Episode Transcript
Speaker0: Hey, what's going on? Welcome to The Doug Show. I'm Doug Cunnington, and I'm chilling with Chris Pantelli. How are you doing today?
Speaker1: I'm very good. Thanks, Doug. It's been a while.
Speaker0: Yeah, good to have you back on the show. And you are the founder of Linkify, a digital PR agency that builds authority and links for brands through expert commentary, earned media, and of Total Authority. That's a newer thing. Tell me about that real quick. What is Total Authority about?
Speaker1: Yeah, so that's our like pure AI visibility agency. We noticed that a lot of what we were doing with Linkify was like one of the driving forces of AI visibility, like brand mentions earned media. So we spun off total authority as a way to like just attract that exact sort of demographic at this moment in time.
Speaker0: Very cool okay you haven't been on the show for a while so can you give a quick intro on, a little bit of your background how you got into the online world and then we'll get into some details around how you're using ai inside the business before we hit record you were telling me about like just you know, different very exciting things that are going on but yeah what's your what's your background.
Speaker1: Yeah, so I graduated from university with a degree in economics and then I did what any half Cypriot man does, took over the family fish and chip shop, which I ran for like the best part of a decade. Then I got diagnosed type 1 diabetes and I thought, I'm not going to be able to like stand on my feet 15 hour days for like much longer. At that point, I'd gotten into the sort of rabbit hole that is this like internet money. Income reports. So I started a personal finance website and started making like a thousand dollars a month. And I was like, whoa, this is like real money. This isn't just like, oh, you can make money on the internet.
Speaker1: And then when I had that website, I realized the need for backlinks. And then I realized the need for quality backlinks. And that's when I started doing Harrow myself. I got myself featured in like Business Insider and New York Times. Met my now business partner because I was looking to outsource a different type of link building. I wanted him to run a skyscraper campaign for me and he looked at my link profile and said yeah how did you get these links for from like new york times and forbes and i said i've been just you know answering journalists requests he said do you think you could do that for some of my clients i said i don't
Speaker1: see why not and then yeah linkify was born and it's now it's been half a decade and uh never look back
Speaker0: And when did you start that first blog do.
Speaker1: You remember uh god that would have been about 18 months before the pandemic
Speaker0: Okay interesting so it's 2019 then, very cool yeah it's it's always interesting like well now we're we're old chris and you know time has passed and but yeah like when i got started things were a certain way and then it changes a lot but a lot of it stays the same so it's like you're still working on, I guess the next iteration or several iterations of like the same idea of like building authority and stuff like that. Very cool. All right. So AI is, everybody is very excited about AI. So what are some of the things that you guys are doing with AI inside the business, outside the business and like your general approach? So I'll leave it kind of
Speaker0: wide open and then we'll narrow down and pull on some threads here.
Speaker1: So i mean i we started using ai really early on in the business um in terms of like pitch formulation with some of these ai writing tools the first iteration that we got our hands on was in the really early days of like these app sumo deals where they would release these ai writers and they were built on top of like the precursors to the first iteration of chat gpt i mean they were rubbish they did sort of save time in a way but in a way they didn't because like it was so i mean talk about hallucinations now i mean back then it was it was just potentially utter nonsense you would have as output but you could see the promise
Speaker1: uh of what what was to become um so we started testing with those like uh early app sumo deals um and then sort of all of a sudden it just went from being like theoretical to oh my god this is insane um with the release of like chat gpt um and then from there we i mean we just haven't looked back but I think after that point, when it really took off, I started getting this sense of overwhelm where I was like, I need to be using AI, but I don't know where to start. And then you'd see these, do you remember when like NA10 was huge and you'd see people release these like NA10 diagrams and say, oh, I've fired like all
Speaker1: of my marketing department and I'm running it on these like 30 NA10 nodes that do all this cool stuff. And I was like, oh my God, like these guys are like cutting costs and they're automating everything. And I was just feeling this, this huge sense of overwhelm, uh, But kept testing and practicing and moving between tools. And then I think I've really found my feet now with, uh, with Claude. Um, I mean, I have the Claude is my biggest account. So I have the 20X max account on Claude. I also have chat GPT and Grok. So I'm still using all the other stuff. Uh, but for me, Claude is where I feel really, really comfortable,
Speaker1: uh, Claude code. And then obviously I've got code, co-work and chat. And we are using AI inside of the business. We have built tools that are like unbelievable. I can't give too much away about one of them because it is literally like a secret weapon and it's helping us like... My business partner said, just don't reveal anything about it because it was a really good idea. It was his idea and we've built it and it's delivering thousands of dollars worth of deliverables for us. We're building automations. We're building like post sales calls, transcript analysis things. I mean, there's just so much stuff. It's endless. And then we're also able to like test and iterate.
