22 – Mastering Online Brand Management: Practical Tips for Clarity, Consistency, and Data-Driven Success with Jason Barnard
In this episode of “Aligned Entrepreneur Secrets,” host Traci Bermingham dives into a lively chat with Jason Barnard, famously known as “The Brand SERP Guy.” Jason, the CEO of Kalicube, shares his fascinating journey from punk folk musician to cartoon creator, and finally, to a digital marketing guru. He reveals how these diverse experiences shaped his expertise in online brand management. Jason offers practical tips on achieving clarity and consistency in your digital presence, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decisions. This episode is a treasure trove of insights, encouraging you to refine your branding efforts and make a powerful impact online. Don’t miss it!
Discovering Harmony in Business and Life for Entrepreneurs
[00:00:05] Traci Bermingham: Welcome to Aligned Entrepreneur Secrets. I’m your host, Traci Bermingham, a business flow and efficiency expert, CEO of goaldi.com and founder of the Business Alignment Method. We help entrepreneurs stop the hustle and get their time back by streamlining systems and building the flow state directly into the day to day operations of the business. We believe that you’re here to make a massive impact on the world. The stress and logistics of running a business shouldn’t be holding you back.
[00:00:32] Traci Bermingham: Be sure to stick around until the end of the show where we’ll reveal how you can be our next guest. Let’s get started.
[00:00:44] Traci Bermingham: Welcome to Aligned Entrepreneur Secrets. I am your host, Traci Bermingham. And today, I am joined by Jason Barnard. Jason, The Brand SERP Guy, is an entrepreneur and CEO of Kalicube. Jason specializes in online brand management and his superhero skill is his ability to influence and reshape Google’s focus on an individual or a company. Welcome, Jason.
[00:01:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you so much, Traci. It’s delightful to be here.
Jason Barnard’s Journey from Punk Folk Musician to Digital Marketing Expert
[00:01:14] Traci Bermingham: I am so excited to have you. So I want to get, I’m super interested in how you get Google to focus, but I would love to, before we kind of get there, I would love to hear about your history, your background and how you got to where you are today.
[00:01:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): All right, well, my history is a musician. I was a musician for ten years playing punk folk music on the double bass. Then I was in cartoons, writing music scripts and doing the voice for cartoon characters. And now, I’m in Digital Marketing. I was going to say manipulating Google, but it’s refocusing Google.
The Intersection of Creative Careers and Digital Marketing
[00:01:56] Traci Bermingham: Interesting. So what I would love to know because I feel like my career, right, like I’ve gone this way and I’m like, yeah, I don’t like that. And then I’ve gone this way and yeah, I don’t like that. But everything that I’ve done, I use today in what I do now. With the music and with, I would love to hear the music and the cartoon. How does that influence that skill, that experience? How does that influence what you’re doing today?
[00:02:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I think music is an interesting field because it’s incredibly structured. Just twelve notes, four beats the bar, should be really simple, but is impossible to completely master because there’s so much nuance in there, so much that you can do with that very seemingly simple basic structure. So you need, yeah, well, you need the pragmatic understanding and implementation, but you also need the creativity. Without the creativity, the rest of it doesn’t make sense. And if you don’t have the foundations, your creativity simply doesn’t happen. And I believe that’s something I brought into the work I’m doing today. And the cartoons is actually, from a cartoon-making perspective, wasn’t directly useful, but we were online building a website and we lived in Mauritius, which is in the Indian Ocean, it’s in Africa.
[00:03:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And because there weren’t trained or qualified developers, I had to learn to develop myself. And that’s how I got into Google. That’s how I got into databases and geekydom and so on and so forth. So it brought me to the place I am today, and I’m using all of those skills day in, day out.
Building Your Personal Brand to Guide Google’s Focus on Your Business Journey
[00:03:39] Traci Bermingham: I love it. And so talk to me about how do you not manipulate? How do you focus Google?
[00:03:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I think you made a really good point earlier on, is I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I’ve done the third thing, and now I’m doing this. And that was the foundational problem I had is I was a musician, I was a scriptwriter, I was a voiceover artist, I was a songwriter, and then I became a digital marketer. And now I’m an entrepreneur. How do I get Google to understand all of those different aspects of my life, but focus on the entrepreneurship, which is the focus for today? And that is what Kalicube does day in, day out for our clients. We take very complex histories and stories of people and indeed corporations, but mostly people, and ensure that Google is focusing on the right one and that it understands all of the other ones, but prioritizes the one that you want. And the interesting fact about that is it’s exactly the same thing you need to do with your human audience. My human audience can know that I’m a musician. They can understand it, and it’s fine.
