Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

Traffic in a Post AI World with Andrew Laws

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 374

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this insightful episode, we delve into the dynamic world of post-AI search and its impact on businesses with our special guest, Andrew Laws, an expert in SEO and digital marketing.

Andrew brings an invaluable perspective on the rapid evolution of search technologies and the challenges faced by businesses today. He shares insights into the shift from traditional search to AI-driven content discovery, discussing how this transformation is affecting publishers, small businesses, and the very fabric of online visibility. Andrew provides a hopeful outlook on how quality content can still emerge victorious in this new landscape.

Notable Quotes:

  • "With AI search, it does offer some opportunities for the real small guys, again, because if you create better information, AI searchers are more likely to use that than they are just the sheer volume." - [Andrew Laws]
  • "Let your weirdness through. Don't try and turn up looking like you think the audience wants you to look. You're gonna appeal to nobody." - [Andrew Laws]
  • "I think that we are in a time where it's very trying, and we're overwhelmed with communication messages." - [Jonathan Green]

Andrew emphasizes the importance of authenticity and adaptability in the age of AI, advocating for businesses to focus on quality, relationship-building, and authentic engagement over traditional SEO tactics. He highlights the potential for smaller businesses to thrive by leveraging these principles in a fragmented and ever-changing digital market.

Connect with Andrew Laws:

Join us as we explore how businesses can navigate the challenges of a post-AI world and seize new opportunities through innovation and authenticity. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of digital marketing and search!

Connect with Jonathan Green

Traffic in a post AI world with today's special guest, Andrew Laws. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated T talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by fraction, a IO, the trusted partner for AI Digital transformation. At fraction a IO, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non-revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the task. That matter most. Driving growth and results, we guide you through a smooth, seamless transition to ai, ensuring you avoid policy mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction aio help you. Stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more. Get started. Fraction aio.com. Andrew, this is a really exciting topic for me because we're hearing a lot of really new terms, like zero click and. SEO is really plummeted a lot in last few years. Traffic, and we're seeing, especially publishers are really suffering whose entire business is search and content, and that's really the people that are suffering the absolute most. I know that for other types of businesses, they're trying to find ways to generate and then the cost for advertising is going down. It's really a tough time in this world and we're trying to figure out. What the future's gonna be, and it's if I do a search on Google, I'm lucky if three out of 20 things on the page are not paying to be there. Like you're never seeing that. That's your question. And what AI has done in my opinion, has taken us back to 30 years ago when you would search and you'd actually see what you were looking for. Yeah. So you'd find the answer. But we're definitely seeing a lot of smaller businesses go under and suffer already. So really. Is what's happening with search like is it going, is, do you think it's gonna continue to exist? Are people still gonna search and find websites or is that kind of over forever? It's not over forever, but it's evolving much faster than I think anybody, including people in the industry could have foretold, could Google's been trying to keep people off your website for many years and the attitude to a lot of people in SEOs. Okay, we might not be able to get as many people to your website now, but we'll still get people to your brand in somewhere they can take action. So it all started with the, what we'd call the SERP features. The little piece of people also asked, and then they start showing images, and then there'd be the knowledge graph, the bit at the side. And increasingly, Google was trying to keep people on their page so that they can sell advertising. And it is. It is tough for businesses, especially small businesses, but there's also quite a lot of opportunity here. So when I first started doing this about what it was about 30 years ago, I really got into SEO 'cause it was a David versus Goliath thing. You could be a tiny little company and you could beat the big guys. And Google came along and followed up with that for a little bit. But then it became, oh, if you spend a bit of money on advertising, that will help get people. And the balance gradually tipped. And I think we are now back in a place