Speaker1: So anybody that's got that sort of shiny object syndrome where you think, oh, this could be a really good idea for a website instead of now it actually taking away from like your real work, you can spin together like multiple projects and see if anything, if anything works. I built one site, had this idea from this like regulatory position that the UK government was taking around this sort of product. And I thought that's really interesting. If I could build something that just every week did a scan to see if these regulations changed, I could build a content site. And within three months, this thing's doing 300 organic clicks a month,
Speaker1: did over 300 organic clicks per month with like a, you know, a traffic trajectory that's just straight up. Some things haven't worked but some things do and you can just iterate and talk and plan and build uh so yeah i mean that that's where we're at now i'm sure you're doing similar stuff but um super exciting
Speaker0: Yeah i um that's generous of you to think that i'm doing similar stuff i am not i i only picked up about half of what you were talking about i don't know how but i i've like stayed But, it sounds super interesting. So I want to dig in on, you were like mentioning a lot of tools that you were using internally. Is that, I imagine some of those were like... A product a sas that you were using and you were having to pay for and you're like actually we could probably build that in-house maybe have a better solution a custom solution for us and now we have you know the ability to create it on our own is that part of it.
Speaker1: Yeah so our entire internal team like workflow is a custom built tool that is uh like maintained and built upon through ai um so that's our entire like pitch operation like query selection distribution uh information on individual journalists and publications like everything is is is custom built with ai now you could have maybe spent tens maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to have built this stuff like three years ago five years ago it would have cost you a fortune but we've hired like one dev guy and then we've got this the whole of our back end is is built and and better than we could have
Speaker1: uh hoped for because it's just exactly what we need and we can make changes based on team feedback in like real time like oh this doesn't work or can't we have this do that and it's like yeah of course well i mean ask claude and like you know comes back and it's done um there's awesome
Speaker0: And previously like you probably didn't have a solution that did all this stuff but before you would probably just have like a bunch of spreadsheets and you know piece together what you could to automate and have some solution is that roughly accurate too.
Speaker1: Yeah yeah and and what you said like about having i imagine this is probably commonplace among people that are like into this stuff but tools that sort of were expensive on a monthly basis that did like a handful of things but really you just needed that like functionality of the one thing it you can just like vibe code now you know and as long as there's no important sort of breach of having to look after the data and you do everything you know as safely as possible then you can save yourself so much money by vibe coding these micro sasses that are so specific to your business that it is better than
Speaker1: than you than you can imagine and it can improve over time as well so that's that's something that we're that we're loving
Speaker0: Yeah it makes total sense and i think back to uh you know the consulting jobs that i have like big consulting companies, and a lot of it i mean actually all of it was you know custom software solutions so it's like we need this to do that and now i'm imagining like it could be an in-house, um you know it department is like oh yeah we could totally build that where before, it took um whatever 50 of us to kind of do it and then they it was never, i mean we never delivered anything, everything got canceled it was it was such a mess such a.
Speaker1: Waste yeah stuff just took i remember when we got our website redesigned um maybe three years ago and we we took it off wordpress we wanted a we liked a friend's website a friend's agency website that had been built on webflow so we hired this guy we spent like five grand six grand it took a year and it wasn't right and then that was it it was like we got handed what what had been done and i rebuilt our entire website like with claude and i'm really happy with it and it's exactly what we want and i can change it and improve it whenever i need to and it's fast you know the core web vitals that you put through on you stay
Speaker1: when you're still obsessed with page speed i get like a hundred on everything just because i just told claude to make sure it does and it knows what it's doing and yeah it's nuts.
Speaker0: Interesting. Well, I was going to say, like, that is one of the things that I am looking at. So I have like, I don't have many websites left, but I have a couple that I'll probably keep around. And I am literally looking at, getting off of wordpress and just migrating over i think i'll just probably just do like a flat file system but like i'm curious since i do have this problem that i want to solve and um, like do you end up with actually i won't fill in the blanks i envision what might happen so you moved off of wordpress how is it hosted now like what is the actual platform that it is on.
Speaker1: Okay yeah Yeah. Great question. So I'll give you my exact setup. This is possibly not the right way. I'll tell you other things that I've heard that people are doing, but, um, well, first question is your site, like, is it a big complicated content site? Has it got functionality or is it just like quite small? Like what, what's the, the makeup of the site?
Speaker0: So I have, I'll, I'll generalize to make it work. We'll say it's not too complicated. Um, um no functionality it's just a content site but let's say there's a few hundred posts.