[00:04:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But I need them to be aware that the focus today is entrepreneurship. Because if I talk to you as a podcast host about music, you wouldn’t have me on your podcast. If I say I’m an entrepreneur who happens to have played music, then you would, because I become interesting.
Focusing Your Brand to Communicate Your Current Identity
[00:05:02] Traci Bermingham: Right. So how can you give us some tips.
[00:05:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes.
[00:05:06] Traci Bermingham: On how to get that focus for ourselves if we do have. Well, even in general. Right. Even if you’ve got a laser focused. I think this is an issue whether you’ve got a laser-focused career, you’ve always known you want to do this, or, like the two of us, where you kind of, your pendulum has gone back and forth trying to figure it out, and then you kind of just, you’re at right now. How do you, give us some tips. How do you do that?
[00:05:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I think everybody has done that pendulum thing to a greater or lesser extent, and there’s nobody who’s just got one single facet to them. The idea of multifacetedness for a human being is built in. So everybody has this problem. It’s the extent to which it is a problem that is key. And if you focus on the audience, then you’re going to find the solution is that if you can communicate this to your audience systematically, consistently and clearly across your entire digital ecosystem, Google will understand. And that’s the trick. You need to make sure that you are being consistently clear about your focus to your human audience, wherever they are hanging out, and that you focus your attention where your current audience is hanging out. So I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m focusing on Forbes.
[00:06:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m focusing on Search Engine Land for the Digital Marketing aspect of it. Inc.com, the New York Times, all of those are places that Google and my audience would expect to see me. I don’t do much work on IMDb or MusicBrainz, which is where you would expect to see me as a cartoon maker or a musician. So if I spend a lot of my time on IMDb, building out my profile, adding lots of things, then it focuses everybody’s attention on that. But if I spend a lot of my time on Forbes.com, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com. All of these sites, it focuses everybody’s attention there. And that’s the secret. The secondary secret is joining the dots for everybody. I need to be standing where my audience is looking.
[00:07:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I need to be explaining to them what I currently do that makes sense to them and not focus on the stuff that doesn’t make sense to them. And I need to give them a destination. That destination is my personal website. And that personal website gives the destination to the audience, but also gives a starting point to Google, because then Google will come to the website. Look at what I’m saying. It will understand that I’m focusing on entrepreneurship, but I also do music and cartoons and it will then go around the web and verify that that’s where I am indeed focusing. That’s indeed where I’m standing making my efforts and being clear and consistent with that same message.
[00:07:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s how you do it.
The Key in Building and Maintaining Your Personal Brand is Consistency
[00:07:52] Traci Bermingham: I love it. And one of the, one of the words that I caught on for you, which is my happy place, is my nerdy happy place, is the consistency, the systematic, right? Like it’s, this isn’t just if I’m hearing you correctly, this isn’t just a one and done. You do it and then you’re set.
[00:08:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): 100%. So what we do at Kalicube with our clients is they come on board. The first thing we do is audit their digital footprint. We then make sure the message is clear. The message that they’re communicating is clear, and we instruct them, or give them a task list to go around and correct absolutely everything online to be consistent with the message they have told us they want to communicate. We then give them a list of resources that they need to focus on in order to be clearly in that space, and the list of resources where they can stop focusing on. We then make sure that on their website, they’re talking more about the current topic than the old topic they’re updating regularly, and that they’re consistently pointing to all the corroborative sources that demonstrate that they are indeed walking the walk of whatever it is they’re doing today. In my case, entrepreneurship.
Seeing Results from a Strategic Personal Brand Audit
[00:09:05] Traci Bermingham: And what kind of results could they see from doing? Like, let’s say that they, you’ve done your audit. They’ve done consistently what you’ve asked them to do over time. What kind of results can they expect from that?
[00:09:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The first result is nothing to do with Google. The first result is that they will find the audience talking to them, will be talking to them about the topic they actually want. And we had a really interesting experience with a guy called Jonathan Cronstedt, who’s the President of Kajabi. He was recognized as the person who brought Kajabi to become a $5 billion valued company. And everybody talked to him about Kajabi. He asked us to reposition him and we repositioned him as a business advisor and investor. And he said, now, people all start the conversation with business and investment, and they follow up with Kajabi rather than the other way around. So that’s the first huge benefit, is that he’s now having the right conversations with the right people and the right start to that conversation, the right focus in that conversation.