where if you are a really big company and you can afford to have a whole suite of writers and a massive website that's worked on constantly by team people, you are gonna do better than the small guys. Whereas with AI search or the AI method, I don't even wanna call it search, the AI method of finding information, it does offer some opportunities for the real small guys, again, because if you create better information, AI searchers are more likely to use that than they are just the sheer volume. This is why some of the bigger companies with very large websites that haven't strategically planned out their content are starting to suffer. One of the things that I wonder about is almost like if Google's killing their own business. If I can't find anything for what I search, if it's just gonna gimme an answer like any other ai. Everyone's just gonna switch to chat. GBT. Like most people, when you say ai, they just think chat, GBT, just like when you say search, they think Google. Yeah. So it's very interesting to me. It seems I don't know that it's a long-term business model where you no longer are a search engine, like it doesn't do that anymore. It really just gives you. A short answer surrounded by ads. It's at least with chat pt, I'm not surrounded by ads if I'm gonna choose between the two things. There's quite a lot of neutrality, iner in search sorry, chat AI results because they're not gonna be influenced by the same things that search results are. They look for the same things when they're trying to decide how important or reliable an answer is. But I think I'd probably trust almost any LLM. Claude and GPT, any of 'em? I think I'd probably trust them more than Google at the moment because I think Google have been caught napping with this. It's odd how they're suddenly scrambling to get a seat at the table. They should have been there first, shouldn't they? The biggest tech company in the world. Yeah. I think that one of the things that interests me is that for a long time, the quality of content has gone down and down because you're writing. A little bit for the readers and a lot for the spiders, A lot for the AI search engines. So you're trying to have, oh, I have to have the right ratio of keywords, the right ratio of tags and meta tags. And there's always these new algorithms to, your article has to be 750 words, a thousand words, 5,000 words, 3000 words. And there's all these little tricks to ranking right? And it's like a game. If you can reverse engineer the recipe, you would rise to the top. The quality of the content was always diminishing, whereas now if I'm not targeting that and I can just write a great article, and it's about the content, not about the ratio of keywords and how many words are bold and italicized and all that stuff, it seems like it's an opportunity for good content to start to get noticed again, for content quality to be the most important thing, which is what it originally was like. The whole point of a search engine is find me the best version of what I'm looking for. One thing that I find really interesting is that there's a new tool from CloudFlare. You can click a button that says, don't let ais see my website, which seems like a terrible idea. It seems Do not give me traffic. It's set by default as well. Anyone listening to this with a website, speak to your host, or if you know what CloudFare is, just go have a look and it's you're worried about them stealing your knowledge. It's like the door, the barn door's already open, the horses are gone. Like it's too late. And now the advantage is exactly what I, the way I see it is imagine all my competitors. Block ai. I'm the only one there. Then I appear in all the AI search engines. By default, it's actually vantage. There's always, I'm not needlessly, I'm not toxically positive with these things. I've just been in this business for a long time, and generally, if everyone starts panicking about losing their knowledge or losing their. Intellectual property or certain things shouldn't be lost, like intellectual property. Generally it's a signal to me to just relax a little bit and think about what it is you actually do and what your assets really are. So of course, no one wants their work stolen. They absolutely don't. I've got friends who are academics and they're livid, but. Ultimately your content isn't why people bought from you, especially if you're writing it with one eye on SEO, which I've never recommended. So is the content what's bringing people in or is it the other things around your content, like your reputation, how how nicely you speak to people. So yeah, you might have to I'm trying to think the best way of summarizing it. We've been living in the age of knowledge. So you can sell knowledge. Knowledge has been the thing that we all, especially consultants, we've all filled our heads with knowledge and then sold it piecemeal little bits and resold the knowledge. And you only got to look at all the courses on Kajabi and whatever, which there's some really good stuff there. But I think that age, it's drawing to a close and I'm not quite sure what the next age is