Speaker1: A few hundred yeah okay so uh the way that i do it is first and foremost get um clawed code or your whatever tool that you're either clawed code or um chat gpt with a with a beefy subscription like you don't have to do it every month but you want to get it done as like you know don't drag it out. So get a subscription level that's generous with the usage. Claude code Max 5x is maybe a good place to start. That's $100. And you'll definitely be able to get it done within a month. So that's $100 for the month. Then you want to have somewhere where you can keep the repository. I'd start with a local build. So open a folder on your computer called Doug's Claude Projects.
Speaker1: And then inside of that folder, you're going to have your website folder. So Doug's website number one. Okay. Then you're going to want to open the Claude Code app and then open that folder as the local location that you're working in. And say to Claude, I want to rebuild and re-host my existing website. Give it the URL, get it to go and expect it. Tell it that you want it built in Next.js and then tell it that you're going to connect it to GitHub or GitLab, both free, where that will be a mirrored version of your local repository. So everything that you build will be local, and then it will be mirrored to
Speaker1: the cloud, GitHub or GitLab's cloud. Then you're going to push that to Netlify or Vasell. So you'll open a Netlify or a Vasell account, and you can start both for free. And actually, the beauty is you're going to do this as a staging site to begin with. So you've got zero risk. You're only going to point your name servers for the domain to the stage site once you're 100% happy that it's what you want. Claude, put it in plan mode, ask it to go and inspect your site. I imagine it will come back to you and it will have said that it can rebuild the entire thing. You'll then connect your GitHub repository and then you'll go into Netlify. I'd start with Netlify.
Speaker1: You'll connect your GitHub to Netlify and you'll deploy the site. It will then give you a URL, you'll go and look at that URL. And I imagine your 200 post website will look identical and you'll have every piece of content word for word, and it'll be perfect.
Speaker0: Okay. And then I'm curious for the Netlify, you said it's free to open an account. Like how much does it cost to like, is that the host now?
Speaker1: Yeah, that's the, that's the host. Um, I, I got, I'm on like a legacy account. So it's really, I've got really generous, um, usage, but I think, I mean, unless you're, unless you're getting like, you know, tens of thousands of visitors, I'm not sure what the exact usage, but it's very generous. So you'll, and if you do need to go one level up on a premium, then you can host all of your sites under that same account. And then depending on how you then want to manage that site. So the first time that I did this, I actually built a backend. So, um, I asked Claude to code a backend similar to WordPress.
Speaker1: So a CMS, a content management system. So I created like login variables through GitHub. So it was secure. So I could sign into this backend and then I could create the content, upload images, turn headings into different H2s or H3s, you know, like you would with a WordPress. And I just thought this is so cumbersome. Like there is no need for me to do this. I can, every time I want to, you know, publish new content, I can just take the Google doc, give it to Claude and say, turn this into a perfectly formatted post. And it would just go and do it. And so, yeah, it would just publish it. You're still going to need your Claude subscription.
Speaker1: Maintain that GitHub connection and the deploy to the cell, but it will do everything automatically. You can drop down to the lowest subscription on Claude, like 20 bucks a month or whatever. Um and just every time you want to produce new content you can even then automate it and pipeline it if you have those google you know a google drive it looks every time the google drive's updated then it will produce the post so much you do and as well then your i don't know what your website looks like but let's say it's like a bit of a dated looking wordpress site that hasn't had a refresh oh the things you can do where you just say like okay make this look a bit like
Speaker1: that and then like it'll go off and then come back and you'll be like oh my site looks awesome that's brilliant
Speaker0: It's very cool okay so you did mention this is super helpful because i haven't heard it explained like this nor have i done research at all so this should be a future project um, but you mentioned that's how you did it you have heard there's some other approaches what are some of those other approaches.
Speaker1: So i'm hearing um with the cms especially if you're if you're like a, like say you have like a proper content pipeline where you need, members of your team to access the site to maybe like publish drafts and stuff. Like it's not really a viable option to have like a single point of entry into that project via Claude. So then you might want to look at something. I think, I think Astra is, is like what you would build out. I think you can also actually connect a WordPress CMS to your vibe coded site. If you Google that or, you know, or ask Claudia, we'll explain to you how you can set that up. That's more if you, you know, you do have, let's say a content team and editors
Speaker1: and you're wanting to like really maintain a proper like pipeline. But if you just want to put all your content and make it look awesome, then do it this way.
Speaker0: Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. And I was just like, oh, why would somebody want to make it look like WordPress is such a shitty, I mean, like, we all got used to it, but it's just like, that's like a poor implementation for a lot of stuff. But I had like my general idea, because I don't think I need to publish often. I would want to update in a way that's probably not tied to quad code and that sort of thing. Okay i'm curious um about use i could probably do this similar thing where like use cloud code i've looked up some, flat uh cms flat file cms type um i think one's called grav but essentially,
Speaker0: i come from like a software background so if i have like a directory and i have html like text files i'm like that's cool i could use markdown it's as simple as it could get it's supposed to be, very secure very fast all those details do you have any insight on you know moving from wordpress to a flat file system i'm assuming um cloud code would just be able to convert it over in a similar way.
