I need to say that on [00:23:00] my website and I need to see how I can get other people to be saying the same things.

[00:23:03] Rich Brooks: And that could be include things like, I mean, if I go to Design Rush, and that’s not one that I’ve really used all that much before, but I’m sure that I can get a page up. I’m sure that I can put my own about section in there and then I can probably pay for a little bit more visibility, which might boost that as well.

[00:23:17] Rich Brooks: That’s the work that you can do, but that’s also great use. Of, you know, if you have a public relations firm that you work with, like they can help you with those citations, get you into local news, get you into national news, get you into industry magazines, if that’s not something that you’re good at yourself.

[00:23:32] Rich Brooks: And the other thing that I think everybody should be thinking about is their brand. Because like you were saying, branded searches lead to more business people know about us, And, and it seems like, well, okay, but we’ve already got the business. But no, the bottom line is you wanna constantly be building your brand, invest in your brand, your logo, show up and be consistent in that brand every single day.

[00:23:52] Rich Brooks: Get your team to show up consistently in that brand and just reinforce that so that whenever there’s a question, AI knows that [00:24:00] Flight New Media is a top tier brand, uh, top tier digital agency offering X, Y, and Z in this location, or whatever it is for your brand. That’s where I think people’s focus should be in 2026.

[00:24:10] Jeff Sieh: That’s awesome. There’s a lot of stuff there I want to unpack real quick, but, Amy Keys says, yes, PR girl here, I, she does PR for the biggest, uh, museum in. The world. So I’ll just leave it that ’cause I don’t know if I can say it legally. uh, she says, gave a comms 1 0 1 course to a group of interns this morning.

[00:24:26] Jeff Sieh: she goes, you are my new best friend, rich. So you got a new fan there. Uh, you need to check out Rich’s podcast. It’s ba it’s amazing. Agents have changed, so make sure you guys do that. but I wanted to kind of. Go back. ’cause you, you mentioned a lot of things in there on how business can do this and talked a lot about outside citations it sounds a little bit back in the old days of the SEO bros where, you know, the, the link farms where you would like go and you’d be on it and that would help and you’d, you’d wanna get from a.org and all that stuff.

[00:24:54] Jeff Sieh: Are we moving back that way to, we need to have those kind of outside links coming in because [00:25:00] we need to be that trusted source that those LLMs will quote.

[00:25:03] Rich Brooks: No, because I don’t think that’s a way of building trust. I think that’s a way of building distrust. If anything, you know, there was a reason why Link Farms went out of fashion very quickly, because they started getting punished for showing up there. I would argue that. The advent of AI or, or basically the democratization of ai, everybody being able to use it, the tools being everywhere is causing both branding and PR to be more important than they’ve been in maybe a decade.

[00:25:29] Rich Brooks: And that’s kind of like what my point is here is that yes, you wanna get citations, but they have to be citations from something that the AI says. This is a logical source. So when I asked that second follow-up question in this little survey that I did, of those four tools. I literally was curious, like, where are you going for this information?

[00:25:46] Rich Brooks: because I did something similar a month or so ago and, and I, one of what, I don’t remember what the tool is, but it says, oh, you’re listed tech behemoth. I’d never heard of that. But then that tells me, okay, well maybe I need to go investigate this [00:26:00] source. Is this a trusted source? And if it is, then I have to invest some time in creating my page there and getting listed there, possibly doing advertising.

[00:26:07] Rich Brooks: I have no idea. But that’s kind of what the, the process is like. But if it’s just some random. Website in the middle of nowhere. Well, AI is not gonna be going to that random website. The AI knows that it should go to relevant directories, relevant, media sources, and that’s where we should start. Our PR journey, you know, to get those citations.

[00:26:30] Rich Brooks: and, and it’s grunt work for sure, but the bottom line is that’s, I think, gonna be important. We just wanna make it as easy as possible, just like we wanted the SERP to make it as easy as possible for Google to recommend us. Now we wanna make it as easy as possible for the AI to recommend us.