yet, but I think I'd like it to be the age of authenticity. So if for the last 30 years, all these people trying to trick Google and trying to write content just to rank, they've ended up being inauthentic. They've ended up not being a true representation of their voice. So we are sat here, you and I at the moment, and anyone who's not watching a video, I apologize, but we have we've both got guitars behind us. I've got a little toter row, which might just be out of shop. And the first, what was the first thing we talked about before we started recording? It was guitars, wasn't it? Yeah, guitars and our kids, it's. The thing that I find interesting is a lot of people think the best use of AI is inauthenticity. They go, great. I want my AI to handle my social media. I wanna use AI to handle all my sales calls, and I wanna put, basically, I wanna put AI as a barrier between me and my customers. I'm like, that's terrible. It's really awful, isn't it? It's like literally. Let's put AI in blocking the most important parts of my business. And I understand the core idea, which is I want to increase efficiencies, but we are seeing this like push towards authenticity. Everybody wants me to use AI to do sales phone calls, and this study recently came out that's 76% of people hang up on phone calls, but the 24% who don't realize it's an AI stay on the call. The 24% you tricked. That's not, and I think, that's the problem. That's not how you start a relationship. How many dates did you go out? I went and spoke to 20 people in a bar. Four of them didn't realize I'm an idiot and agreed to a date. What? What are you doing? Exactly. Now it is a strategy. It's just a bad one. And I think that we're entering an area of fragmentation. Where we're seeing a lot of this with tools like Patreon and a lot of markets where now you can support the Angel visual creator, you can subscribe to someone's YouTube channel and you can do Super Chance. There's these things that allow you to directly communicate, and that only works up to a certain size. Once you get past a certain size, there's no longer the value. If I have a, if I message someone who has a thousand subscribers, they're gonna respond. So does 10,000, 50,000, they're probably not right. And there's this point where you, instead of getting talked to the person, you get to talk to the number two or a certified coach or someone on their team. And it like diminishes the value of the level of access. And so I do see a lot of value like in supporting a smaller creator and then your name appears in their video or the, you, they make a character look like you in their comic book. There's a lot of really cool opportunities I think for smaller or. Like an individual business, like a bit like a self-supporting business. I see that as like one of the really cool things. I think Fragmentation's always a good thing that the opportunity then comes for loss of grace.'cause unfortunately it happens is you have a fragmentation that a few people come superstars and they steal all the traffic and then that's it for everyone else. So I hope that's what's gonna happen now. But I can certainly understand, I think the big question on a lot of people's minds is if I can't get found via search engines. How do I get found? Like how do I get my customers to learn that I exist, especially outside of paid advertising? What's the organic method that's replacing SEO? What's a new way for people to discover me? Na, naturally the same way people have discovered businesses for since millennia ago, doing really good things, building a strong network. Really old fashioned business things. And yes, you can't scale as fast necessarily unless you hit that sweet spot where you've got something everybody wants. But looking at the bigger picture. I have to ask myself what was the drive between this kind of what was behind this hustle culture of start a company scale? Fast. Fast. Everything's hormo everything. We have something called Steven Bartlet over here. Everything's just like hustle, push, push, push, never sleep, work 80 hours a week, and I'm too old for that now. And you think what is the reasoning behind that? What was driving that? What, who was that ultimately serving? So if some of the methods for that to happen are now going away. Then maybe the world might become a better place. We, maybe we don't need $50 billion companies and only one choice of communication product like an iPhone or whatever. Because I'm old enough to remember what certain parts of the world were like before that. I'm a Gen X, white haired, middle-aged man. I remember the, here in the uk I remember only having three TV channels. And we used to go to school the day after and everyone had watched the same thing on tv. And it was nice. And I'm not being a Philistine, I'm not saying let's go back to the stone age where, everything was simpler and the golden days. No, today's world is much, much better than it has ever been. But I think some of these stories of just get big. Some of that drive, I think, is it running its course? Is, have we had enough of that now? I think for me, one of