[00:10:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google is the secondary result, which is when you search Jonathan Cronstedt’s name, or JCron, we got Google to recognize his synonym, his pseudonym. Sorry. You will see investor, and it will say, Jonathan Cronstedt is a business leader, investor, and is the President of Kajabi. So it becomes the third thing. So the KPI we’ll be using is the visual KPI of what Google represents him as when you search his name or what ChatGPT says about him, which is just as important, especially for the future. ChatGPT says exactly what Google says. Jonathan Cronstedt is an investor, business advisor and the President of Kajabi. Once again, it’s third in the list.
[00:10:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But for me, the huge win that he’s got is he’s not having to change the course of a conversation when it starts with a person. The person naturally starts with the right topic for him.
[00:11:10] Traci Bermingham: So interesting. And I love that, that it’s not, I was just thinking kind of straightforward entrepreneur, but it’s almost like even if your pendulum is still going like this and you need to switch, you’re the person that they would come to so that they could actually switch and get the pendulum going center.
[00:11:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And maybe the best sales pitch I can give anybody is if you search for my name ten years ago, it said at the top on Google. Jason Barnard is cartoon blue dog because that was my job before and now it says Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur. If I can change Google’s perception of me and my audience’s perception of me from cartoon blue dog to entrepreneur, I can change any perception for anybody because that’s a huge pendulum swing that I’ve pulled off. And the other thing, of course, is nobody opens conversations with me anymore about the blue dog. Literally nobody. Everybody starts with entrepreneur, Digital Marketing, SEO, blue dog, music, in that order.
[00:12:27] Traci Bermingham: That’s powerful.
[00:12:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s cool, isn’t it?
How Data-Driven Systems Help Achieve Success and Keep Things Manageable
[00:12:30] Traci Bermingham: Yeah, very cool. Okay, so tell me, so I’m going to geek out on you. So tell me, I mean you’ve worked with some big names, right? And you’re doing big things. How do you do that? Like how do you do that on the back end of the business and actually running the business and keeping your sanity?
[00:12:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, keeping my sanity is the big one, isn’t it? I spent a long, long, long time learning to do this and I built a machine that automates the process. So when I say stand over there, speak to these people, this is the message to communicate. This is where you need to focus, this is where you need to correct and update the information about you. I’m not guessing, I’m using 2 billion data points from the database I built. I started building a team three and a half years ago and I think I did the right things in the right order with more or less the right timing, is that I had to build the process, build the machine, because without that I couldnt pass on the knowledge I was accumulating to other people. So once I built Kalicube Pro, which is the proprietary internal software we use with its 2 billion data points, I could then build a team and tell them this is how it works. This is the information the machine spits out.
[00:14:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): When you see this information, do that. When you see this information, do the other and they can then communicate that to the client. So at the end of the day, data-driven decision making in personal and corporate brand management online comes down to the fact that I walked the walk, learnt it by trial and error, mistakes, figured out the system to build the database. That allows me then to pass the baton. We call it at Kalicube, passing the virtual baton to somebody else. And I now have a team that do it.
Leveraging Expert Systems for Personal Brand Growth
[00:14:36] Traci Bermingham: And isn’t that, and that’s one of the things that I think is so cool from a me standpoint of systems in that you took years to learn, to build, to perfect, to optimize, right? Like this system. And I can just come and plug in and get all of that experience and all of that knowledge without the years of learning and headaches and trial and error and all of those things. And it’ll so me being able to plug in, but then you being able to plug in all of us into that same system and we all get that benefit from doing that.
[00:15:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that’s kind of the key with any specialist such as a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer is you’re not paying for the person’s time as such. You’re paying for their experience and everything they’ve learned and the fact that they’re going to save you the headaches, they’re going to save you the time, they’re going to move you forwards faster and they’re going to get you there. In the sense that with a lawyer, for example, you would say, well, I’m paying for the experience. And not just the experience, but also the human intelligent guesswork to know what’s going to work and what isn’t going to work in a given situation. And here, we have the advantage that we’re not using human intelligent guesswork, we’re using data. And the data is saying this is what you need to do because we know from the 2 billion data points this is where you need to aim. We take it a step further, which is we take your digital footprint and we figure out where you’re at today and what you need to do to change and to refocus both your audience and Google. Then we ask you to give us a list of the 20 people you would like to emulate, the people you want to be like or to be perceived like.
[00:16:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We then put them in the system, we analyze their digital footprint and we find basically a venn diagram of commonalities where they all cross over. We say, these are the super, super sweet spots. This is exactly where you need to hit to become the best representative of that particular cohort, that particular peer group. And it’s data driven, no guesswork, and it works for anybody.