[00:26:45] Jeff Sieh: so what is the importance for businesses, for like doing live video, you know, stuff that AI can’t do really well right now, like podcasting.

[00:26:53] Jeff Sieh: and I know you’re a podcaster, so what are your thoughts on how that will play into discoverability moving forward in [00:27:00] this age of ai?

[00:27:01] Rich Brooks: So, you know, by tomorrow, by the time this is published, who knows, maybe AI is gonna be doing video better than we can do, so to speak. but if the question is about like, does it help our discoverability, it absolutely does. I mean, we were talking earlier and Conor mentioned that he goes to TikTok for some of his searches.

[00:27:17] Rich Brooks: Okay. So if I want to be one of the sources that Conor’s always. Turning towards for one reason or another, then I know that I need to show up on TikTok. And yes, I could do some stuff in ai. and, and people have to create that sort of, avatar or virtual influencer. And, and maybe that’ll make a difference.

[00:27:34] Rich Brooks: That’s not the path I’m gonna choose to take, I believe. And, and I think it is dependent on the type of business you run. I believe that people want to work with people. There are times where they might want to use an automated system ’cause they don’t wanna work with people. But in general, like especially something with a service-based industry is, is they wanna be able to trust the person and the people behind that brand.

[00:27:56] Rich Brooks: So doing video is very helpful and can help [00:28:00] establish you as a expert in whatever you want. So. if I run an HVAC company, you know, maybe what I’m gonna do is create little videos on TikTok and, and, and shorts on YouTube and all these sort of things that kind of show people how to fix some of the minor stuff themselves around the house.

[00:28:15] Rich Brooks: For example, like, hey, if you’re hearing this, this probably means this, but it could be the sign of a deeper problem, yada, yada, yada. Like, I’d be creating that video content because I want people to see the owner or, or one of the workers. Showing up as a person and providing good information, and that builds trust.

[00:28:29] Rich Brooks: So I think that’s really important from an AI standpoint. The videos probably get transcribed automatically at this time, and that content may show up in some database somewhere, and then it’s like, oh, rich Brooks, the head of flights, HVAC department, you know, is an expert in this, that, and the other thing.

[00:28:44] Rich Brooks: And that helps establish that entity of flight being an HVAC company, which we’re not. I probably shouldn’t have even said that. I’m probably

[00:28:51] Rich Brooks: causing havoc in my own right. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Jeff Sieh: your break can search for that now. Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:55] Conor Brown: Jeff, I’d love to move on to this next section. ’cause I think I’m, there’s, there’s a lot [00:29:00] there about creating this high quality content using ai, which I think a lot of people are, are interested in, in, in having AI be this sort of,virtual assistant. Right. So, rich, you talked recently in, in an article you said AI can produce good drafts, but not great.

[00:29:18] Conor Brown: Writing. So what do you think specifically makes the human version better? Especially when we’re about to publish whatever content we’re talking about, we’re talking about the human touch with, with all of that. But what specifically are the things that you look for or, or you’ve noticed that make the human version better than just going with AI from the get?

[00:29:38] Rich Brooks: Maybe it’s imperfections, but also. Real world stories. So there was an amazing article this week in the New York Times, called Why does AI sound like that? You know, and talking about things like, why does it use the M dash so often and why does it always say X is not Y, it’s Z. Like, there’s like these things that happen all the time.

[00:29:59] Rich Brooks: And it was so funny ’cause [00:30:00] somebody just sent me something that they’re like, oh, I did this deep research and this, and then I did this and it was written by this and I read it and I was so. Disappointed because I could tell that it was AI and. And it just hurt as, as somebody who likes to write, I always say, I know that AI has been trained up on Shakespeare and Milton and Stephen King, and yet I still think I’m a better writer than it because I feel like it’s just, if you’re not a good writer, AI can help.