the best examples is what's happened in the world of comedy. So it used to be, as a comedian in America, you would try and get on a late night TV show, and then you'd get on a network show you did a good job, you get one chance, you tell your jokes if you do good enough, they go, we need to put you in a sitcom and you get your TV deal. That's really was the method of success in the seventies, early eighties. And then after that it was get on com, do a special on Comedy Central, then you'd get put in a movie Right now. You can have a podcast, grow it, and then you have subscribers to your Patreon, subscribers to you, and you and then you do live shows, and you can have this new math to success that no longer requires to be on a television show. And I really see this as an adaptation to the market. More than anything else that's going, I can build a small audience. I don't need millions of people to watch. We have 10,000 people pay $10 a month. That's an amazing life. That's amazing. Yeah. I'll take that. I'm killing it. And it's exactly, and it's like that's compared to you. Who watches television shows, it's so fragmented. You don't have control. You have to have, like an agent takes a piece, your lawyer takes a piece, your manager takes a piece it's like small and small, and you can get canceled. This show can just get for a million reasons, shows don't get renewed. Whereas if you have total control of your pipeline, if you're from discovery to profit, then you have a lot more freedom to do whatever you want. There's not a risk, and that's the thing I end up being entrepreneur, is that no one can fire me. That's the freedom. So I do see that. We have to see that type of adaptation. Other markets where you go, I need to take control of the entire pipeline, even if I have less customers. Of them discovering me all the way through me servicing them. And especially if you're in any form of entertainment, any form of content delivery. Like we're seeing a big shape shake up in America in a lot of the publishing industries, like the comic book industry, the main distributor just declare bankruptcy. Oh, really? So tons of comic book publishers are gonna go outta business. Like basically every comic book in America is sold by one company. They're called it physical ones. And that company just declared bankruptcy a few months ago. And that is, so all these people they owe money to are wait, what we sent you? They're going to, and so it's gonna, it's leading to that thing, which is you have to find a way to. Adapt to this new world and see the way people shop and it's, I go through the same thing. I remember, I was like, I would never buy something from my phone. That's insane when everyone else is doing. I was like, no way. And it's before that I was like, I wouldn't use a computer. I would never, and we eventually get pulled along kicking and screaming to the way people purchase and understanding the behaviors of our customers. And so I think that. We've gotten so used to organic search and this is a method of genetic traffic generation that we're, we just have to accept that era is shifting, and now it is the era of, again, there's an opportunity where quality rises to the top and. There are a lot of, there's still opportunities in social media and I think we're seeing social media networks are gonna fracture in the same way we're seeing some of that. They already are. I can't keep track of, I know a lot of people jump ship from Twitter to Blue Sky, but beyond that, I'm now seeing platforms, as a professional in the field and going, I have never heard of that platform. And it's got a lot of users. Yeah, there's so many social media networks that are huge. Like I have a Mastodon account. I'm not sure what it is. Got it's, I was like, I thought that was Blue Sky. Yeah. Like it's gotta tell users. And we're seeing Twitter clones and Facebook clones and listen, I remember Friends Stir, I remember MySpace. Like you had, it used to be there was only MySpace. And then they dropped the ball, they dropped their leadership, they made a mistake and they lost everyone. Too many ads. I remember when my profile was more ads than content and I go, I'm done. Yeah. You can't be more than 50, you can't be 60% ads on my own profile page and people who spend time cultivating and choosing your top eight friends. So I think that we're gonna see. And this is the key. I think it's not about the technology, about the adaptability. Whenever I see a big market shift, my first thought is if everyone is freaking out or jumping ship, that's an opportunity. Absolutely. Because they're gonna lose their customers or they're gonna lose market share. And I've really moved, I've done a lot. I have a huge growth on Pinterest. I really focused on that for two years. It's been a massive growth for me and I never looked at it before, started using it, and it's just been massive growth. Huge amount of my audience comes from there. And then really growing on LinkedIn, which is how a lot of people find me, where most people watch, more people watch the show on LinkedIn than on YouTube, so you don't know