How Your Brand Can Win the New AI Search Game, with Jason Barnard
Times of transition are times of opportunity and as search marketing and SEO scramble to adapt to generative AI powered search results and conversational search, small brand have more opportunity to thrive than they perhaps realise.
This week on the podcast, I’m speaking with Jason Barnard, the ‘Brand SERP ( search engine rank positioning ) Guy’ about how you brand shows up in search is about so much more than Google rankings and that in the brave new world of GEO ( Generative Search Optimisation ) personal brands have a lot to get excited about.
About Jason
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) is an entrepreneur and CEO of Kalicube. Jason specialises in Online Brand Management and his superhero skill is his ability to influence and reshape Google’s focus on an individual or a company.
This isn’t just optimization; it’s a strategic manipulation of digital perceptions. He’s been working on Google since the year it was incorporated, and he has been successfully manipulating Google from day one. Literally. How many people do you personally know who can say that!
Jason’s Website : https://solutions.kalicube.com/the-kalicube-process-has-solved-digital-marketing
Narrator [00:00:03]: Welcome to Amplify – The Personal Brand Business Show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Jason Barnard.
Jason Barnard [00:00:12]: SEO is simply packaging the branding and the marketing you’re already doing for your audience. You’re packaging that for Google and other machines. So you should be doing a great brand or building a great brand and you should be creating the marketing materials that go with that brand that speak to your audience where they are hanging out online. With the right solution to the right problem at the right time for the right people in the right places and then packaging it so these machines understand that you’re this incredibly great solution.
Bob Gentle [00:00:43]: Hi there and welcome back to The Personal Brand Business Show. My name’s Bob Gentle and every week, I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise. Intentionally growing a unique personal brand and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you’re new to the show, then while you still have your device in your hand, take a second to subscribe. That way you won’t miss a single thing. So it’s fair to say that most people might not know how to do it, but they think they have a good handle on what search engine optimization is. Ranking your website better on Google, right? Fair enough. Everybody knows this.
Bob Gentle [00:01:22]: As Google and other search engines are shifting things up with things like AI and traditional search exposure becoming much more limited, there are other plays brands can make and that, and no doubt some other stuff is what we’re speaking about today with Jason M. Barnard. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Barnard [00:01:44]: Thank you, Bob. Lovely to be here.
Bob Gentle [00:01:47]: So Jason, I’ve been looking over your shoulder at your work over the last year, year and a half or so because somebody we both know in common, Scott Turman, recommended that I speak to you and I’ve been aware of what you do and it’s super nerdy. I love it. It’s something that until Scott had mentioned it to me, I’d never even heard of it. And for somebody who’s worked 20 years in Digital Marketing, that’s frankly astonishing and it’s really quite powerful. So for the listener who’s meeting you for the first time, can you maybe just start by telling us about who you are, where you are and what it is you actually do?
Jason Barnard [00:02:29]: Right. Well, I love that introduction because as you say, what I’m doing is so blindingly obvious once you’ve thought of it, it’s astonishing that nobody else has been doing it these last 25 years. I started in the Internet in 1998, so I was there when Google started its journey and I’ve grown up with Google, but Google obviously doesn’t know that and for many years worked in Digital Marketing. I made some cartoons, a website for children and it was hugely successful. And then I switched careers to become a digital marketer rather than a cartoon maker. And that was in 2012. And I realized that when people search my name, Jason Barnard on Google, it said Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. And as a digital marketer, that doesn’t make sense.
Jason Barnard [00:03:15]: I can’t get clients if when you search my name and you research me, Google is misrepresenting me in that it is representing what I used to do and not what I do today. So I needed to pivot my brand in Google’s mind. So I set out to manage what I call the Brand SERP. SERP search engine results page for my personal name so that it now says Jason Barnard, entrepreneur. And it shows that I was a blue dog. But that’s a minor detail. So if you search my name, Jason Barnard J-A-S-O-N B-A-R-N-A-R-D, you’ll see that my, what we call Google business card, represents me the way I want. And that’s my specialist topic. How to get Google and other engines such as Apple, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity to represent me the way I want. My brand isn’t what Google says it is, my brand is what I say it is.
