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In this episode, host Matt Rouse interviews Ben Albert about his journey in starting a successful podcast and business in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Ben shares his story of being let go from his corporate job and how he used his skills and local connections to build a thriving podcast and marketing business. They discuss the importance of hyper-localization and adding value to a small audience, as well as the benefits of podcasting for networking and client acquisition.
Show Links
Ben's Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/real-business-connections/id1537115928
Hook Digital Marketing
"Will AI Take My Job?" book.
(00:00:49) Ben's podcast and how he got started
(00:04:27) Monetizing a podcast through service-based business
(00:06:24) Finding an audience and clients in a local or niche market
(00:09:49) The importance of adding value and building relationships
(00:19:54) The long-term commitment and benefits of podcasting
(00:23:50) The potential of AI-generated content and its impact on marketing
https://serve.podhome.fm/episodepage/digital-marketing-masters/ben-alberts-strategy-for-growth-253
[00:00:05]
Narrator AI:
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse.
[00:00:10] Matt Rouse:
And welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. My guest today is Ben Alber. How are you doing, Ben? I'm good. We should have recorded the green room conversation. You're fun, man. I'm excited to be here, Matt. We can talk about the the science of evolutionary science of egg laying. You got my chicken shirt on. Chicken and roosters. Good to go. So I wanna have you on the show. I saw you speak at, Traffic Conversion Summit, and also we chatted a little bit at the after events there and stuff. I really, really like your story because it's something I really believe in, which is hyper localization, I guess I would call it for your business.
[00:00:50] Ben Albert:
You wanna explain a little bit about your podcast and how you got started there? Yeah. I mean, let let let's just set up a scenario, and this is my story, but just imagine you're in the scenario. COVID hit. Oh, we all experienced that. Job market's changing. I personally got let go from my corporate role for a large marketing firm. And so you're unemployed. You don't really know what you're gonna do next. You do have skillsets, but I had never run a business before. I had booked bands. I had set up Myspace pages back in the day. I was a music promoter. I had dabbled here and there, but I had never run a business. I had never actually made money on my own.
And I came from a marketing firm. I understood podcasting, marketing, and promotion. That's about it. I wasn't the smartest guy on earth. So what am I? I'm a I'm a minnow in an ocean of sameness. There's a lot of marketers that humbly are better than me. There's a lot of firms that have been around 5, 10, 20 years. There's a lot of people that have private equity and money. I was not planning on getting let go. I had no savings to launch this big grand business. I was a minnow in an ocean of sameness. And no matter what you're doing, unless I wanna I wanna figure this one out. You make broccoli and kale taste like chocolate chip cookies with no negative and all positive.
You have something that the world wants, needs, and you're gonna be successful even if you're an asshole. Right. Most of us can't do that. Most of us are kind of a commodity. We're minnows and oceans of sameness. So I thought if my hometown of Rochester, New York isn't willing to put any chips on me. Invest in me. Support me. Who am I? I I I can't I can't go international if I can't even help my neighbor. So I started Rochester, New York. That's where I started networking. I started Rochester Business Connections podcast, very simply put because I wanted some. On LinkedIn, a a friend request was called a connection request.
So I started a Rochester Business Connection podcast and went on LinkedIn and started reaching out to I went to State University, New York, Brockport. So I started reaching out to SUNY Brockport alumni for my Rochester, New York Business podcast using LinkedIn to do it. Right. I'm still kind of a minnow, but at least I'm in a pond. I'm not in an ocean. And I was the only Rochester, New York business podcast that I at least knew of at the time. And since I was reaching to people I had a commonality with, people that's went to the same college, university as me, it was very easy to at least get someone's attention.
People were willing to put their chips on me, be on the show, and then a lot happened from there. I gained mentorship. I gained friends, and I gained clients. Not every person that came on my rinky dink little podcast became a client, but we built rapport. We built a relationship. We shared info. We shared introductions that led to goodwill, that led to clients. Clients created the foundation that gave me the confidence and the true evidence that I could be a business owner, which is something I didn't imagine I was gonna do a year prior. And then once I had that evidence, I just continue to do the fundamentals well.
Show up, have interviews, promote, promote, promote, introduction, introduction, introduction. Add a ton of value even to a tiny audience, and that's all I needed to build a business. Nowadays, it's called Real Business Connections. I do have clients that are national and a couple international. It's grown, but it started from the core and that was my city.
[00:04:57] Matt Rouse:
Right. And so there's a couple kind of key factors there. I think, I think one of them is you looked at the skill sets that you had, and and you were able to kind of capitalize on that. And another one was looking at your history and saying, is there some way I can make a connection with other people with something that I've done or someone I know or, you know, by using your alumni as as leverage, I guess, you would call it, to be able to kind of gain some trust with people. Because I don't know about you, but I get a 1,000 requests a week on LinkedIn from anybody trying to sell anything.
The tipping point on LinkedIn is about a 1,000, you know, followers or connections. Once you're over that, you're pretty much at the I'm gonna get spammed constantly level. Yeah. So let's talk about that. I mean, Rochester, New York, still a reasonable sized population. Right? I mean, it's it's small, but it's not small small. I mean, it's not Nova Scotia small. Like, it's probably the population of all of Nova Scotia. I think the idea is is there an audience big enough to support yourself, right, and and kind of get your business started? And do you wanna maybe talk a little bit about like, you say you you received clients, but what were they clients for? Like, what was the actual business that you started doing once you had met some business owners and stuff? Yeah. So a couple questions.
[00:06:27] Ben Albert:
Fantastic questions there. At the end of the day, if your audience is just you, your friend, your guest, their mom and a coworker, I'm still going to deliver to all those people to the best of my ability. Small audiences is not what I'm not looking at scale from day 1 because if I can add value to Matt and his one listener, his 10 listeners is 10,000 listeners, that'll scale on its own naturally. So if you're in Nova Scotia or a city, a small city, a small town, It's like, do I have an audience there? I guess, you know, that's a personal again, I'm I don't like to just wave a magic wand and say, this is the way. This is the solution.
What does your how big is your region? Maybe it's not a citywide podcast. Maybe it's a regional podcast. Maybe it's a travel podcast where you travel to all the cities in the region and meet the locals. Think about what you're working with and expand on that. And maybe it's not local at all. Maybe you're into putting golf and you specifically talk to other people that are experts at putting golf. There's gonna be very few experts at putting golf in Nova Scotia, but there's gonna be a million of those across you know, we got a big world out there who it surprises me. My buddy here at Iran has a vertical farming podcast, and it's huge. Okay. So I'm not surprised, honestly. There's a lot of that going on these days. It's amazing.