where it's gonna be. But it starts with this idea of, where's my audience? What do they like? What makes them happy? End. It seems like a crazy formula, but'cause we were so used to I thought the rules were this is this for SEO. And as I move into new markets and I expand, I have to find and adapt to new methodologies. And that is a challenge. It is a scary thing, especially if you've been doing something for a long time and we're seeing that. If selling, like you said, we may be in a post information world because a lot of websites had just sold information like how to solve a puzzle in a video game or. There used to be a lot of websites that didn't realize just giving you the lyrics to songs. Yeah. Or the tabs. Now you get those tabs from Chad, JPT, and that's something okay, what can we do? Another industry I'm very interested in is the music industry. When Napster came out, they stopped making money from CDs. So what did they do? They shifted and now it's back to live concerts. Live concerts and events. Like people are more bed driven than ever. I think that there's a lot more things, there's, there is a future, but we just have to find it. And sometimes this is in the past, the way you made money 150 years ago. Go to town to play music. Now it's the same thing. Live music is back again. So the question is for. Smaller businesses or medium sized businesses that relied on these types of traffic sources, how can they start to. Just approach it big picture without even looking at specific technology. What's the mindset that allows some companies to adapt, and some companies don't make it. The mindset is the growth mindset. There's a brilliant book written by someone called Caroline Dck, and she argues that every decision every person makes, it's not a business book. Every decision every person makes, they're either fatalists, they're always, ah, this is what's gonna happen, it's gonna be bad. Or they go. Okay, this is an opportunity to grow even when really bad things happened. We lost a client last year and it was catastrophic, but I decided that this had to be the best opportunity we've ever had. And in the years since then, we've completely improved all our internal systems, all our communication.'cause I won't let that happen again. If I didn't have a growth mindset, I would've gone. That's the end of that. We're done. Here in the uk this is the toughest market. Anyone has known for years. I've been in business say nearly 30 years, and the combination of COVID and the frankly bizarre decision that Britain made to leave the eu and then lots of other things. We are, I've got friends running agencies who have gone from 25 down to two clients. And I saw this pivot coming and or the need for a pivot coming, and about six months ago, me and my team started looking deep, going what is it we actually do? What do we really do? My company's called SEO. So it's, yes. SEO. And it's that because that's what people searched for, quite frankly. But what my business actually does is make more money for our clients. That's never changed. The tools might change. Plumbers have gone from soldering with, I don't know. Yeah. What my point is that technology and opportunities change in every industry. But yeah, if you're a small business, look at what your strengths are and don't try and a hundred exit. Don't try and go we need to scale this massively. When things are this hard, just think how can we grow enough? What would realistic growth be? Look at your clients. Who do we enjoy working with? Who we sold to multiple times? Let's really look at who they are. What is that profile? What is that personality? And let's do more of that.'cause frankly, right now, if you can stick it out, so many of your competitors are gonna wither and fail. That when things start to lift up again there's a void left that you can rush into. So business owners, do what you do best. Speak to people, understand your market. I think I can't, I haven't. It would be lovely to have a magic. Oh, what you need to do is, this is part one of the plan. This is part, it doesn't exist, unfortunately. Yeah, I think that. A lot of companies forget what they do and they become obsessed with the mechanism. And SEO is a mechanism and it's not the solution. Yes. I remember when, like I started off in SEOA long time ago. I remember anytime I was said to a client, I'll get you number, I'll get you 10 new clients a month. Then they go, great, but how many back links? And I'm like, can't work with you. You care about the wrong goal. So I had a social media manager work for me once and I was like. What's with these numbers? He goes our reach is 4 million. And I go, what is Reach? He goes, reach is the number of people that could potentially see our content. I was like, oh, in high school? In high school, my reach was everyone. Yeah, my actual friends was three. Yeah. So this is a imaginary number. I was like, that's a fake number. I said, here's my me. I care about one metric. It starts with a dollar sign. If you're in England, I guess starts with a pound sign. That's the metric that matters to me. If you generate more