Jason Barnard [00:04:10]: And I force Google to say the same thing.
Bob Gentle [00:04:13]: I think what’s interesting, and everyone will be familiar with what a Google search result page normally looks like. So if you search best cheese to go with beef, that’s the most random thing I could think of. You’ll get a page full of results. But if you search some notable brand names in Google, things look very different. It’s more like somebody had laid out a deck of cards on the page and they claim almost the entire search result. It’s a very different look. For somebody who’s maybe never explored this before, what are the key benefits of a Knowledge Panel? So for the listener, I’ve been aware of Knowledge Panels for a little while, and Scott, who’s a friend we have in common, showed me how to trigger mine to an extent. And if you look at mine, it’s higgledy piggledy.
Bob Gentle [00:05:07]: It’s a bit of a mess, but if you look at some, they’re very well crafted. How do we go from a having no Knowledge Panel, I guess as a personal brand, and I guess there’s a core question here, can anybody do this? And if they can’t, what does it take to achieve it? And then once you have achieved it, how do you get it from looking like a bit of a spilled garbage can, as mine does, to something that looks really polished?
Jason Barnard [00:05:38]: Right. Well, there are multiple questions within that question. Number one is.
Bob Gentle [00:05:42]: I know, I’m sorry.
Jason Barnard [00:05:43]: It’s okay. Well, it’s really nice because I can explain step by step. Number one, you’ve used the term Knowledge Panel, but I use the term Brand SERP. So the Brand SERP is the entire search result for your name or your corporation name or your personal name. The Knowledge Panel is the thing on the right-hand side. It’s an information box on the right-hand side when you search on desktop, that gives the facts about the person or the corporation when you search their name. So the Knowledge Panel is Google’s understanding of the facts about the person or the corporation. And if you search for Bob Geldof, you will get a Knowledge Panel.
Jason Barnard [00:06:19]: On the right hand side, it will explain who he is. It will give a description. It will show social media profiles, and it will show other people that Google thinks are interesting for somebody who’s interested in Bob Geldof. On the left-hand side, you have Google’s recommendations. What is the user, the audience of the person or the corporation, which are the results that are going to interest them? It’s things like social media profiles, it’s their own website, it’s their corporation website. If you’re a business leader like myself, it’s your articles. It’s potentially Crunchbase, Forbes magazine, all of these things that my audience might want to use to engage with me. So on the right-hand side, you have Google’s understanding of the facts, knowledge. And the idea is that it summarizes who I am, what I do and who I serve. On the left-hand side, how do you want to engage with Jason Barnard or Bob Geldof? Google’s recommendations are the places that you would want to engage with them. And there’s a third aspect which is now coming into play, which Google are launching this month, which is AI overviews. And it’s the equivalent of ChatGPT but on Google search. And that goes right at the top and that is Google’s assessment, the algorithmic judgment about you as a person for a personal brand or the corporation for a corporate brand. Its assessment of what it thinks, the culmination or the combination of the knowledge it has and the recommendations it’s found makes sense to the user.
Jason Barnard [00:07:54]: And when it does that, it’s a machine judging you. And that is the key to the future. The key to the present is the Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side and the recommendations on the left-hand side.
Bob Gentle [00:08:06]: So we can see, listening to that description, this is about much more than simply ranking your website on Google.
Jason Barnard [00:08:12]: Yes, much more. And people talk about SEO and say, well, I need to rank my website. That is actually no longer the game. Google have recently completely changed the game. So search engine optimization has fundamentally changed. And for me, I’m terribly excited because it’s come into what I’ve always wanted to do, or I’ve always tried to do, is SEO is simply packaging the branding and the marketing you’re already doing for your audience. You’re packaging that for Google and other machines. So you should be doing a great brand or building a great brand, and you should be creating the marketing materials that go with that brand, that speak to your audience, where they are hanging out online. With the right solution to the right problem at the right time for the right people in the right places, and then packaging it so these machines understand that you’re this incredibly great solution to the subset of their users who are your audience.