Speaker1: Yeah so like static html sort of
Speaker0: Yep 100 yep.
Speaker1: Yeah that's what i hear other people doing. I don't know. I am not from a coding background, so I have no idea. I just ask Claude, but I am, I think if you've got an ability to like interact with Claude and then go and do like keep asking questions like i like to have claude code open and then i'll have chat gpt with like its sole model or now it's just released astra although astra absolutely burns through your your usage and then i like to ask one model to like uh validate the other models like thinking um so if you just ask it like hey i've got this site if you know even just a little bit you can say i want it to be like a static html html file i want it to be
Speaker1: hosted somewhere i wanted to be really safe like what do you recommend give me a plan and then it will work through and if you've got any level of understanding of those different bits you can sort of take what you know and go well this is direction i want to go and if you don't understand anything you can say i don't understand anything re-output what you've just said to me in 10 bullet points as if i'm six years old and then make it break it down for you so that you know exactly what you're getting
Speaker0: Very cool okay this is good i won't make it a whole um consulting session about how i should migrate over but um it sounds like it was pretty quick for you to to do this right.
Speaker1: Yeah yeah it's so much fun as well honestly it's like so much fun and yeah it's really quick um okay
Speaker0: Cool. And from my perspective too, so, you know, I mentioned I have a couple of WordPress sites, not a ton. People, I don't even know if people go to them. I don't even look at analytics anymore. So it's kind of irrelevant if there's even any traffic, but I'm like, ah, it would be good to like reduce this down. And it's not a huge cost, but I am in a spot where I'm just like, okay, am I going to pay, am I going to keep paying like $150 a year for a premium WordPress subscription for these couple websites that like no one goes to? So I'm like, okay, I can make this simpler and easier. And maybe I still pay
Speaker0: for like $10 of, you know, hosting on some server somewhere and just keep it minimal and text files. And I think that's what I'm going to do. Because I mean, it's just simpler to do that.
Speaker1: Yeah, I'd go for it, man. You can do it.
Speaker0: Awesome. Well, let's talk about some of the tools that you've built specifically, if there's anything you want to highlight before we shift into, you know, more on the AI search, like what people are doing on the ground. But yeah, any other specific tools where you're like, we did this and it's really awesome.
Speaker1: Yeah. Well, I mean, we've got the one that I wish I could share more about, but I'm not going to just because it's awesome. And it's like, it's really doing wonders for us. And like, yeah, it's cool. If I heard somebody in my industry... Talk about this tool i'd go and build it and it likes immediately because i'd want it i'd want i don't want in on that so part of you know what one where we're at now and this was actually part of the um the overwhelm that i was getting i think like 12 months ago and i was like watching these youtube videos and listening to these podcasts was like oh my god this stuff is so complicated and then like open claw came out which
Speaker1: is this like open sourced way to connect agents and And I just remember thinking to myself, this is so like beyond me, not to mention having to like learn all this stuff, but then figuring out how to implement it and where to implement it. Whereas now I feel like I feel like I could accomplish anything with AI just because I've got the ability to put it into Claude, let's say, and have the output come back to me and for me to work through it, ask questions and work through the problem, whatever it is that I want to achieve. So I think the superpower now in this era of AI is actually coming up with the
Speaker1: ideas of what to do with this stuff. Like having this, a unique idea of like, well, everyone's got access to these tools and can build anything, but what can I build that no one else has thought of that's going to, you know, give me the edge or give my company the edge or give my team the edge. So that's where we're really, you know, having a lot of fun and very exciting, I think.
Speaker0: Gotcha. And I... Basically, I'm where you were when you felt that overwhelm. Again, I'm not actively trying to solve a bunch of problems or anything like that, but I'm like, should I move my site over? And I've been thinking about it for months. And I'm just like, to your point, I'm like, I don't know where to start. I don't know where to click. I don't know. And I have a very strong technical background. I'm just like, oh, I don't know what to do. This seems really hard. And I've set up a lot of like artificial barriers in my head. So thank you for the inspiration.
Speaker1: Go and do it, man. Cause you've, you've got the know-how, just get clawed, download the desktop app, click on code, open a local folder and just start talking to it and say, Hey, you know, this is who I am. This is the website that I've got. I don't, you know, and just, just start and just see and you'll be blown away. And then tell me when you've done. I want to see the site when it's, when it's relaunched.