money than you cost. I don't care what you're doing, you're bulletproof, you're totally protected. But as soon as you go people, we look at the wrong metric. And I think that's the same thing. That's why this episode is about traffic rather than seo, o and a post AI world. Because it's if SEO is over, then it's a short conversation, right? But it's like traffic is, I have a business that works, I have a funnel that works. I just need people to see it. I remember, this happening a long time ago, my, one of my dad's friends owned an amazing music store. He had the most beautiful website I'd ever seen. Absolutely beautiful friend music store, beautiful instruments, completely designed in flash, which meant Google couldn't see it. Wow. No search results. So I was like, he was like, how come no one ever, how come we don't make any sales for the website? I go, oh, no one's ever seen your website. It will never appear. You built something beautiful. Unfortunately, that's in flash. And flash, basically. In codes, the back of the best way to say it. So you can't really see the language, which means that Google doesn't know what the website's about. And that's an unfortunate thing. That's why we don't see a lot of interactive websites. Remember, you used to be able to move around the mouse and music would happen, or things would move around. A lot of cool animations, that's all gone. Because of Google. They killed beautiful websites. So it's Google. They, that's what's Your quote for the episode. Google killed beautiful websites. All websites now basically look the same, right? They all almost have the exact same WordPress, like newspaper layout, unfortunately. So that's. The problem again, it's like it's the mechanism, right? It's okay, this tool doesn't work anymore. What's another way for people to find this? How can we get discovered? So traffic is most businesses. That's a struggle. I often say, and sometimes there's other problems in a business, it's not always a traffic problem. Sometimes it's a pricing promise. If you get one customer a year, but they pay you $10 million, you're fine. So it can be a pricing thing, but it's like it's about the right customers in these other elements. But I think that we are at a time where it's very trying and we're. Overwhelmed with communication messages, and a lot of people right now are using AI to flood their communication channels. Oh. With ai, I can send more messages than ever before. I can send use AI voices. I can text, I can email in. It's the thing that happens in this. You can, and this I can tell because. It's all men doing this.'cause women have experienced this where you receive too many messages a day. Too many men flirt with you, you just shut down the walls. And it's exactly the same thing, which is that I get so many inquiries to be on this podcast that I don't read any of them. There's probably some diamonds in there, but once you get to the point where you, all you're doing is making nobody check their email anymore, and it's, you're, that's what's happening. And the strategy is, and we're seeing a lot of people employed, it's like now with AI lead gen, you can send 50,000 emails a day. And it's what? What's AI lead gen? You can have 50,000 emails ignored a day. And that's exactly it. It's you have to think about what's your goal? Is your goal, how many messages you send a day? In that case, it's the perfect tool. If your real metric is sales or potential customers, that's very different. And it's I think that's an important lesson, which is to think who is my ideal customer? What's the best way to get their attention? And I'm seeing there's a massive shift right now towards referral. So if I'm looking to hire a new coder, I would rather get a referral from someone else than go through the nightmare right now, like the recruiting industry, jobs industry, there are so many AI generated resumes. It's i've had people on interviews using chat, GPT. I'm like, I can tell you're doing it. What's happening? What's the point? You're just trying to trick someone long enough to get to the first paycheck and then get fired. That's a horrible life strategy, but it's seems like it's become very common and the market's inundated. It's the same thing, like I said, when you get inundated with too many messages, now you post a job on LinkedIn or anywhere you get 600 messages. The first day, by the end of the week, you have 5,000 people apply for your job, and probably three of them are real resumes. So you have this. When you get too many messages, you just don't listen to any of them. So it's really this challenging place of how do I get noticed in a way that, like you said, is authentic and is not, if everyone else is doing that, do something different. Absolutely. So I rejected a lot of kind of common business logic and business teachings when I first started in business. That turned out to be a mistake. But one thing I would stick with is let your weirdness through. Don't. If you try and if you try and turn up looking like you think the audience, your audience thinks you want to you to look. You're gonna appeal to