Jason Barnard [00:09:07]: If you can do that, then you’re going to win the long-term game.
Bob Gentle [00:09:12]: See, this is really interesting and I think this is why people want to pay attention at this point. So I’m going to clarify, and Jason, tell me if I’m wrong. But for small business owners, for solopreneurs, for micro businesses, a lot of the time we have to compete, or in the past, we’ve had to compete with corporations with very deep pockets for creating massive content farms and hiring big SEO companies. What this actually is facilitating now is an authentic or potentially authentic representation of our value to our people. If we’re actually creating content, if we’re actually delivering value, if we’re actually having conversations, then all of these different disparate components that we have, if we signpost them effectively, they can start to work for us and the people who need us can potentially find us much more effectively. Is that a fair explanation?
Jason Barnard [00:10:11]: Yes, it is. And you were saying earlier on that you’ve been looking over my shoulder for the last year. Google and these other engines such as Microsoft Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT are looking over your shoulder every second of every day, and they’re judging you every second of every day by what they find online about you. You need to control what they find. You need to control what it looks like. You need to control how they find and how they digest that information, because that’s how you control what they believe and think about you. That’s how you control their opinion of you, which is the future. And the future is a conversation between these machines and their users.
Jason Barnard [00:10:52]: So if you look at ChatGPT, the first thing you realize is that it’s answering your question and drawing you into a conversation. If you look at assistive engines such as AI Overview on Google, it’s giving you an answer to your question when you search and then suggesting follow up questions. So it’s guiding you through a conversation. So if we now think about the future as a conversation between machines and humans, you can easily understand that my strategy at Kalicube is going to work because we’re aiming at getting you introduced to the conversation spontaneously by the machine, because the user doesn’t know who you are, but the machine does. And if the machine introduces you to the conversation as a potential solution to that problem, then you’re on the winning side. But if the machine doesn’t understand who you are, what you offer and who you offer it to, it cannot introduce you to the conversation. So the foundation of all of this is what we say at Kalicube, educate the machines about who you are, what you do, who you offer, and then convince them that you’re a credible solution. If you can do that, you’re going to be winning.
Jason Barnard [00:12:05]: And you were mentioning big brands, and there’s a lot of talk in the SEO community now that the updates of September 2023, which was ironically called the Helpful Content Update. And the update in Google in March has killed small brands and the big brands are now dominating. And in fact, what they’re missing is that small niche brands who are well understood by Google and the other machines are actually winning. And it’s specifically smaller brands that are incredibly niche, because Google understands that a small brand that’s niche will serve its users better than a big brand that isn’t niche. So this is a good time as a small brand to niche down.
Bob Gentle [00:12:51]: So from what you’re describing there, we have to find ways to clarify our intent, our mission and our disparate ecosystem for the machines. Because most of us haven’t intentionally done this. We’ve got lots of different bits all over the place. We probably got social media profiles, probably a website, probably some webinar landing pages and lots of different platforms. Our ecosystem is spread out across the digital estate. How can we signpost effectively for AI in order that they can get a good appraisal of who we are and what we’re about?
Jason Barnard [00:13:36]: Yeah, the word signpost is brilliant. We use that when we’re explaining what we’re doing and you’ve immediately honed in on the key. The first thing you need to do is identify what we call the entity home. The entity home is the webpage that you control that describes who you are, what you do, who your audience is, and why you’re credible. Google is actively looking for a webpage that you control, where you explain your version of reality. If you can identify that for yourself, it should be your own website. As a personal brand, you should buy a domain and you should set up a website. Even a two-page website is fine because you need to explain to Google who you are.