[00:30:26] Rich Brooks: and I think that even I, who I love to write, I use AI a lot, but not on that final version in most cases. So let me give you an example. So, I might say to ai, I wanna write an article on, microphones. I would definitely use AI to do the research on the best microphones and what they’re good for and beginner versus advanced and things like that.

[00:30:48] Rich Brooks: Pull in some data. I’m doing it right now for, I’m gonna be doing a GIF for Geeks episode on 2 0 7 this evening, news magazine that I appear on. I leveraged AI to do the research for me, but I’m gonna go in and I’m going to [00:31:00] write my own jokes and my own takes and my own thoughts on these sort of things, because I’m gonna be the one showing up on screen, and I don’t want the whole thing to be ai.

[00:31:08] Rich Brooks: I might also use AI to polish something that I’ve written to be like, is this clear and coherent? In fact, at flight I created a custom GPT for my team because what would happen is somebody would write a blog post, they’d hand it off to somebody. Usually me as the editor and I’d have to go through it and I’m be like, there are things that we do in every article and you haven’t done those things, you know?

[00:31:29] Rich Brooks: And plus you’re not using the Oxford comma, so obviously stop and go put those in. I created a, a chat, GPT, trained on flight’s voice that everybody is required to first run it through the chat, GPT custom, GPT, get it back, make the changes, and then hand it off to another human being. That saves like two hours of human work right there, but it’s still not that final version facing the client.

[00:31:52] Rich Brooks: It’s still, and one of the things that it says is, is there a real world example that you’ve either seen or [00:32:00] done? That’s leading off this story. You know, so those are some of the things that are important to me and, and I am flight new media, so I require it of my team to make sure that we’re not just spouting out something that we read somewhere, but instead we have some real life experience that we can tap into.

[00:32:15] Jeff Sieh: So, as a follow up, I want to pull up this comment by Dustin, ’cause I’d love to know your thoughts. He goes, if you haven’t seen AI right, fully finished, ready to publish content, you just haven’t prompted it well enough, but you ran an experiment. Where you tested fully written AI posts and then you got some of the worst performance ever.

[00:32:33] Jeff Sieh: Right. so

[00:32:35] Rich Brooks: So let’s take these two things one at a time, right? I wanna respond to Dustin because I remember, and I said the same thing. It’s like if you think if you’re getting generic you know, copy out of your ai, it’s because you haven’t prompted it properly or you haven’t trained it in your voice, I, I don’t believe that’s true anymore. I believe it. And honestly, Dustin, I want you to go and I love Dustin and he’s been on my podcast more. Go read that article in the New York Times on why AI sounds like that. It’s a long [00:33:00] read, but it’s brilliant and I think it really gets to the heart of the fact that AI is just basically doing remix of human writing.

[00:33:09] Rich Brooks: It can be good, but it tends to fall into the same rhythms and traps regardless of what we trained it in, because I’ve seen some of that, and Dustin, you and I can argue it, fight offline, but I, I don’t believe that that’s way, I don’t think that AI, at least right now, is capable of writing the way that humans should be writing.

[00:33:27] Rich Brooks: Now, I do think that some people, the majority of people are crap writers, and so using AI is going to help improve sentence structure and, you know. One of the things in the article, and I’ve always felt this, the rule of threes is so critical in writing. So when I say something, I will go outta my way to find a third example of whatever it is.

[00:33:46] Rich Brooks: So it’s like A, B, and C. Like I do that all the time. AI can’t help but doing that. So does that mean that it’s bad? Well, no. It’s just that it’s always in that same rhythm. It’s always in that same rut. What [00:34:00] makes good poetry? Is not following the Iambic pentameter. It’s knowing when to break the Iambic pentameter, and I don’t think AI is yet good enough at that.

[00:34:09] Rich Brooks: I’m sure there’s an algorithm that would get it to break it occasionally, but it wouldn’t know intrinsically or artistically when to do that. And I’m sure that a lot of people going, whatever, I just need to write an email fine, use AI for that. Although I will argue. I never liked the idea of having AI write important emails for me because so much can be lost, but I will have it check my tone when I’m really angry at an employee or a client and I’m like, please tell me being petty here.