So we work with what we got. And, you know, we can talk about pun to monetize podcast monetization. I like monetization. That's a that's a good one. That'd be a good name for a book. Pod it. Pod it. So we can talk about monetization all day. There's way to monetize a podcast. A lot of the ways are pretty difficult. I monetize, in my case, a service based business. Now you could do SaaS, you could do courses. Whatever you're selling is fine, but I didn't try to become a influencer overnight that can just make money through creating content. I had a service based online marketing firm And a lot of people would actually ask me, Matt, what do you do? I I see you podcasting. What do you do?
Now that some people you got 2 takes on this. Bad problem to have. People have no clue what you do. You're not being clear in your messaging. I saw that as a good problem to have because all I was there to do was to add value to business owners in Rochester, New York. And then when some someone said, what do you do? I can explain, you know, website SEO, content marketing, this that was way on the back end of the relationship. So the way I was monetizing was through relatively high ticket online marketing clients. And I wasn't using the podcast specifically to prospect, but the prospecting kinda happened naturally.
And then once, you know, your clients are paying for your show and paying for you to get a little bit of momentum,
[00:09:44] Matt Rouse:
then again the scaling is gonna happen naturally as well. Yeah. I a 100% agree. And I think one of the most interesting things that I get asked with the podcast, especially, I mean, this is year 6, so we've been doing this for a while. Right? I get asked all the time, like, how come you're not advertising on your podcast? How come you're not pitching on your podcast? How come you're not selling a course or or something like that? And that is a 100% not the reason I have the podcast. Everything you do doesn't have to have a dollar value attached to it. That value that you add can be, you know, advice or, you know, people just like listening to you. They like your personality, whatever it is. But I found really quickly with our show, the idea was kind of similar to to, you know, what you were doing is we were having kind of clients and and other, you know, potential clients on the show when we first started. And because we were recording, this is a good tip, by the way. If you're just starting recording your podcast, you have no idea how to do it. We were recording in a music school, and the music school has no one in it Monday to Friday because all the kids are at school. Yes. So they would lend us their recording studio. They will, they didn't lend it to us. They we paid 20, I think no. We paid $30 an hour for a professional recording studio.
Beautiful. Which is ridiculous. We would have the clients in. They would meet us. We would chitchat before and after the show, you know, that kind of thing. And then I started having more people on the the show, and I found really quickly that the people were kind of curious about what we're doing, but not because they want to hire us or something like that. But after the fact, they were messaging us saying, I know person x. They have this problem, and you talked about how you solve that thing. You know, do you wanna have a chat with them? So it was referrals from guests. Yeah. And that was a, like, that was a big moment for us because I found that out. And then I was like, well, now I can just go interview anybody I want to. And I don't have to try and pitch my audience.
[00:11:48] Ben Albert:
I'm curious. What were you doing to make you referable? And and just to kind of like think out loud here, I think a big part of it is you must have been giving a good experience
[00:12:00] Matt Rouse:
for them to want to start talking about Matt. Is that a fair assumption to make? Yeah. I think so. I mean, I'm a lot better at it now, you know, that I've been doing it for a long time. Yeah. And I mean, I'm not a a high pressure sales kinda person. I mean, I did work in commission sales when I was younger, and I was not a huge fan of it. But I find that if I can kind of gauge the community that the person is in Yeah. You know, like, let's say for let's say they're a real estate agent. Right? Brokerage owner, something involved with real estate.
I know what the common problems that real estate agents have that we solve, so I will bring up a story or something about how we solved something that's related to real estate. Do you use your your brokerage website, or do you have your own website? And they'll be like, oh, we have our own website. And I'll be like, oh, yeah. We we got a website that we were doing for an agent, and, man, they were having problems getting their property listings and stuff up there. And so we had to use a different system, yada yada yada, and I explained what we did. And then the next time they have a problem getting their listings on their website or somebody else does, they go, oh, yeah. Matt said he knows how to fix that. I love that. So there's it's not like a pitch. It's not a sales call. It's not a series of follow-up emails about business or something. It's just a little bit of storytelling. Can I try that for fun real quick? Sure. So same concept.
[00:13:24] Ben Albert:
A lot of people don't realize or understand that Google owns YouTube and YouTube's actually the 2nd biggest search engine in the world. So everybody's wondering how can I search engine optimize? How can I create content? Well, a great answer to that is to create a long form video that you can place on YouTube. Time stamp that video so there's certain keywords for the certain sections. Break that time stamp up into clips. And if you really wanna get some bonus points, you write a description on that video, on that podcast, and you use that as blog content on your website. Now what the true winners do is they're not just hosting a podcast, They're gonna guest on other people's podcast.
Because what they understand is that when Matt links to Ben's page from his website, he gets something called a backlink. The more people are recommending your website, the higher it ranks. So before you know it, they've got a big YouTube following. They're ranking on Google. They're a thought leader because they're creating content. And, really, all they're doing is having a long form conversation on a podcast. Now, Matt, I made that up on the spot. K. But that's a be close. That's a big part of what I do for my clients with content marketing, with podcast marketing.
So in theory, I could get that story down a lot better and then tell that story. And the right people
[00:14:53] Matt Rouse:
that are interested in doing that or grasp on to it. And the people that aren't, that's quite all right. But the people that are those become your clients. Let me tell you a quick story about the story that you just had. Yeah. And this is one that I actually have this conversation all the time. We were talking to somebody at t and c about this fact is if you can get your client to go on other podcasts, they think that they are trying to sell their story to the audience. But I would say the largest benefit, at least for most, you know, businesses that are online sales, you know, their b to b, their ecommerce, something like that, The biggest benefit is that you're gonna get 50 backlinks when you go on that show, on that one show. Right? Yeah. Because your podcast, just like my podcast, it goes to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Libsyn, you know, Spotify, and and who knows how many other, right, podcast locations that goes to. And every single one of those sites is gonna have a backlink to the guest. Right?
So you've done 1, you know, 30 to 60 minute piece of work that now you get, you know, 50 backlinks to your website from it. Also, it's contextual. Right? Because you've got the description from the show and the the transcript and all that kind of stuff. And then on top of all that, you can use that to get clips. You can cut the whole show and send it to the next person so you could be the guest on the next show and say, look. You can watch me on the previous show. And so all those things are great. Right? I mean, that's not a service that we do for clients. I'm just saying that this is something that if you're out there and you're thinking about going on shows, you just do it. I couldn't agree more. I'm raising my hand to this, but, like, who has
[00:16:43] Ben Albert:
I haven't even said it yet, Matt. Who has who has spent 2 hours on a reel that got like a 100 views, 200 views. And what's funny about a reel is those views could have been, like, 8 seconds long. Like, they did nothing. I spent 2 hours on something that returned no result. Now I'm not saying not to do reels, but what if I spend 2 hours on podcast interviews? Right. Based on what you just said, that's a better return on my time investment.