Speaker0: Okay. I was going to say, you're going to create like a new obsession. I'm like, oh, wow. And now I know what I need to spend all my time on. So you made a pretty, I mean, the company made a good transition and pivot to total authority where it's like, okay, that's where the market is going. And as this conversation has led us, people could hear like, I'm not actively trying to do SEO. I don't care about AI search visibility for my own personal projects. I obviously care about what's going on in the industry, but talk about the pivot and like how that was, I imagined kind of just the natural growth path.
Speaker1: Yeah. I mean, it wasn't really a pivot. It's a dual sort of operation. So Linkify is still, I mean, Linkify is doing great and we're in a really strong position because there is so much demand now for, you know, So we've always sold links and
Speaker1: Of an earned nature. So they're already of a premium quality because it's not just like a race to the bottom in terms of quality. Like what we do is earn media for clients with the link. Then all of a sudden, AI visibility comes out. And all of a sudden, this thing called a brand mention is also valuable because AI systems can, you know, they can not just read links, but they can read your brand, understand it as an entity, and then understand that your brand is being talked about on the BBC, let's say, or the New York Times. So that has become really valuable in of itself. So that for us was like,
Speaker1: whoa, I mean, our deliverables is still links. We get like a ton of unlinked mentions, which are branded mentions as a by-product of the work that we do. So that's just like a huge advantage compared to like a company that wants to buy let's say a handful of backlinks to, for SEO purposes. Now they can come to us and they can say, well, you guys are going to get me backlinks to my root domain, which is going to significantly power my, you know, Google SEO. But also that is a brand mentioned, like, you know, you're saying Doug Cunnington,
Speaker1: The host of the Doug Show podcast, and that's been written in Forbes. Like all of that is powering, not just your SEO, but your EAT, your AI visibility, all of that juicy good stuff. So for us, that was just like, this has been an amazing growth area for us. But we also have noticed many people that they're just not even interested in SEO anymore. All they care about is this thing called AI visibility. So we wanted to be able to speak directly to that ideal your customer, because if they've been charged with, you know, you'll have like enterprise businesses now that say, look, we don't understand what this is,
Speaker1: but go and improve our AI visibility. So if we're able to speak directly to those people and not like confuse it with like, this is good for SEO, it's also good for the, like, okay, AI visibility is, you know, you need to build real brand, real authority, and you do this by doing X, Y, and Z then, you know, and that's allowed us to do it through that agency. So it's super exciting times.
Speaker0: Okay. Well, let's get into some of those details. So what, what is working out there?
Speaker1: So, yeah, I mean, we, we're doing loads of tests at the minute. This is another thing which AI lets you do. Um, so if you've got, we've, I've got like bright data, um, and, uh, I can connect to, to Ahrefs MCP. Um, I can pull a load of information. I can create these studies. Um, we do a lot of internal studies. Uh, so one area we've been looking at a lot is med spas. And running prompts inside of ChatGPT to see who it's recommending. And there is a shift. If you think that the way that you would search in Google is you would, as a searcher, you'd very specifically pick your keywords, Maybe like MedSpa New York or Facial Peel Boston, very specific keywords,
Speaker1: and then Google will put forward 10 websites, you know, in its organic search results. Now, if I go into ChatGPT and say, I would search completely differently. Like, I'm worried about my skin. Like, I think I need, I don't know anything about cosmetics. I think I need appeal. Maybe that's what I'd say. I want to look good for this award ceremony I'm going to later this week. I'm in Boston. Like, what do you recommend? ChatGPT is coming back recommending individual clinicianers, like practitioners from med spas, from different practices. So it's, it's actually looking at, okay, so you've got a problem with your skin. You want a facial peel.
Speaker1: Dr. Joe Bloggs from this practice in Boston is known as being one of the best facial peel clinicianers. So you have to build authority to you individually as an entity to the business as well. And that's how ChatGPT is making its recommendations. So it's, it's, it's like real marketing. It's like done a 360. it's not now trying to game google like oh okay so i'm gonna like put this keyword here to make sure my site comes up for this specific keyword instead people are having full-blown open and honest conversations inside of these models and then they're going out and looking for the best match on a like a clinician clinician
Speaker1: basis so it's completely changed
Speaker0: What kind of um you know clients are you working with basically.
Speaker1: So we love the clients where this is um like easier to do so any health practice any finance institution any law firm any real estate broker like we like pr friendly niches And we like niches where it makes sense, where you can like build authority. So imagine like a realtor in Austin, Texas, like it's, that's, we can make them famous in their area for what they do because real estate and property is like a hot topic. Journalists are talking about it. It's in the media a lot. And it makes sense for these people to be on podcasts, maybe TV, talking about their industry and how it affects like the local area.