[00:34:35] Rich Brooks: You know? That’s how I, I choose to use it.

[00:34:37] Jeff Sieh: yeah, so, so I, I wanted to, one of the things I use it for, like you mentioned, those threes, like when I’m writing an email and I’m needing that third example, I’ll ask AI to help me find it. Or send and, and then I’ll pull it in. But I won’t take what it gives me, I guess, is what I’m saying.

[00:34:51] Jeff Sieh: Like it’s a great research assistant, like, I can’t think of another way to say this thing. Can you help me with that? And it gives me a bunch of results and then I can kind of massage [00:35:00] it to way I want. Is that kind of what you are saying to use it for in the

[00:35:03] Rich Brooks: It, you could use it for that for sure if you didn’t have a third thing and you just want something quickly. Yeah. Perfect example where you’re getting basically the ingredients from ai, but you’re making it yourself. Um, so for example, I have it right in my voice. for every podcast that I do a blog post that goes up on the website and also is repurposed as a LinkedIn newsletter that I basically have AI write, I I’ve trained it on my voice, I give it examples, all these sorts of things.

[00:35:29] Rich Brooks: And, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this. But invariably it gives, every title would be is why you’re not showing up Right On a Podcast and How to fix it. Why does every single title from AI have to end and how to fix it? Like, I’m not telling it that, I’m telling it not to do it as a matter of fact, but it still falls into these same boring traps.

[00:35:49] Rich Brooks: So I think as humans, we are imperfect. We should. We should revel in that imperfection, but you, I, I love using ChatGPT and other AI tools to help me with my [00:36:00] research to find content gaps for SEO, to look at the top, results in a search result and tell me what are the commonalities, why does Google want to list the, is it.

[00:36:10] Rich Brooks: Looking for this type of content, all these sorts of things that helps inform me. It’d be the same thing if I had an intern or an assistant. I’d ask him or her to go out and do some research for me, bring that back. But it’s still gonna be my creation and I might hand it off to an editor, in this case, ai, where am I falling short?

[00:36:26] Rich Brooks: What points am I not backing up with? Hard evidence, like those are great uses of ai, but to tell AI to write your content for you, I think is a mistake. Even though I’ll occasionally do it, I do write that blog post, but I treat that as a draft and I go through and I clean it up myself. Usually I have to take the word actually out of it because it uses it seven times and I’d like to use it only one time in an article.

[00:36:48] Rich Brooks: That’s literally one of the things that happens all the time. and, and other things like that. So it sounds more like me. Now, I will let it write the social posts for those blog, for those podcast episodes. Because I don’t care about [00:37:00] them. I only do them because I’m told I have to do them. I don’t believe anybody’s reading them.

[00:37:05] Rich Brooks: I don’t get any engagement, not just ’cause they’re ai, but I haven’t gotten engagement on those kind of posts for years. But you have to do it. So I don’t care if AI does a mediocre job there because it’s not mission critical.

[00:37:16] Jeff Sieh: Well, we’re gonna have to have both you and Dustin on the show because the, the gloves are off in the comments, so you’re gonna have to go back and

[00:37:21] Jeff Sieh: follow this up. Yeah, it’s so, uh, which is, it’s really interesting ’cause I mean, and Dustin has done a lot of research in this as well, so, it’d be fun to have

[00:37:30] Jeff Sieh: you, uh,

[00:37:31] Rich Brooks: is, I will say, much smarter than I am.

[00:37:33] Rich Brooks: I am opinionated. Yeah. So, I’m opinionated. I have strong feelings. I, I trust my gut. and again, what, what I see as problematic in AI writing, people may not.

[00:37:44] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Conor, do you have a follow.

[00:37:46] Conor Brown: Just, just break free of the iambic pentameter unless you’re writing a sonnet. Shout out Shakespeare. Shout out Keats. Just wanted to get that out there. But I think it’s, it, the, the thing that I struggle with when, when having AI write something [00:38:00] is like what Dustin was just saying right now, add in this thing.