[00:17:14] Matt Rouse:
And you could cut the most important bits out of that show and make reels out of it. Except for 2 hour period. I'm only only getting 200 views on those though, Matt. Yeah. But if you get 200 views on them, but you use something like Get More Yeah. And it cuts 20 clips out of the podcast interview and you get 200 views on each one, now you got 4,000 views and you didn't have to cut them out yourself and you didn't have to make the reel yourself.
[00:17:41] Ben Albert:
You're entirely correct, and I was kinda just, like, being silly with the Rios. But the next level is you have 20 of those Rios. 1 of them pops off, and you actually get 10,000. Oh, wow. That's some data proven fact that maybe I should talk about this topic more. Maybe I should tell this story more. Oh, this is the kind of thing that so, again, it's just, you know, posting it out. I'm not a huge fan of throwing crap at the wall because there's a lot of filth on my wall. That being said, you need to throw some things at the wall. And then once something sticks, you go, okay. This is the sticker. Well, there's some infinite amount of walls on the Internet to throw stuff at me. So I like to find the sticker and then create more content around the sticker, but constantly be looking at the analytics
[00:18:35] Matt Rouse:
I'm constantly throwing things at the wall and like you just get It's getting harder and harder to tell. Right? If something worked. The idea of actual attribution is it's it's at this point, it's basically an educated guess, and it's soon gonna be, like, you know, fleeting fantasy that you could tell where anybody came from on the Internet. You know, it's it's going that direction. Another thing that you wanna think about also is, is there some kind of quantitative thing that you can say, like, if I do all of these efforts that I'm gonna do, is that sales?
Is it leads? Is it connections? Is it, you know, conversations? Or what is it you're gonna measure? And maybe you're gonna measure more than one of those things, but what you have to do is is you have to try and do, you know, the things that you're gonna do, like throw some stuff at the wall, have some, you know, tried and true theory stuff. You know? Have a strategy, I think, is always important. That was actually our last episode. Christine, Campbell Rappin, all about marketing strategy. Have some strategy, but then be ready to consistently work on something for a long enough period of time for it actually to have some kind of benefit.
And that's the problem that you have when people have their shiny object syndrome. Mhmm. They don't do it long enough to see if it works and they've already switched to the next thing and they never do anything long enough for it to take effect. Like, how long when you started your podcast, how long did it take before it really got rolling into something you were like, okay, this is a business and this is gonna work? Yeah, man. I mean, first off, you're nailing it. We feel like a failure sometimes because we are not seeing the long enough time horizon. And I won't go tell my entire story but had some abuse when I was a childhood. Started reading growth and personal growth books because
[00:20:31] Ben Albert:
I felt lost and lonely when I was young. Got into the music industry because there was other weird creative types in the music industry. Started a music podcast in 2016 because I wanted to add value to the industry, and I wanted to get backstage and get into places for free. 2020, I'm a marketing executive. I get let go. Start a marketing podcast because music, Ben, first off, was nonessential. And second off, didn't have any money and had a drinking problem. So redefine myself into business, Ben, started a marketing business podcast in my hometown of Rochester, New York that is sales and marketing driven, but it's also no personal growth driven.
And my insatiable curiosity makes it super fun. And, again, in 2020 and then in 2021, I magically somehow replaced my sales executive income in about a year, and they see me replacing my income in a year. They don't see that this started with the abused kid that just wanted to figure out why he was a weirdo. So in a long enough time horizon, in another 20 years, Matt, I probably won't recognize the Ben I am now. Long enough time horizon, we can do anything. And a lot of the stuff that even sucked are still preparing us and providing skills and data and understanding to be better tomorrow.
So I entirely agree. And I only touched on the story, but everything that's happening is in preparation for being better at what we're doing for the future. Absolutely.
[00:22:12] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I mean, you did say there, you know, like, it took what year, year and a half to replace your income. The average podcast ends within 6 months or 6 episodes. Right. Right? Yeah. Anyone who stopped after 6 episodes, they didn't get the benefit of having done the actual podcast. When I was gonna do this podcast, I committed to it. I said I'm gonna do it every week for at least 2 years. 2 years. I said every week I'm gonna do it for 2 years. You know what I did? I did every week for 3 years and then I did it 3 times a week for a year before I took a break. And you know what? Endless amounts of benefits. All the people that I have known and talked to and, you know, some of the people who are quite good friends of mine now that I still talk to all the time, I met through the podcast. Tim. It's an amazing medium, and it's also one of the last kind of if I can soapbox for a minute, it's kind of one of the last kind of freedom of the Internet spaces.
Mhmm. I can say whatever I want. There's no there's no block. There's no one telling me what I can or can't do. Facebook's not disapproving my ad or my post or putting me in Instagram jail or something. Right? Podcasting is, you know, within the boundaries of the law kind of thing is still a free space, and you can do as much of it as you want. There's no limit as long as you can afford an unlimited podcast host. Ben, I know we're kinda we're kinda getting
[00:23:39] Ben Albert:
tight on time here pretty soon, but I You didn't want any you didn't want any insider trading tips? My girlfriend works for a publicly traded company, so I can give you some tips on air.
[00:23:50] Matt Rouse:
Alright. Let's have that. And then we'll go over the podcast I was listening today where they are testing Google Gemini on horse track racing.
[00:23:58] Ben Albert:
Let let's talk about that because I actually don't wanna get sued for this podcast. There are lines we can't cross. That's
[00:24:06] Matt Rouse:
right. Google Gemini. I actually I heard something super funny today that's completely unrelated. It was about people using, students using AI for their homework assignments. Yeah. And the AI detectors or they detect people who have English as a second language. It detects them as AI generated when they write things, and so the whole thing the whole system has a problem. So there's a teacher in the States, I can't remember which state, she has been putting basically ghosted text into her assignments. So it's white text on a white background, but the students copy and paste the assignment into the AI.
And so the white text that they can't read is telling it to put certain words or phrases into the assignment so she can see if they had the AI write it or not. You know what my favorite part of that is?
[00:24:58] Ben Albert:
The fact she's clever is, is initially what hooks me to that story. But my absolute favorite part is that they don't pay enough attention to realize that they copy pasted stuff. That wasn't it. Like they're just literally Right. Because you can see it highlighted. Once you highlight it, usually, you highlight it. You can see the words. They're that lazy that they don't even realize that they're copy pasting her, like, hidden.
[00:25:25] Matt Rouse:
So that stealth thing is is has been used in other places like it was in the lawsuit for Google about scraping content around music lyrics. I don't know if you ever saw that one. No. One of the music lyrics websites, Google said they were not scraping their content. So they went in and they changed the dots and and commas, the periods and the commas in the music lyrics to spell out Morse code phrases. And then when they looked on Google, they would see the Morse code of the dots and the commas. Right? The periods and the commas. So they were able to prove that Google was scraping their content even though they said they weren't. Wow.