Speaker1: Same with finance, law firms, any health clinic. It becomes a bit more of a harder job if you have a non-PR friendly business with no visible, demonstrable spokesperson. So that's something that we think every business should be thinking about now is like having someone to represent that business that can go out there and speak so that you can build authority through that person or persons. To the business.
Speaker0: And you mentioned podcast. Did you mention YouTube as well? Is that another big area?
Speaker1: YouTube podcasts, like conferences, speaking events, TV appearances, local TV, radio, like you need to be everywhere because that's how these systems know and trust you. They derive consensus. So if me, Chris Pantelli, has only ever been mentioned on the entire internet once as being somebody you should go to, to consider digital PR services from his company, Linkify, if that's only been mentioned once on like, let's say my website, compared to being on hundreds of podcasts, speaking at conferences, and all of these YouTube transcripts getting ingested into these, you know, into these models, that's when it then really knows who I am, what I do, what my business does,
Speaker1: and slowly starts to build its trust. And then that's when they then start to service you and recommend you so it's not easy unfortunately like you can't just keyword stuff a page or use the golden keyword ratio like you could 10 years ago but
Speaker0: Yeah yeah this was the good old days yeah,
Speaker0: so what um what mistakes do you see people making.
Speaker1: Okay so it's hard to to show authority let's say if you haven't got any okay that's that is hard okay let's say i'm starting a new health brand and i've got no health qualifications and i and i've just i've opened up a a hair transplant clinic in it's a little too
Speaker0: Targeted i feel.
Speaker1: Attacked a hair transplant clinic in my my hometown in the uk uh and i've got i've got no medical qualifications and i've actually i've just hired a newly qualified surgeon okay so actually i'm going to build the authority through the surgeon there's no other way to do it but you can see it's more difficult. I see like medical practices that have got, you know, 15 doctors with decades of experience. You go on the about page, it doesn't say anything other than name and a three line bio. Maybe when you look at the individual like surgeries or procedures that they're offering, they don't say which clinicianers or which doctors are going to be
Speaker1: responsible for those for those surgeries. I've seen this done fantastically well. You click on a doctor's bio and it's like 20 years worth of resume, every media appearance that they've had, every qualification that they've got. And that's what you need to do. Like you have to scream from the rooftops about all of the skills, credentials, qualifications, awards, accolades, everything that you've got, which shows that you can be trusted. And where I see people doing it wrong is they've got these people and they just haven't taken the time and effort to go into Claude Code and say, oh, just go and put all of my qualifications on this page.
Speaker1: It'll take two seconds. Like it can be done now, like super quick.
Speaker0: Interesting. Interesting. And it's, I mean, it's basically like the opposite of, you know, the first part of what you said, where it's like, you know, get out there, get on different, essentially be an authority for whatever your position is in that niche. Do as much stuff as you can from a media perspective because that is what um, i guess google was seeing before um any of the ai tools it's just ingesting media of some kind all over the place.
Speaker1: Yeah yeah and you have control like on your own website like that's the place that you shouldn't be dropping the ball um and that is still looked at by these ai models do you also want to take some time and effort to go and look at where they're looking like this will change and this is another thing that we see as a mistake don't just think that because somebody's told you that uh you need to be in reddit in order to be like recommended by ai and then all of these reddit optimization agencies popped up and then like two weeks ago reddit's visibility inside of chat gpt absolutely plummeted so these things change but go and look in there You would be surprised
Speaker1: how simple it is to match your competition where you might be dropping the ball. I'll give you an example. So one, we looked at... Like recovery centers in, in the U S uh, and you look at different state, this changes on a state by state basis. Okay. So you ask like, what's the best recovery center in, in, um, uh, for let's say like a drug, um, rehabilitation in, uh, Florida. And it will, it will list its recommendations of those like individual doctors and, you know, which recovery centers that they, they recommend. And you'll be able to see the sources. So you can either go in manually and look at the sources, like where it's pulling that information we can go straight
Speaker1: back into chat gpt let's say and say like why did you recommend these places like where are you looking and let's say for florida it might be really heavily skewed towards like a florida based directory of recovery centers um in another state it might be a chamber of commerce website in another state it might be Uh a listicle that was produced by Forbes, let's say, for whatever reason, top 10 recovery centers in LA, let's say, for like celebrities in drug rehab, like that might be the place. So you need to find what's, you know, especially if it's things like directories where like you go and just claim your profile and fill out the information.
Speaker1: One of the biggest mistakes I see is chat GPT will say, like, I like this. I'll say, why don't you recommend this particular recovery center? I like this recovery center. There's some good things that I found out about it, but all of the ones i've recommended are on this directory and all of the ones on these directories have got a complete profile apart from this this person they they didn't fill out their profile so i've just i haven't recommended them in i mean that's a simple fix isn't it
Speaker0: Interesting okay any other mistakes that you could think of that that people were.