[00:38:02] Conor Brown: Important. Never use the word actually more than once. Right? All of a sudden. We have a million different types of things. We don’t want AI to do that. We’re adding to the rules. Don’t use an M dash, don’t use this. Don’t you know, use the word actually more than, so now we’re just basically saying things that it shouldn’t do, and we’re always adding to it repeatedly.

[00:38:24] Conor Brown: Rich, you talked about running. Are these articles through your brand voice, almost your brand voice, GPT, to kind of give it that, that polish and put it in that voice so it’s consistent. But how do you prevent AI from flattening your brand voice right, from, from going rogue, from exaggerating your quirks and metaphors and things like that.

[00:38:45] Conor Brown: How do you get it so specific to where it’s, it is your brand voice, uh, uh, when you’re running it through something like that.

[00:38:51] Rich Brooks: Well, that might actually be a better question for Dustin, but I will say, so most of, we’re actually creating what we’re, what we’re calling brand GPT for a lot of our [00:39:00] clients, so they can use them and we can use them together so that we’re creating consistent content. I think it’s more like guardrails.

[00:39:06] Rich Brooks: So a typical brand, GPT at a minimum would have. The brand voice, which you develop separately by looking at your brand, and then you can run it through AI and have it summarized, tweak it a little bit, and then you have basically the guidelines. You have a summary. And I also think you should still use examples even after you’ve created the summary of your brand voice.

[00:39:25] Rich Brooks: That’s one. Knowledge doc. And the other knowledge doc is your ICPs, your, your, ideal client personas. Maybe you have one, maybe you have three, maybe you have five. Whatever the number is. Whenever I’m creating content, I could use, I would recommend using AI to a, run it through a brand voice. Just at the end to make sure that like if the brand voice always uses iambic pentameter or always uses the Oxford comma, or only uses the word actually once, whatever it is, that you’re following those rules.

[00:39:54] Rich Brooks: And then the other thing is you wanna make sure that you’re writing always for your ICP. For [00:40:00] us, two of our core ICPs are a business owner and head of marketing in in, in the company. So I am writing. To answer questions that those two people have. So all of my content should be, written to solve the problems of those people or answer their questions, and also in my brand voice.

[00:40:17] Rich Brooks: So Using a brand GPT like that, that’s very helpful. That kind of helps us paint within the lines, but I still think that one thing that AI can’t do is it, it has no personal experience. So if I want to talk you hvac, you know, and I have some story that explains why I am so passionate about this. Well, yeah, AI could fabricate something, but that’s not the same.

[00:40:40] Rich Brooks: Instead, I can talk about this one time with a homeowner who didn’t wanna invest in the upgrade that I was recommending, and five months later they had to bring me in for a much more expensive home repair. Well, that actually means something. So I think it, it’s kind of like that you can use these GPTs to make sure you’re in [00:41:00] alignment with what you wanna accomplish, but ultimately there’s gotta be the human involved there.

[00:41:03] Jeff Sieh: So I wanna go back to something you said earlier, you mentioned using AI to build frameworks, find gaps, and suggest some new angles. So is there a, a best prompt that you have or an approach that you found for uncovering those ideas that you may have never thought of?

[00:41:18] Rich Brooks: I probably, somewhere in my prompt library, I have the exact prompt, but basically to find, and this is something that I, you could use a tool like, now I’m gonna forget the name of it. So I’ll just, I’ll just go with the prompt. So I, you might just say to one of these tools. Go and take a look at the top 10 results for this particular search and find all the commonalities, and then find all the things that they’re not talking about.

[00:41:41] Rich Brooks: And I believe AI can do a very good job of that. Here are the things that are always covered, and here are three things or five things that they’re not talking about that you should talk about because your ICPs. Have these pain points. So I think that’s a great exercise to go through. And then that tells me, okay, these are three things that, you know, [00:42:00] the other sites don’t talk about price, or they don’t talk about the, the lifetime value of copper over plastic or whatever it may be.