Sneaky.
[00:26:08] Ben Albert:
I like it. I like it.
[00:26:10] Matt Rouse:
Ben, real business connections. Somebody wants to they could list the podcast obviously, but if they wanna reach out to you, what is the best way for them to do that?
[00:26:21] Ben Albert:
So first and foremost, I would not be here without our man, Matt. So you're already listening to this podcast. I always recommend you haven't hit subscribe. Do that. Now, if you haven't hit 5 stars, you can do that. That's really easy. And bonus points, brownie points goes to leaving a review, but literally just smashing surprise, subscribe in 5 stars is so, so darn easy. That's the barrier to entry because I'm humble of to know that I wouldn't be here without Matt. You can find me where you found this. So you just type in Real Business Connections wherever you found this. And if I failed you as a marketer, Google it, and I promise Google works. So real business connections, Google it. You'll find me. But show some love to Matt first, and and then we got we we're in business then.
[00:27:12] Matt Rouse:
Perfect. I appreciate it, Ben. I do have an AI generated voice that asks people to like and subscribe that I Yeah. Tag on to the end. And we actually use an AI, piece of music in the show. That all came from the season of AI last year. So if you wanna catch up on some AI stuff. You have an article that's, like, part of a 2 part series. Yeah. Do you want to because I thought the article was great. Do you wanna throw that out?
[00:27:36] Ben Albert:
Yeah. And on AI, you sent me a matrix to put into chat gpt. I did that and it's been creating better content. Do you share that with your listeners?
[00:27:46] Matt Rouse:
Yes. Let me figure out. I think I have it on my LinkedIn, so you can just find Matt Rouse on LinkedIn. Find a way to share that with them because that's making my content better. Yeah. I have an update for it, so I'll send you the update. And I'll put it on LinkedIn so everybody can get it. Basically, the it's the custom instructions for the pro version or the paid version, plus version, whatever they call it, of chat gpt article.
[00:28:09] Ben Albert:
The article. I haven't written the second part yet, but I wrote an article. It went semi viral called why a I will make you look like a bad marketer in 2024. Now there's science behind even the word look. People don't wanna be a bad marketer. They just don't wanna look like a bad marketer. So I swear to God, it's if you look at dating stuff, it's not like how to be more attractive. It's how to look more attractive. People just wanna look they don't wanna put in the work half the time. But I said how how to not look like a why AI will help you? Oh my god. I can't talk, man. This is why I need AI. AI is gonna make you look like a bad marketer in 2024.
And it it was an honest look on the fact that if you don't understand the essentials, you're just gonna you're gonna be vanilla. You're just an operator. You don't have skill set. Digitalmarketer.com's fantastic because they teach people the skill sets. Somewhat's like the one you went to traffic and conversions. They teach you the skill set. If you're just copy pasting stuff, you're gonna be a crappy marker marketer. But I wrote that article and it went a little bit viral and I want to write a second article. And it's how I created a viral article criticizing AI using AI.
Because the the joke the joke of the article, very simply put is I was on a podcast interview. We talked about how AI is making bad marketers and people don't understand the foundational essentials. I took a transcription of that podcast interview. I copy pasted the transcription into chat gbt. I'm not fantastic with AI. I was just doing the basic stuff. Copy pasted the transcription, got the main points, got the main quotes, and then I used chat g p t to use direct quotes, direct concepts, add a little bit of fluff, add a little bit of context, turn it into an article. And when I look back and I read that article, I actually don't think it's even that good.
It was decent. It's not even that good. But it was 100% ridden by AI
[00:30:19] Matt Rouse:
and it started to go viral because it was criticizing AI. There is a theory that I have for those of you who have managed to stay on after we are sad and like we are gonna end it. My bad. This is a good theory though. Everybody talks about how Google is against AI content or at least AI generated content that is that is like below average kind of thing. I think that is a 100% not the case. I think Google has tweaked their algorithm because they want people to subscribe to Gemini or at the time Bard. Right? So they want people to subscribe to their AI, and they know one of the biggest use cases is writing content for your website. So they want you to put AI content on your website because they want you to pay them to use the AI. And the other thing, and you know this as, you know, a fellow marketing person who understands a little more SEO than your average person, is that content that is fresh.
It's it's new and and fresh. It's updated. Those things tend to rise to the top in the search results because there's no time decay because they're new. Right? So especially if you take an old article that you already had and you put it into the AI and have it rewrite that for you and you repost it as due, that's great for SEO. So it's actually maybe benefiting you because of the scale that you can get by using AI to rewrite your old articles and stuff, you may end up with a much higher ranking by using AI for SEO
[00:31:52] Ben Albert:
than if you did not use it. Brilliant. I don't know what to say. I I presume I presume it has to be good content though.
[00:32:00] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I mean, it's gotta be good. It's gotta be like it's gonna fit the knowledge graph kind of thing. Right? It's gonna make you sound like, you know, you know what you're talking about. You're trustworthy and all that. I love how you said it's gotta make you sound like, you know, what you it's like Yeah. You you gotta look like a you gotta sound like, you know, what you're talking about. Well, it's true though. Right? It's true. It is true. Here, it's the easy thing. See if you can tell something to an AI and have it believe you when it's not true. And it is the easiest thing in the world to do. And then think that the AI they're using for search is dumber than that one. Even if the AI you're using now may seem magical in some ways and stupid in others, it is also the dumbest one you're ever gonna use.
So they're just gonna get better and they get better fast. Look at some Midjourney images from 2020 and look at them now. Unbelievable. Just actually, I think it was 2021 that Midjourney first came out. It's hard to remember now. But, yeah, like the new ones are unbelievable. And look at, like, you know, the video that came out of Sona from OpenAI. Right? And 11 Labs has their they that's the speech engine, the AI speech engine. They have a sound effect engine now. Cool. And so it will you could put a video into it, and it'll automatically make the soundtrack of of not the music, but it'll make all the sound effects. I need to hear that. It's kicking. Ben, we'll talk again soon. Thanks for being on the show. I hate to cut it short, but I know you've got another show to go on. I don't want you to be late. No. I appreciate it. I gotta go start hanging out with my AI girlfriend. So That's right. She's she's planning on me. You can get a AI girlfriend on Sym Theory, which is from the This Day in AI podcast.
So check that out, people. I'll do a shout out to them because I love their show as well. Real Business Connections with Ben Albert. Ben, thanks for being on. Thanks for having me, Matt.
[00:33:53] Narrator AI:
This voice over used to be done by a human, but now it is synthetic. Oh la la If you want to know if your job or business is safe from disruption read Matt's new book Will AI Take My Job? Predictions about AI and corporations, small business and the workplace. Available now on Amazon. Trust me, it'll be worth it.