Speaker1: Yeah just not not going in and looking uh well one of the big mistakes that's been done by a bunch of people in recent weeks has been this like listicle blasting so everybody thought that listicles was the be all and end all of AI discoverability and listicles are utilized a lot like by chat GPT, especially currently. So, okay, what's the best Email management tool. And let's say it's recommending two or three companies and the top source that it's pulling that information from is, let's say, a HubSpot post that lists the 10 best email management tools. Now, that's a listicle. And in order for you to be recommended for that particular
Speaker1: prompt or, you know, for that particular query, you know, you really, you would want to be inside of that HubSpot article. So the mistake everybody made was thinking, ah, listicles are being like pulled from. So everybody went and blasted their own listicles, putting themselves in that listicle of like best email management software from like linkify.io, 10 best email manager, number one, linkify's email management software. And like all of these businesses have been like somewhat penalized from that because it's like a spam activity. And actually it's not even where it was pulling from in the first place.
Speaker1: You can't go and make your own listicles to compete with like a HubSpot listicle.
Speaker0: Interesting. Well, I mean, it's so similar to how marketers get into stuff. It's like, oh, this works. And then everybody does it. And then cat and mouse game, you know, the powers that be will readjust to get better information. Okay. Well, that's a good example. Like you mentioned a couple of times, like things change, like things that worked don't work anymore. Or there's a shift, do you have any like tips or strategies to like either stay ahead or always, you know, I guess be nimble so that you're able to adjust or how do you do that with the agencies?
Speaker1: Um, so we've built like custom stuff, uh, analysis, um, like competitor analysis. Uh, I get like daily weekly emails on certain aspects of the business that I want to see what other people are doing. And I get like digest emails. I get Slack notifications. We've built like an internal, um, like snack analysis that will analyze everything that's been discussed publicly within our Slack. And then like summarize for each day. Um we'll have um like post sales calls transcripts analysis um i have internal tool analysis as well so every tool that we've built we have like a weekly uh Analysis of those like repos to see if there's any security issues or vulnerabilities
Speaker1: that have happened like in between the the scans with recommendations or like prompts to go back in and i think so we're trying to automate as much as possible and then we're trying to use like better models on that high level stuff so There is always a cost and this stuff can spiral. I've seen people that have had like thousands of dollars worth of like clawed code bills running like multiple accounts and stuff. So this stuff can spiral. So you need to try and be, this is like one thing I'm not very good at because I'll just put it on like the biggest model and just, and then my business partner
Speaker1: will be like, why are you doing that? It's costed for you. So you have to try and I'm getting better at it. So certain things don't need the best models. Like if you're, if you need something to go and quickly, I don't know, filter out a bunch of URLs and get rid of the ones that aren't .com. Like you don't need a good model for that. Like that can be done on kind of fast, cheap model. But then let's say after you want like a slightly better model to go and read all of the URLs and summarize what each one is talking about. Maybe that's a slightly better model. Then at the end, maybe you want to write a personalized email to the top three
Speaker1: candidates of the journalists that wrote that article. You're going to want to use like a much, you know, your highest model. So that distribution across models is a really good way of Like streamlining costs and getting the maximum amount of efficiency out of the stuff that you're building.
Speaker0: Well as we're wrapping up here i see in the notes that total authority has a youtube channel what kind of stuff do you have on the channel.
Speaker1: Uh ai visibility stuff teardowns and breakdowns of different companies um news as well so stuff that's happening and how how that can affect um how it can impact your business like my business partner just got uh grok um grok bot which is like x's answer to not really to like claude and chat gpt it's it's like an autonomous cloud-based agent builder that can like run stuff like whole aspects of your business. And it's a really simple, clean sort of layout. So anyway, he's taken the subscription on that and started building some stuff. And He built something that lets us look at like, what's popular on X, let's say for that day.
Speaker1: And then it will ping us that information into Slack. And it will like formulate an initial reply to, let's say an interesting post. And it will come back to me, like from Nick, but via like GrokBot. And it'll say like, have a look at these, like, do you approve? And like, this was just in his initial like internal testing. So I just left him a voice note. Like I knew it wasn't him that had messaged me. I knew it was him, like his account, but like via this, but I left him a voice note going, Nick, these look great, man. Just like send them off when you can. And then let's like discuss how we can.
Speaker1: Anyway, the GrokBot like listened to this voice note and went and scheduled them. And I gave it like some feedback. I said, these are really good. I reckon you should post them, but don't do them all at once because it's going to look odd to have like five posts. So spread them out, but just let me know what you need. Anyway, it came back and was like, I've listened to what you said. They've all been scheduled, paced out like 30 to 40 minutes between them. I said to Nick, like, you may as well like retire like they don't need you
Speaker0: Don't need you anymore pretty cool um so on the channel there's like cool experiments and um you know case studies other things you guys find interesting basically.