[00:42:08] Rich Brooks: Then I know that I should be adding these things in. Human beings are terrible at seeing things that they don’t see. I know that sounds obvious, but AI, because it is such a great knowledge base, can often see things that we can’t so. Identifying things we’re not seeing. That’s a great use case for ai.

[00:42:24] Jeff Sieh: That’s great. Yeah. ’cause I think getting blinded, even in our circle of, like even in a mastermind or something like that, a lot of times we’re so focused on one thing. We need to kind of look outside. And I think that’s a great point that AI can help you do that. another thing that, um, I wanted to talk about really quick is our amazing sponsors.

[00:42:41] Jeff Sieh: Over at Ecamm, they can find out more about them by going Ecamm dot com slash jeff. they’re doing some amazing things. They’re actually having a UK event, so you can go to Tube fest.co, do UK slash creator dash camp. Thank you Ecamm for the amazing, easy to say url. but you can find out more about that by going there.

[00:42:58] Jeff Sieh: It’s gonna be amazing. It’s gonna be April [00:43:00] 23rd through the 24th in the uk. So if you are a UK viewer or listener, make sure to go and check that out. Really quick. I wanted to, before we kind of move on, I wanna know from the audience, wherever you’re listening and watching from, let me know in the comments, if AI could cite your content tomorrow, what topic would you want to be known for?

[00:43:19] Jeff Sieh: Mm. Conor would it be for you? What would it be?

[00:43:22] Conor Brown: Where to get beers in Walt Disney World

[00:43:25] Jeff Sieh: Okay. That’s a good one. Yeah. Drunk Disney, Conor Brown. Uh, that’s not what, what is your what, sorry? What’s your real, TikTok handle that you won’t be able to go to?

[00:43:31] Conor Brown: Theme Park. Happy Hour or Vacation Kingdoms.

[00:43:34] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. we’re gonna talk next as we wrap it up. Gosh, we, this goes so fast. Rich, you have been amazing guest. I could talk to with you for a couple hours about this stuff, but I wanted to talk about the future. What’s gonna happen. I mean, we’re all at just guessing at this point, but you are deep in the trenches.

[00:43:49] Jeff Sieh: You do this for clients. So, you know, Brian Piper was on a couple weeks ago and he talked about. Answer engine optimization being kind of that next evolution of [00:44:00] SEO, we’ve kind of talked about that. Where do you think that a EO aligns or conflicts with how agencies like yours work today? Like, are there changes that you’re starting to implement you know, leading your team because you see what’s coming on the horizon.

[00:44:17] Rich Brooks: it’s a great question. Things are changing so rapidly and in my opinion, there’s so little data now to make informed decisions that I, I would say this is the period of best practices and as we get more data, we can then make better decisions. But some of the things that we’re. And these are things we’ve done in the past, but we’re maybe raising the importance.

[00:44:40] Rich Brooks: I mentioned pr, outside citations. We don’t offer pr, but we definitely will direct people to PR firms or we’ll talk to people about how they should go out and get more citations. Another thing is improving your brand and really living your brand is another thing. beyond that, we’re looking at things like making sure that schema, it appears on all pages, and that’s [00:45:00] a slightly technical language that, there, there you can learn more about it online, but the bottom line is it helps the search engines and now ai.

[00:45:07] Rich Brooks: Better understand the content that’s on your website. That seems to be something that’s helpful. Consistency. So, you know, make sure we’re going through, not a rebrand right now, but we’ve been doing more in the branding space. So as we’re about to launch or in the next few months, we launching a new website.

[00:45:24] Rich Brooks: And it’s really a change for us where we’ll be saying the three main things that we offer are branding, web design, and digital marketing, and now we’re not known for branding. So it is gonna be some work to go and see, find all of our citations, and kind of update all of these places where we’re talking about branding, the kind of branding work that we do.