[00:34:18] Narrator AI:
I hope you enjoyed Digital Marketing Masters. Check out our back catalog of episodes for more than 200 interviews with top digital marketers, authors, and productivity experts. Stay tuned for the next episode where we talk about more AI tactics and applications you can start using right now just like me.
[00:34:36] Narrator AI:
Remember to tap like, subscribe, or unfollow to never miss a show.
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse.
[00:00:10] Matt Rouse:
And welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. My guest today is Ben Alber. How are you doing, Ben? I'm good. We should have recorded the green room conversation. You're fun, man. I'm excited to be here, Matt. We can talk about the the science of evolutionary science of egg laying. You got my chicken shirt on. Chicken and roosters. Good to go. So I wanna have you on the show. I saw you speak at, Traffic Conversion Summit, and also we chatted a little bit at the after events there and stuff. I really, really like your story because it's something I really believe in, which is hyper localization, I guess I would call it for your business.
[00:00:50] Ben Albert:
You wanna explain a little bit about your podcast and how you got started there? Yeah. I mean, let let let's just set up a scenario, and this is my story, but just imagine you're in the scenario. COVID hit. Oh, we all experienced that. Job market's changing. I personally got let go from my corporate role for a large marketing firm. And so you're unemployed. You don't really know what you're gonna do next. You do have skillsets, but I had never run a business before. I had booked bands. I had set up Myspace pages back in the day. I was a music promoter. I had dabbled here and there, but I had never run a business. I had never actually made money on my own.
And I came from a marketing firm. I understood podcasting, marketing, and promotion. That's about it. I wasn't the smartest guy on earth. So what am I? I'm a I'm a minnow in an ocean of sameness. There's a lot of marketers that humbly are better than me. There's a lot of firms that have been around 5, 10, 20 years. There's a lot of people that have private equity and money. I was not planning on getting let go. I had no savings to launch this big grand business. I was a minnow in an ocean of sameness. And no matter what you're doing, unless I wanna I wanna figure this one out. You make broccoli and kale taste like chocolate chip cookies with no negative and all positive.
You have something that the world wants, needs, and you're gonna be successful even if you're an asshole. Right. Most of us can't do that. Most of us are kind of a commodity. We're minnows and oceans of sameness. So I thought if my hometown of Rochester, New York isn't willing to put any chips on me. Invest in me. Support me. Who am I? I I I can't I can't go international if I can't even help my neighbor. So I started Rochester, New York. That's where I started networking. I started Rochester Business Connections podcast, very simply put because I wanted some. On LinkedIn, a a friend request was called a connection request.
So I started a Rochester Business Connection podcast and went on LinkedIn and started reaching out to I went to State University, New York, Brockport. So I started reaching out to SUNY Brockport alumni for my Rochester, New York Business podcast using LinkedIn to do it. Right. I'm still kind of a minnow, but at least I'm in a pond. I'm not in an ocean. And I was the only Rochester, New York business podcast that I at least knew of at the time. And since I was reaching to people I had a commonality with, people that's went to the same college, university as me, it was very easy to at least get someone's attention.
People were willing to put their chips on me, be on the show, and then a lot happened from there. I gained mentorship. I gained friends, and I gained clients. Not every person that came on my rinky dink little podcast became a client, but we built rapport. We built a relationship. We shared info. We shared introductions that led to goodwill, that led to clients. Clients created the foundation that gave me the confidence and the true evidence that I could be a business owner, which is something I didn't imagine I was gonna do a year prior. And then once I had that evidence, I just continue to do the fundamentals well.
Show up, have interviews, promote, promote, promote, introduction, introduction, introduction. Add a ton of value even to a tiny audience, and that's all I needed to build a business. Nowadays, it's called Real Business Connections. I do have clients that are national and a couple international. It's grown, but it started from the core and that was my city.
[00:04:57] Matt Rouse:
Right. And so there's a couple kind of key factors there. I think, I think one of them is you looked at the skill sets that you had, and and you were able to kind of capitalize on that. And another one was looking at your history and saying, is there some way I can make a connection with other people with something that I've done or someone I know or, you know, by using your alumni as as leverage, I guess, you would call it, to be able to kind of gain some trust with people. Because I don't know about you, but I get a 1,000 requests a week on LinkedIn from anybody trying to sell anything.
The tipping point on LinkedIn is about a 1,000, you know, followers or connections. Once you're over that, you're pretty much at the I'm gonna get spammed constantly level. Yeah. So let's talk about that. I mean, Rochester, New York, still a reasonable sized population. Right? I mean, it's it's small, but it's not small small. I mean, it's not Nova Scotia small. Like, it's probably the population of all of Nova Scotia. I think the idea is is there an audience big enough to support yourself, right, and and kind of get your business started? And do you wanna maybe talk a little bit about like, you say you you received clients, but what were they clients for? Like, what was the actual business that you started doing once you had met some business owners and stuff? Yeah. So a couple questions.
[00:06:27] Ben Albert:
Fantastic questions there. At the end of the day, if your audience is just you, your friend, your guest, their mom and a coworker, I'm still going to deliver to all those people to the best of my ability. Small audiences is not what I'm not looking at scale from day 1 because if I can add value to Matt and his one listener, his 10 listeners is 10,000 listeners, that'll scale on its own naturally. So if you're in Nova Scotia or a city, a small city, a small town, It's like, do I have an audience there? I guess, you know, that's a personal again, I'm I don't like to just wave a magic wand and say, this is the way. This is the solution.
What does your how big is your region? Maybe it's not a citywide podcast. Maybe it's a regional podcast. Maybe it's a travel podcast where you travel to all the cities in the region and meet the locals. Think about what you're working with and expand on that. And maybe it's not local at all. Maybe you're into putting golf and you specifically talk to other people that are experts at putting golf. There's gonna be very few experts at putting golf in Nova Scotia, but there's gonna be a million of those across you know, we got a big world out there who it surprises me. My buddy here at Iran has a vertical farming podcast, and it's huge. Okay. So I'm not surprised, honestly. There's a lot of that going on these days. It's amazing.
So we work with what we got. And, you know, we can talk about pun to monetize podcast monetization. I like monetization. That's a that's a good one. That'd be a good name for a book. Pod it. Pod it. So we can talk about monetization all day. There's way to monetize a podcast. A lot of the ways are pretty difficult. I monetize, in my case, a service based business. Now you could do SaaS, you could do courses. Whatever you're selling is fine, but I didn't try to become a influencer overnight that can just make money through creating content. I had a service based online marketing firm And a lot of people would actually ask me, Matt, what do you do? I I see you podcasting. What do you do?