Speaker1: Yeah yeah awesome yeah and loads of studies and teardowns as well as of like um businesses that like you said are doing it really really well and aren't doing it
Speaker0: Well so one sort of to go back a little bit one question is like which ai tools do you like for certain things because you mentioned like oh you know you'll you'll ask claude you'll double check which hat gbt, vice versa working with grok a little bit so who does what best in your opinion or how do you choose which tool to use at which time?
Speaker1: Great question. So for me currently now, Clawed is code and I do like Clawed for, so Clawed Fable and Opus for my coding. And I am using Clawed More often than I used to for things like, um, like deep analysis on a, on a personal level. So let's say I've had like a 30 to 40 email thread with, with someone and like, it's sort of gotten away with me. I can't remember what we've discussed and I need to do like a reply or like a followup. Let's say I'll, I'll do that expansion button in, in Gmail where it opens every single email. I'll control A and copy the whole thing, dump it into Claude and say like,
Speaker1: analyze all of this and just do me like a preliminary either response or follow up and let me know why you've said that and flag anything that's been discussed that, you know, is worth me knowing about. It's really, really good at doing that. I will use ChatGPT. I love ChatGPT for image creation. It's my default image creator of like thumbnails and any sort of like image editing. And I like ChatGPT for sort of personal stuff and figuring stuff out. So I will chat to ChatGPT, like, do you think I should do this? Like, do you think this is a good idea for the business? It's got a lot of memory about me. So it knows, which is great.
Speaker1: Although the other day I asked it something and it came back and I was like that's definitely not right did I say I said uh do you know who my what my wife is and it said yeah it's uh Sue Pantelli that's my mom I said that's my mom why are you saying that um and then I'll use um
Speaker1: I used to use Gemini more. I don't really use it anymore now. Grok, we're using, you know, Nick's using for the automation stuff. So, yeah, as a business now where we stand, Claude coding and like deep analysis, ChatGPT image and like working through stuff. And then for the automation, it's GrokBot.
Speaker0: Why'd you stop using Gemini?
Speaker1: I mean i've got the i'm paying for the like the pro account which gives me the the pro ai i think so i've got like and and gemini is by far the most generous in terms of usage um i think it just doesn't fit that default need like If I'm coding all the time in Claude, so that I'm never going to like jump into somewhere else to code because everything is connected. And so it's either am I going to, if I want to like, you know, do some analysis or talking through, I'll just go into ChatGPT and I just won't use Gemini. I don't know. I do hear people that swear by it, like custom gems, anti-gravity be in their sort of coding environment.
Speaker1: I don't know. I can't tell you. I can't tell you for sure why,
Speaker0: But no specific reason. It was just like other things are working fine and whatever. Okay. Yeah. And I use Gemini, but it's because I have whatever. I pay for other stuff at Google. So I have like the pro account, like you're mentioning.
Speaker1: That's what I've got. Yeah.
Speaker0: Yeah. For drive space or whatever. So I'm curious. I may test that out also. Cause if I'm doing like, like I said, if I'm moving, my problem is like, wordpress to flat file system that's a pretty straightforward thing and i wonder because i'm already in the, you know gemini ecosystem, just test it out would you be opposed to that versus cloud code or is like cloud code just like so fucking good like probably the best option.
Speaker1: No i i know people that swear by anti-gravity and and gemini i use gemini models inside of some of my tools because they're good like the flash models they're really reliable they're fast and cheap and i know people that are building really cool shit inside with anti-gravity which is the like okay the desktop app for the coding for so i would yeah if that's where you're at with that and you've already got that subscription and it's very generous as well i think you're probably on the same account as me it's like the first paid tier isn't it correct google yeah so yeah yeah i would yeah i would definitely
Speaker1: recommend going in and right on
Speaker0: Yeah all right chris it's been fun catching up where should people find you and i'll be sure to link up so people can you know hit the youtube channel wherever you point them but yeah where where is all your stuff at.
Speaker1: Yeah. So, um, I would go currently the best place I can give you a cheat sheet. So you can start going to get those first pieces of earned media yourself, which you can get from linkify.io slash cheat dash sheet. Find me on socials. We've got the, um, YouTube for total authority and we've got our podcast, uh, on market movers as well. Um, so any of those places, LinkedIn, if you want to reach out, always happy to talk.
Speaker0: Right on. Thanks a lot, Chris. Good to catch up.
Speaker1: Thanks for having me, Doug. Always a pleasure.