[00:16:56] Traci Bermingham: So cool.
[00:16:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I like it. After ten years, I’m just going, woo. Isn’t this wonderful?
Mastering Simplicity in Streamlined Processes
[00:17:02] Traci Bermingham: Yeah, no kidding. It’s so cool when it all comes together, right? So, and it’s just so, you’ve created a very… from very complex, what it sounds like, right? From very, a complex task to do and you’ve simplified it. Yes, right? Simplified for me.
[00:17:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. No, 100%. But as a super processed person that you are, isn’t that the secret of a process, is to take something hugely complicated, take away all the fluff, boil it all down and say, do that, do that, do that, do that, and you’ll come out the other side looking rosy and feeling great.
[00:17:49] Traci Bermingham: Yes. I geek out. I think this stuff is so cool.
[00:17:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I love that idea of simplicity. Simplicity is super hard to do. It takes time and it’s complicated to get to that simplicity. And when I can say to somebody here, the ten things you need to do today to change your audience’s perception of you and Google’s perception of you and Google’s representation of you and ChatGPT’s representation of you and give you control over their representation of you today and into the future. Do these ten things and you’ve got a solid foundation. It seems like ten isn’t very many, but it’s ten out of 100,000 things you could potentially do. I’m telling you, the right ten things to do today that are going to make the difference.
How Tracking Key Metrics Can Streamline Your Business
[00:18:36] Traci Bermingham: Yes. It’s the levers, right? Like, it’s the levers that you pull. Like, I can basically run my business now, right? Because I boiled it all down, I can run my business with like five, like, I literally check five levers every day and if one of them is off, I know who to go to, where to go, what to tweak based off of just those five levers. And so as long as I know I’m on track for what I need to do, because I’ve done that. But it’s taken up a minute to boil it down to those five, to figure out what. What metrics, what data points, what I see, right. Like what that means and that. But that’s just, it’s so simple.
[00:19:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It is. And then you have this terrible, terrible, terrible moment in life where you say, well, I wake up in the morning. Within an hour, I’ve checked my five levers, I’ve recalibrated everything. What do I do now? Do I sit around in the sun drinking a coffee, watching the world go by? Do I work more? Do I give more time to my family? You’ve got that amazing choice because, you know, the five things you did that morning or the five levers you checked in the morning mean that it’s good until at least tomorrow.
[00:19:54] Traci Bermingham: Yes, there are the things that matter. Yes, yes.
[00:19:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And my only concern now is that I’ve got, let’s say, the ten levers. Am I going to get bored?
[00:20:05] Traci Bermingham: You think you will?
[00:20:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Not so far. Actually what I found is if I was on my own, I would, but because I’ve got a team of 22 people working with me, I don’t. Because part of the whole game for me now is how do I pass as much of this onto them as possible so they can then go on and do more? How can we expand the team, serve more people, help more people with their self determination in a super frightening AI digital world? How can I control how these machines perceive me? How can I control how they then represent me? That’s scary. I want to control because I want self determination. I don’t want to leave it to luck. I don’t want this to run away from me. What’s going to happen with AI is the machines are going to understand what they understand and they’re just going to go off and do their own thing. At that point, controlling it is going to be increasingly difficult.
[00:21:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you’ve grasped, excuse me, control today, your chances of retaining control in the future are significantly higher.
How to Connect with Jason Barnard and Engage with the Brand SERP Expert
[00:21:08] Traci Bermingham: Yeah, I hear you. So, Jason, if people want to work with you or want to learn more, where would they go?
[00:21:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, you can search my name on Google, Jason Barnard. J-A-S-O-N B-A-R-N-A-R-D. And it gives you the choice of how you want to engage with me on my personal website, for my personal life. kalicube.com, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E .com for the company. LinkedIn, if you want to hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter, my articles on Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Forbes.com, it’s your choice. The other thing you can do is ask ChatGPT, who is Jason Barnard? And it will tell you everything you need to know.
[00:21:46] Traci Bermingham: Yeah, no kidding. So I will put the show notes in here, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to have trouble finding you.
[00:21:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No. Oh, they just look for the red shirt.
[00:21:56] Traci Bermingham: There you go. Very good. Thank you, Jason, so much for being here. This has been absolutely wonderful.
[00:22:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you. That was absolutely brilliant, Traci.
[00:22:04] Traci Bermingham: Yes, thank you. All right, everyone, have a great day and we will see you next time.
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