Now that some people you got 2 takes on this. Bad problem to have. People have no clue what you do. You're not being clear in your messaging. I saw that as a good problem to have because all I was there to do was to add value to business owners in Rochester, New York. And then when some someone said, what do you do? I can explain, you know, website SEO, content marketing, this that was way on the back end of the relationship. So the way I was monetizing was through relatively high ticket online marketing clients. And I wasn't using the podcast specifically to prospect, but the prospecting kinda happened naturally.
And then once, you know, your clients are paying for your show and paying for you to get a little bit of momentum,
[00:09:44] Matt Rouse:
then again the scaling is gonna happen naturally as well. Yeah. I a 100% agree. And I think one of the most interesting things that I get asked with the podcast, especially, I mean, this is year 6, so we've been doing this for a while. Right? I get asked all the time, like, how come you're not advertising on your podcast? How come you're not pitching on your podcast? How come you're not selling a course or or something like that? And that is a 100% not the reason I have the podcast. Everything you do doesn't have to have a dollar value attached to it. That value that you add can be, you know, advice or, you know, people just like listening to you. They like your personality, whatever it is. But I found really quickly with our show, the idea was kind of similar to to, you know, what you were doing is we were having kind of clients and and other, you know, potential clients on the show when we first started. And because we were recording, this is a good tip, by the way. If you're just starting recording your podcast, you have no idea how to do it. We were recording in a music school, and the music school has no one in it Monday to Friday because all the kids are at school. Yes. So they would lend us their recording studio. They will, they didn't lend it to us. They we paid 20, I think no. We paid $30 an hour for a professional recording studio.
Beautiful. Which is ridiculous. We would have the clients in. They would meet us. We would chitchat before and after the show, you know, that kind of thing. And then I started having more people on the the show, and I found really quickly that the people were kind of curious about what we're doing, but not because they want to hire us or something like that. But after the fact, they were messaging us saying, I know person x. They have this problem, and you talked about how you solve that thing. You know, do you wanna have a chat with them? So it was referrals from guests. Yeah. And that was a, like, that was a big moment for us because I found that out. And then I was like, well, now I can just go interview anybody I want to. And I don't have to try and pitch my audience.
[00:11:48] Ben Albert:
I'm curious. What were you doing to make you referable? And and just to kind of like think out loud here, I think a big part of it is you must have been giving a good experience
[00:12:00] Matt Rouse:
for them to want to start talking about Matt. Is that a fair assumption to make? Yeah. I think so. I mean, I'm a lot better at it now, you know, that I've been doing it for a long time. Yeah. And I mean, I'm not a a high pressure sales kinda person. I mean, I did work in commission sales when I was younger, and I was not a huge fan of it. But I find that if I can kind of gauge the community that the person is in Yeah. You know, like, let's say for let's say they're a real estate agent. Right? Brokerage owner, something involved with real estate.
I know what the common problems that real estate agents have that we solve, so I will bring up a story or something about how we solved something that's related to real estate. Do you use your your brokerage website, or do you have your own website? And they'll be like, oh, we have our own website. And I'll be like, oh, yeah. We we got a website that we were doing for an agent, and, man, they were having problems getting their property listings and stuff up there. And so we had to use a different system, yada yada yada, and I explained what we did. And then the next time they have a problem getting their listings on their website or somebody else does, they go, oh, yeah. Matt said he knows how to fix that. I love that. So there's it's not like a pitch. It's not a sales call. It's not a series of follow-up emails about business or something. It's just a little bit of storytelling. Can I try that for fun real quick? Sure. So same concept.
[00:13:24] Ben Albert:
A lot of people don't realize or understand that Google owns YouTube and YouTube's actually the 2nd biggest search engine in the world. So everybody's wondering how can I search engine optimize? How can I create content? Well, a great answer to that is to create a long form video that you can place on YouTube. Time stamp that video so there's certain keywords for the certain sections. Break that time stamp up into clips. And if you really wanna get some bonus points, you write a description on that video, on that podcast, and you use that as blog content on your website. Now what the true winners do is they're not just hosting a podcast, They're gonna guest on other people's podcast.
Because what they understand is that when Matt links to Ben's page from his website, he gets something called a backlink. The more people are recommending your website, the higher it ranks. So before you know it, they've got a big YouTube following. They're ranking on Google. They're a thought leader because they're creating content. And, really, all they're doing is having a long form conversation on a podcast. Now, Matt, I made that up on the spot. K. But that's a be close. That's a big part of what I do for my clients with content marketing, with podcast marketing.
So in theory, I could get that story down a lot better and then tell that story. And the right people
[00:14:53] Matt Rouse:
that are interested in doing that or grasp on to it. And the people that aren't, that's quite all right. But the people that are those become your clients. Let me tell you a quick story about the story that you just had. Yeah. And this is one that I actually have this conversation all the time. We were talking to somebody at t and c about this fact is if you can get your client to go on other podcasts, they think that they are trying to sell their story to the audience. But I would say the largest benefit, at least for most, you know, businesses that are online sales, you know, their b to b, their ecommerce, something like that, The biggest benefit is that you're gonna get 50 backlinks when you go on that show, on that one show. Right? Yeah. Because your podcast, just like my podcast, it goes to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Libsyn, you know, Spotify, and and who knows how many other, right, podcast locations that goes to. And every single one of those sites is gonna have a backlink to the guest. Right?
So you've done 1, you know, 30 to 60 minute piece of work that now you get, you know, 50 backlinks to your website from it. Also, it's contextual. Right? Because you've got the description from the show and the the transcript and all that kind of stuff. And then on top of all that, you can use that to get clips. You can cut the whole show and send it to the next person so you could be the guest on the next show and say, look. You can watch me on the previous show. And so all those things are great. Right? I mean, that's not a service that we do for clients. I'm just saying that this is something that if you're out there and you're thinking about going on shows, you just do it. I couldn't agree more. I'm raising my hand to this, but, like, who has
[00:16:43] Ben Albert:
I haven't even said it yet, Matt. Who has who has spent 2 hours on a reel that got like a 100 views, 200 views. And what's funny about a reel is those views could have been, like, 8 seconds long. Like, they did nothing. I spent 2 hours on something that returned no result. Now I'm not saying not to do reels, but what if I spend 2 hours on podcast interviews? Right. Based on what you just said, that's a better return on my time investment.
[00:17:14] Matt Rouse:
And you could cut the most important bits out of that show and make reels out of it. Except for 2 hour period. I'm only only getting 200 views on those though, Matt. Yeah. But if you get 200 views on them, but you use something like Get More Yeah. And it cuts 20 clips out of the podcast interview and you get 200 views on each one, now you got 4,000 views and you didn't have to cut them out yourself and you didn't have to make the reel yourself.