[00:45:43] Rich Brooks: That’s something fairly new. If you asked AI now, like who are the best. Branding agencies in Southern Maine, I doubt that any would reference us, even though my creative director is doing amazing work. I need to do some work to, to get it out there. So I think showing up consistently. And making sure that you appear and are [00:46:00] described the same way in as many places as possible is gonna be key to discoverability.

[00:46:06] Rich Brooks: And a lot of what we’re talking about now is still a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about with SEO. So yes, some things will definitely change, but I think a lot of it is just best practices on how do you answer your ideal customer’s questions. And that’s both from what are their pain points and where are they asking those questions.

[00:46:25] Conor Brown: I love that. I think that encapsulates so much right there, you know, answer the right questions your ideal customers asking and where are they asking those questions and go there. But Rich, you’ve also talked about how, you know. You’ve predicted that websites are gonna become this B two A hub, right?

[00:46:43] Conor Brown: Where it’s a business talking to an AI agent directly, or, or, or, or just AI agent is, is picking up the content that it’s talking about. For a small business, for a solopreneur, an entrepreneur who has a million different things they have to learn, and now they have to kind of understand and [00:47:00] navigate these waters of working with AI agents.

[00:47:03] Conor Brown: What does that look like practically for someone with a small business website to get their content to talk to AI agents?

[00:47:12] Rich Brooks: So I don’t remember saying that exactly, but I say so many things. I probably did say it at some point. Um, I would say that if you’re a small business and you know, the marketing isn’t the main thing you’re worried about and you just want to do good work, but you understand and appreciate, you have to be aware of the things that are going on.

[00:47:29] Rich Brooks: I’m not suggesting that you should go out and learn schema code and put it on your website, but. I would take a look at everywhere that you show up, both on your website and elsewhere and these directories as well, that people use and that your description of what you’re offering is true and consistent.

[00:47:47] Rich Brooks: And the other thing that I would think about is when people go to AI tools, they often ask more long tail would be the SEO term for this, but more nuanced questions, more difficult, or complex questions. I [00:48:00] would. And this is one of the things we’re rolling out in our new website and we’ve started doing for our clients is having an FAQ on every important page on the website.

[00:48:06] Rich Brooks: What are the questions? So that you’re basically asking and answering, asking and answering. FAQs kind of went away as people started to build them out into their own pages for blog posts and stuff like that. But I, I’m seeing now that one of the best practices, so in a year from now we may say it’s stupid, but is having those FAQ pages, or FAQ sections on the important pages on your website, which again, just gets back to what we’ve been talking about all day, is answer the questions your ideal customer is asking.

[00:48:35] Rich Brooks: So you can ask and answer those right away. And one of the tricks that I’ve been playing around with lately is asking ai, like, what questions are you asking? When you do the search to find these sort of things and ai and the debate we had in our own agency mastermind the other night, because if you ask AI what questions you ask, they give you one answer.

[00:48:54] Rich Brooks: When you look at the underlying code using this very long string of things that I don’t understand, it [00:49:00] gives you different answers. So in part I’m like, do we even trust these things? But the bottom line is if you took both of those lists and you put them into an F, A Q and answered them, you’d probably be covering all your bases.

[00:49:11] Jeff Sieh: So final question. last time you were on the show, you mentioned that AI model. Still need that high quality human content or they degrade. So there’s been a lot of talk in the news about AI slop. So how can creators protect themselves when the web becomes like 90% AI generated noise, is what they’re saying.

[00:49:32] Jeff Sieh: So what can we do, to stop that from happening for our businesses and our presence online?

[00:49:37] Rich Brooks: I would just say don’t be putting anything that was created by AI up without you putting your own take on it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using ai. Half of my browsers open right now, tabs open right now, are ai. I use it constantly. I love it. I have debates with people all the time about it, but I mean, the bottom line is I can’t protect against ai slap.