nobody. Nobody at all. My videos, especially my ones on LinkedIn, relate to business are quite frankly quite dumb and quite stupid. A lot of 'em, I've skateboarded in some of them. I ran a webinar wearing a mortar board 'cause it was an end of term assembly, and do some odd things. And when I first got brave enough to start being my true self, I was really nervous about it. I'm gonna lose work. People are gonna look at me and think he's unprofessional. But what actually happened was people started saying, I also think that's funny. I get your sense of humor, and do you know what? Those people are really nice to work for. People who I've pre-filtered the whole of LinkedIn by posting content that most people don't align to. Yeah. So one of the things that reminds me of is that, I ran into someone one time at a conference. They go, oh my gosh, it's so nice to meet you. We've never met before. He is we've met before. And I was like, maybe you should be more memorable. You know what I fair? And that's the thing is it's maybe it's not my fault that I don't remember you. And that's the thing that like Exactly. It's I think this is a great lesson for anyone. It's be interesting. We all remember. A public access or a local commercial by a small business where the guy's dressed like a king or wearing a silly costume. Those are the ones we remember. We don't remember the really good professional ones. We don't remember the. Like you said, the LinkedIn post, it looked like everyone else. And I think that there is something in having an element of individuality that we think what we do is we go I'm gonna do what I think everyone else wants. Yeah. Instead of what I want. Ooh, dangerous. And it's like you become, the thing that's most interesting is your uniqueness. Nothing I sell is unique. It's a commodity. Search engine optimization traffic. It's as in other people sell the same thing, right? So why would you buy from me? It's because I'm interesting or you like me or you like my content, and if it's the same as everyone else's, then I'm not gonna be remembered. And I'm not saying I, I know you are not saying this either. You haven't gotta be wacky. I'm not saying go nuts. I'm saying just let yourself come through. Just that. That's it. And if you, people never talk about their hobbies on LinkedIn. Some people get really sniffy about it. Oh, it's not Facebook. We don't talk about your hobbies. I sure as hell need to know about people's hobbies on LinkedIn because, what else am I gonna talk to 'em about? Business stuff? Yeah. It's yeah, there's this. Mindset we shift into, which is, I have to be something I'm not, so that people wanna do business with me. And it's exactly, it's not about being wacky, it's just about being yourself or letting yourself shine through. Because people, one of the biggest mistakes that see people make and will wind down on this one, 'cause they know you've taken you over time, and it's been amazing, is that they sign up for an emailing service. They go, oh, look at all these newsletter templates. And I would say let me ask you a question. What are you more likely to open an email from Amazon or an email from Jonathan? At Christmas some families in America will send out a newsletter, which is they write the same letter to everyone. They photocopy it, and you get like all the things that their family's been up to this year. Nobody reads those. Nobody cares. Because it's impersonal. Yeah. Whereas if you get a message, if you get a postcard, like how rare they're short. It's got a picture and it was set like it's set with love. And also like it feels really good 'cause you get 'em so rare. I haven't gotten a message postcard in 20 years. I talked a friend about this the other day, but it has this personalization element and it feels like it's from a person that's really magical. And I think that's where you can shine through is that I was only just looking over,'cause there's a postcard up. Look at this. Sure. I have this postcard up up in my office. It's just some random beach in Germany. But I kept it. Got that lovely handwriting. Yeah. I kept it because a friend sent me this when I was at high school and I was selling, I sell selling some books and it fell out and I cut it and I put it on the wall because that is a personal message that's talking about the topics that we were talking about at the time, and that's one of my little reminders. Be authentic, build relationships. Don't be a jerk. Yeah. Now this doesn't mean using AI to send 50,000 postcards to people that are ai. No. And don't do that. And don't make it look like handwriting if it's not somebody local business got called out in my town a few weeks ago for doing that. People just started comparing them because that's worse. You've damaged the trust, then you put a big dent in it. Yeah, and it's exactly, it's okay to send out a mass send postcard. But don't lie about, like that's the problem is that we always think I have to pretend to be authentic when I'm not and it's I deal with something all the time. It's like I outreach most of my guests on my show and they always are like. Oh, did