[00:17:41] Ben Albert:
You're entirely correct, and I was kinda just, like, being silly with the Rios. But the next level is you have 20 of those Rios. 1 of them pops off, and you actually get 10,000. Oh, wow. That's some data proven fact that maybe I should talk about this topic more. Maybe I should tell this story more. Oh, this is the kind of thing that so, again, it's just, you know, posting it out. I'm not a huge fan of throwing crap at the wall because there's a lot of filth on my wall. That being said, you need to throw some things at the wall. And then once something sticks, you go, okay. This is the sticker. Well, there's some infinite amount of walls on the Internet to throw stuff at me. So I like to find the sticker and then create more content around the sticker, but constantly be looking at the analytics
[00:18:35] Matt Rouse:
I'm constantly throwing things at the wall and like you just get It's getting harder and harder to tell. Right? If something worked. The idea of actual attribution is it's it's at this point, it's basically an educated guess, and it's soon gonna be, like, you know, fleeting fantasy that you could tell where anybody came from on the Internet. You know, it's it's going that direction. Another thing that you wanna think about also is, is there some kind of quantitative thing that you can say, like, if I do all of these efforts that I'm gonna do, is that sales?
Is it leads? Is it connections? Is it, you know, conversations? Or what is it you're gonna measure? And maybe you're gonna measure more than one of those things, but what you have to do is is you have to try and do, you know, the things that you're gonna do, like throw some stuff at the wall, have some, you know, tried and true theory stuff. You know? Have a strategy, I think, is always important. That was actually our last episode. Christine, Campbell Rappin, all about marketing strategy. Have some strategy, but then be ready to consistently work on something for a long enough period of time for it actually to have some kind of benefit.
And that's the problem that you have when people have their shiny object syndrome. Mhmm. They don't do it long enough to see if it works and they've already switched to the next thing and they never do anything long enough for it to take effect. Like, how long when you started your podcast, how long did it take before it really got rolling into something you were like, okay, this is a business and this is gonna work? Yeah, man. I mean, first off, you're nailing it. We feel like a failure sometimes because we are not seeing the long enough time horizon. And I won't go tell my entire story but had some abuse when I was a childhood. Started reading growth and personal growth books because
[00:20:31] Ben Albert:
I felt lost and lonely when I was young. Got into the music industry because there was other weird creative types in the music industry. Started a music podcast in 2016 because I wanted to add value to the industry, and I wanted to get backstage and get into places for free. 2020, I'm a marketing executive. I get let go. Start a marketing podcast because music, Ben, first off, was nonessential. And second off, didn't have any money and had a drinking problem. So redefine myself into business, Ben, started a marketing business podcast in my hometown of Rochester, New York that is sales and marketing driven, but it's also no personal growth driven.
And my insatiable curiosity makes it super fun. And, again, in 2020 and then in 2021, I magically somehow replaced my sales executive income in about a year, and they see me replacing my income in a year. They don't see that this started with the abused kid that just wanted to figure out why he was a weirdo. So in a long enough time horizon, in another 20 years, Matt, I probably won't recognize the Ben I am now. Long enough time horizon, we can do anything. And a lot of the stuff that even sucked are still preparing us and providing skills and data and understanding to be better tomorrow.
So I entirely agree. And I only touched on the story, but everything that's happening is in preparation for being better at what we're doing for the future. Absolutely.
[00:22:12] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I mean, you did say there, you know, like, it took what year, year and a half to replace your income. The average podcast ends within 6 months or 6 episodes. Right. Right? Yeah. Anyone who stopped after 6 episodes, they didn't get the benefit of having done the actual podcast. When I was gonna do this podcast, I committed to it. I said I'm gonna do it every week for at least 2 years. 2 years. I said every week I'm gonna do it for 2 years. You know what I did? I did every week for 3 years and then I did it 3 times a week for a year before I took a break. And you know what? Endless amounts of benefits. All the people that I have known and talked to and, you know, some of the people who are quite good friends of mine now that I still talk to all the time, I met through the podcast. Tim. It's an amazing medium, and it's also one of the last kind of if I can soapbox for a minute, it's kind of one of the last kind of freedom of the Internet spaces.
Mhmm. I can say whatever I want. There's no there's no block. There's no one telling me what I can or can't do. Facebook's not disapproving my ad or my post or putting me in Instagram jail or something. Right? Podcasting is, you know, within the boundaries of the law kind of thing is still a free space, and you can do as much of it as you want. There's no limit as long as you can afford an unlimited podcast host. Ben, I know we're kinda we're kinda getting
[00:23:39] Ben Albert:
tight on time here pretty soon, but I You didn't want any you didn't want any insider trading tips? My girlfriend works for a publicly traded company, so I can give you some tips on air.
[00:23:50] Matt Rouse:
Alright. Let's have that. And then we'll go over the podcast I was listening today where they are testing Google Gemini on horse track racing.
[00:23:58] Ben Albert:
Let let's talk about that because I actually don't wanna get sued for this podcast. There are lines we can't cross. That's
[00:24:06] Matt Rouse:
right. Google Gemini. I actually I heard something super funny today that's completely unrelated. It was about people using, students using AI for their homework assignments. Yeah. And the AI detectors or they detect people who have English as a second language. It detects them as AI generated when they write things, and so the whole thing the whole system has a problem. So there's a teacher in the States, I can't remember which state, she has been putting basically ghosted text into her assignments. So it's white text on a white background, but the students copy and paste the assignment into the AI.
And so the white text that they can't read is telling it to put certain words or phrases into the assignment so she can see if they had the AI write it or not. You know what my favorite part of that is?
[00:24:58] Ben Albert:
The fact she's clever is, is initially what hooks me to that story. But my absolute favorite part is that they don't pay enough attention to realize that they copy pasted stuff. That wasn't it. Like they're just literally Right. Because you can see it highlighted. Once you highlight it, usually, you highlight it. You can see the words. They're that lazy that they don't even realize that they're copy pasting her, like, hidden.
[00:25:25] Matt Rouse:
So that stealth thing is is has been used in other places like it was in the lawsuit for Google about scraping content around music lyrics. I don't know if you ever saw that one. No. One of the music lyrics websites, Google said they were not scraping their content. So they went in and they changed the dots and and commas, the periods and the commas in the music lyrics to spell out Morse code phrases. And then when they looked on Google, they would see the Morse code of the dots and the commas. Right? The periods and the commas. So they were able to prove that Google was scraping their content even though they said they weren't. Wow.
Sneaky.
[00:26:08] Ben Albert:
I like it. I like it.
[00:26:10] Matt Rouse:
Ben, real business connections. Somebody wants to they could list the podcast obviously, but if they wanna reach out to you, what is the best way for them to do that?