[00:49:57] Rich Brooks: I can only protect against. Our [00:50:00] content, flight New Media, the Agents of Change, rich Brooks from producing that slop. and there is concern that AI is training off of AI created content and it’s just becoming weirder and weirder and that’s fun on some level and it’s horrifying on other levels. I know you have a lot of creators who pay attention and follow you guys and so I would just say continue doing your best, most.

[00:50:24] Rich Brooks: Perfect work possible and be putting it out there because I think as And, and Dustin will disagree with me. I think, AI tends to round the edges on a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be rounded, and I think that there should be prickly parts and dark parts and imperfect parts in the content that we create because it reflects who we are as prickly and imperfect people.

[00:50:46] Rich Brooks: and I think that should be celebrated. So yes, find where to use AI to help you create better content, but you need to make sure that you are showing up and you’re, you’re proud to put your name on whatever it is that you’re sharing with the [00:51:00] world.

[00:51:00] Jeff Sieh: And I’m all for prickly. ’cause I am prickly. Conor’s a but um, yeah, so that’s a great way to end the show. But, I wanna pull up some comments when we ask the question, you know, like, what do people wanna be known for? If they could, come up and search? And Amy is like brand strategist and communications experts for museums.

[00:51:16] Jeff Sieh: And imagine what Gretchen says, black and white photography and children’s literature, two different channels. and then, and Amy even said, look, I did a check while Rich was talking and my name does come up. So that was very, very cool for her. And, Dustin wants to say, Hey, just wanna let everybody know I love Rich.

[00:51:30] Jeff Sieh: So I guess the, the, the, the, uh, good debate we’re having in the comments was awesome today.

[00:51:37] Rich Brooks: admiration society. No doubt.

[00:51:39] Jeff Sieh: That’s right. That’s right. So once again, rich, such a great show. Tell people where they can find you and make sure you mention your podcast because it is an excellent podcast. It’s one of the OG marketing podcasts out there.

[00:51:50] Jeff Sieh: So, it’s a really great one.

[00:51:52] Rich Brooks: I.

[00:51:53] Jeff Sieh: of change, but talk about that a little bit, rich.

[00:51:55] Rich Brooks: Before I do that, I just wanna say, this has been like such a great hour of my life. [00:52:00] This has been so much fun. and you know, I, I’m on a lot of podcasts. I get a lot of interviews, but this one was different. This one was interesting and it was very engaging. So thank you. Thank you both for that. Uh, if people wanna check out, uh, if you like podcast, check out my Agents of Change podcast.

[00:52:14] Rich Brooks: It has been going on for over 12 years. We’re about episode 6 0 7, 6 0 8. So, Hopefully got it nailed down by this point. and if you are interested in help with your AI or branding or web design or digital marketing, I’d love to chat with you. You can find me at Flight New Media. That’s take flight FLYT e.com or find me on LinkedIn at the, I am the Rich Brooks on LinkedIn and every other platform.

[00:52:37] Jeff Sieh: Awesome that this has been an amazing show, but Conor Brown, where can people find the unsinkable Conor Brown?

[00:52:43] Conor Brown: Unsinkable Conor Brown. You can head to vacation kingdoms.com and you can follow me across the social medias at Vacation Kingdoms. It has been an awesome, awesome episode and people have been loving it in the chat. Thank you so much, rich. This has, this has been great.

[00:52:59] Jeff Sieh: Thank you guys [00:53:00] for watching the show. We wouldn’t be able to do this show without you. Thank you for Amy Keys, Dustin, of course. uh, Ralph was here earlier, all the people who watched and left comments. We appreciate you more than you know, and thanks to the sponsors. Ecamm, find out more about them at Ecamm dot com slash Jeff.

[00:53:14] Jeff Sieh: And by the way, I would love for you guys to sign up for nine newsletter and find out all about these great shows and the great guests we have. If you go to jeff c.com/news, be a part of our email community. I’d appreciate that. And with that, we’ll see you guys next time. Bye everybody. Have a great weekend.