you message me on purpose? I was like, yes. On purpose. What? Yeah, like they, oh, sometimes they get people and this isn't very often they're like, oh, you probably want someone else. I was like, then I would've messaged them. I read your profile. I looked up some of your stuff. Like people are always surprised when I've read one of their articles or have a specific reason I want to talk to 'em. They're always like shocked. I was like. What do you think I'm doing here? This is not like I don't have, I would not have someone on the show that I don't like, that I'm not interested in, that has no benefit to my audience. This is the place of greatest authenticity for me. So that's but we're so used to. Bait and switch messages. We're so used to like you're waiting for someone to tell you, okay, what do you really want? And then when there's not a trick, they're like shocked. And it's that's the key. If you can surprise people by telling the truth the whole time, then there's a huge opportunity there. And I think that's. Really good. Like I know that a lot of people think the sky is falling 'cause SEO is coming to an end, but it didn't exist 20 years ago. Businesses existed 20 years ago. It would be a nicer place if SEO had never have died. It never have existed. And I mean that from bottom of my heart because all SEO has ever done is try and help people. Good. SEO can just amplify the excellence of already brilliant business. The whole point is if you are on it, if your content is passionate and it's connecting to your audience, and if you take your website seriously and it's fast, you don't need SEO. That's it. You can be, look at the BBC here in the UK ranks like hell for everything because there are beloved organization that are neutral and put out brilliant information. I very much doubt they've got anyone doing their SEO. I you think? I think government departments must have SEOP. Like I feel like it would just happen be, I was just saying that feels like a gobert job. I'm not sure. I believe that because it seems like every fictional character has their own Twitter and every television show, and it's like someone must be doing all that stuff. Maybe it's all bots. But yeah, I think this is a good positive note to end on, is that. Even if the mechanism changes, the concept remains the same, which is create good content in a place where your audience can find it and do things that make people wanna refer you. And you're gonna see, I think you're gonna see really big spikes and like you get the right person and then suddenly you explode. Like I think that's where we're gonna see more and more of, which is that it's more network based or more relationship based because Exactly. We're seeing a shift. It's I don't think it's a bad thing. I just think it's a tumultuous thing. That's a lovely way of describing it. I really like that. Jonathan I think my positive note would be if you're a business owner listening to this, you've already got everything you need to succeed in the age of ai, probably more so than you did in the age of information. That's it. It's a bit like the end of a, a movie. Like the answer is within you, but it is. Yeah, it is. It's, yeah. I think that we always see these and there's always periods where lots of businesses fail and new businesses start up. I think as much as we're gonna see tons of businesses shut down, I see we're gonna see a lot of startups right now. Suddenly people are like, oh, I can do that myself. And I think it's an exciting time. I think this has been really informative. Andrew, for people who are interested in your business, SEO or kind of this concept of. The good stuff rising to the top. Where can they find out what you're doing or maybe see you on LinkedIn, see some of the content you're putting out there and maybe even feel like they're a good fit to work with you? Sure. I just looked me up on LinkedIn. It's my, my name's Andrew Laws. There's not many of us on there. I've got white hair, so you see all the little thumbnails pop up. I'm the Andrew Laws white hair, and you can find me on my podcast, which is called the Business Amplifier Podcast, and we're on YouTube and all the channels. Just come and say hello. I've got a really nice question I ask people when they connect me on LinkedIn. I say, what would your entrance music be if you had music playing every time you walked into a room? And actually I get quite a lot of replies. People go, look we don't need your services. But thank you for that message.'cause it, it's fun. Oh, that's wonderful. So we'll make sure to put that in the show notes below the video on YouTube and everywhere else, make sure people can find you. Thank you again so much for being here today, Andrew, for an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business' revenue, head over to artificial intelligence pod.com/calculator. Use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact AI can have on your bottom line. It's quick, easy, and might just change the way. Think about your. Business while you're there, catch up on past episodes. Leave a review and check out our socials.