[00:26:21] Ben Albert:
So first and foremost, I would not be here without our man, Matt. So you're already listening to this podcast. I always recommend you haven't hit subscribe. Do that. Now, if you haven't hit 5 stars, you can do that. That's really easy. And bonus points, brownie points goes to leaving a review, but literally just smashing surprise, subscribe in 5 stars is so, so darn easy. That's the barrier to entry because I'm humble of to know that I wouldn't be here without Matt. You can find me where you found this. So you just type in Real Business Connections wherever you found this. And if I failed you as a marketer, Google it, and I promise Google works. So real business connections, Google it. You'll find me. But show some love to Matt first, and and then we got we we're in business then.
[00:27:12] Matt Rouse:
Perfect. I appreciate it, Ben. I do have an AI generated voice that asks people to like and subscribe that I Yeah. Tag on to the end. And we actually use an AI, piece of music in the show. That all came from the season of AI last year. So if you wanna catch up on some AI stuff. You have an article that's, like, part of a 2 part series. Yeah. Do you want to because I thought the article was great. Do you wanna throw that out?
[00:27:36] Ben Albert:
Yeah. And on AI, you sent me a matrix to put into chat gpt. I did that and it's been creating better content. Do you share that with your listeners?
[00:27:46] Matt Rouse:
Yes. Let me figure out. I think I have it on my LinkedIn, so you can just find Matt Rouse on LinkedIn. Find a way to share that with them because that's making my content better. Yeah. I have an update for it, so I'll send you the update. And I'll put it on LinkedIn so everybody can get it. Basically, the it's the custom instructions for the pro version or the paid version, plus version, whatever they call it, of chat gpt article.
[00:28:09] Ben Albert:
The article. I haven't written the second part yet, but I wrote an article. It went semi viral called why a I will make you look like a bad marketer in 2024. Now there's science behind even the word look. People don't wanna be a bad marketer. They just don't wanna look like a bad marketer. So I swear to God, it's if you look at dating stuff, it's not like how to be more attractive. It's how to look more attractive. People just wanna look they don't wanna put in the work half the time. But I said how how to not look like a why AI will help you? Oh my god. I can't talk, man. This is why I need AI. AI is gonna make you look like a bad marketer in 2024.
And it it was an honest look on the fact that if you don't understand the essentials, you're just gonna you're gonna be vanilla. You're just an operator. You don't have skill set. Digitalmarketer.com's fantastic because they teach people the skill sets. Somewhat's like the one you went to traffic and conversions. They teach you the skill set. If you're just copy pasting stuff, you're gonna be a crappy marker marketer. But I wrote that article and it went a little bit viral and I want to write a second article. And it's how I created a viral article criticizing AI using AI.
Because the the joke the joke of the article, very simply put is I was on a podcast interview. We talked about how AI is making bad marketers and people don't understand the foundational essentials. I took a transcription of that podcast interview. I copy pasted the transcription into chat gbt. I'm not fantastic with AI. I was just doing the basic stuff. Copy pasted the transcription, got the main points, got the main quotes, and then I used chat g p t to use direct quotes, direct concepts, add a little bit of fluff, add a little bit of context, turn it into an article. And when I look back and I read that article, I actually don't think it's even that good.
It was decent. It's not even that good. But it was 100% ridden by AI
[00:30:19] Matt Rouse:
and it started to go viral because it was criticizing AI. There is a theory that I have for those of you who have managed to stay on after we are sad and like we are gonna end it. My bad. This is a good theory though. Everybody talks about how Google is against AI content or at least AI generated content that is that is like below average kind of thing. I think that is a 100% not the case. I think Google has tweaked their algorithm because they want people to subscribe to Gemini or at the time Bard. Right? So they want people to subscribe to their AI, and they know one of the biggest use cases is writing content for your website. So they want you to put AI content on your website because they want you to pay them to use the AI. And the other thing, and you know this as, you know, a fellow marketing person who understands a little more SEO than your average person, is that content that is fresh.
It's it's new and and fresh. It's updated. Those things tend to rise to the top in the search results because there's no time decay because they're new. Right? So especially if you take an old article that you already had and you put it into the AI and have it rewrite that for you and you repost it as due, that's great for SEO. So it's actually maybe benefiting you because of the scale that you can get by using AI to rewrite your old articles and stuff, you may end up with a much higher ranking by using AI for SEO
[00:31:52] Ben Albert:
than if you did not use it. Brilliant. I don't know what to say. I I presume I presume it has to be good content though.
[00:32:00] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I mean, it's gotta be good. It's gotta be like it's gonna fit the knowledge graph kind of thing. Right? It's gonna make you sound like, you know, you know what you're talking about. You're trustworthy and all that. I love how you said it's gotta make you sound like, you know, what you it's like Yeah. You you gotta look like a you gotta sound like, you know, what you're talking about. Well, it's true though. Right? It's true. It is true. Here, it's the easy thing. See if you can tell something to an AI and have it believe you when it's not true. And it is the easiest thing in the world to do. And then think that the AI they're using for search is dumber than that one. Even if the AI you're using now may seem magical in some ways and stupid in others, it is also the dumbest one you're ever gonna use.
So they're just gonna get better and they get better fast. Look at some Midjourney images from 2020 and look at them now. Unbelievable. Just actually, I think it was 2021 that Midjourney first came out. It's hard to remember now. But, yeah, like the new ones are unbelievable. And look at, like, you know, the video that came out of Sona from OpenAI. Right? And 11 Labs has their they that's the speech engine, the AI speech engine. They have a sound effect engine now. Cool. And so it will you could put a video into it, and it'll automatically make the soundtrack of of not the music, but it'll make all the sound effects. I need to hear that. It's kicking. Ben, we'll talk again soon. Thanks for being on the show. I hate to cut it short, but I know you've got another show to go on. I don't want you to be late. No. I appreciate it. I gotta go start hanging out with my AI girlfriend. So That's right. She's she's planning on me. You can get a AI girlfriend on Sym Theory, which is from the This Day in AI podcast.
So check that out, people. I'll do a shout out to them because I love their show as well. Real Business Connections with Ben Albert. Ben, thanks for being on. Thanks for having me, Matt.
[00:33:53] Narrator AI:
This voice over used to be done by a human, but now it is synthetic. Oh la la If you want to know if your job or business is safe from disruption read Matt's new book Will AI Take My Job? Predictions about AI and corporations, small business and the workplace. Available now on Amazon. Trust me, it'll be worth it.
[00:34:18] Narrator AI:
I hope you enjoyed Digital Marketing Masters. Check out our back catalog of episodes for more than 200 interviews with top digital marketers, authors, and productivity experts. Stay tuned for the next episode where we talk about more AI tactics and applications you can start using right now just like me.
[00:34:36] Narrator AI:
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Ben's podcast and how he got started
Monetizing a podcast through service-based business
Finding an audience and clients in a local or niche market
The importance of adding value and building relationships
The long-term commitment and benefits of podcasting
The potential of AI-generated content and its impact on marketing