Jason Barnard [00:14:18]: Then what you need to do is make sure all the corroborative sources that you just mentioned, Bob, webinars, profiles, social media profiles, sites you’ve contributed to, they all say the same thing that that corroborative information is clear and consistent across the entire digital footprint that you have. Then what you need to do is add a link into your website, your entity home, out to these sources that corroborate what you’re saying, and if possible, a link back from these corroborative sources to your entity home to the website, the personal website. That gives Google what we call the infinite loop of self corroboration. Google comes to your website, it sees one thing, it goes out to a corroborative source, a social media profile, forbes.com, your YouTube channel, an article about you, a webinar you’ve done sees the same explanation and a link back. It comes back, goes to the next one, comes back, goes to the next one, and it keeps seeing the same thing over and over again. Google and these other machines are children. And it’s very simplistically learning by pure repetition. And that is the key today.
Bob Gentle [00:15:29]: So a lot of people, myself included, have a website that’s not a personal name .com. Mine is amplifyme.agency, but I do have a bobgentle.com. But I noticed in my Knowledge Panel off to the right of the Brand SERP, it’s listing the amplifyme.agency. How have you organized yours? So there’s your Jason M. Barnard, but then you have Kalicube. How do you organize your own Brand SERP? Because clearly that’s going to be the model.
Jason Barnard [00:16:05]: Yeah. The first thing to do is existentially distinguish yourself from your company. It’s not the same thing. So your company has a website and you have a website. It’s two different things. And if you don’t do that, you’re immediately struggling. Some people have given their company the same name as themselves. That’s hugely confusing for everybody, for your audience and for Google and for all the other machines.
Jason Barnard [00:16:28]: Ideally you wouldn’t do that, but even if you have, for example, Jono Alderson, who’s in the SEO community, has a company called Jono Alderson Limited. He’s a very smart SEO, so he can distinguish between Jono Alderson Limited and Jono Alderson for Google. So Google understands the difference, but that’s because he’s super smart. Anybody who doesn’t know how Google’s algorithms function is always going to struggle and Google is going to get them confused. This is very illustrative. One mistake we see our clients making, and they come to us when they make this mistake, is give their personal name to their Google business profile, thinking that it will help. But in fact it confuses because a Google business profile is a place on Google Maps. And so Google then thinks, well, actually this name, Jason Barnard, is a place somewhere.
Jason Barnard [00:17:17]: It’s a head office for a company. So it gets confused. You need to distinguish and be very, very clear in your own mind which references online are about you, which are about your company, and which, in this case, is about your head office. If you can’t be clear and consistent about that, the machines will never understand. It’s up to you to take control. You’re the adult in the room. Be clear and consistent about you. The distinction, sorry, between you, your company and any other entities, things around you.
Jason Barnard [00:17:47]: And you can educate the machines by repetition. But we find when clients come to us, the first conversation we have is about that clarity and distinction between the person, the company, different entities within a company. And it’s a huge conversation that is surprisingly difficult and surprisingly long and painful.
Bob Gentle [00:18:09]: Well, I can imagine because a lot of people, they like the idea of the Brand SERP, but they don’t necessarily want the personal visibility. I think that a lot of CEO’s, for example, I’m guessing when people come to you for Brand SERP, the personal brand is a lot of the time going to be the easiest route. Is that fair to say?
Jason Barnard [00:18:35]: Well, actually, personal brands, people’s names are naturally very ambiguous. They’re actually quite difficult to do.
Bob Gentle [00:18:42]: Right.
Jason Barnard [00:18:43]: You have hundreds of thousands, millions of people called Steve Smith. If you’re called Steve Smith, you have a problem of ambiguity.
Bob Gentle [00:18:52]: Yes.
Jason Barnard [00:18:52]: If you’re called Bob Gentle, you have a relatively small problem of ambiguity, but then you have a problem of domination. We were talking about that earlier on. There was a very famous Bob Gentle from many years ago, who used to dominate. And in order for you to become the person that appears when somebody Googles your name, you need to become more relevant, more probably important in Google’s mind, and that’s a tough call as well. So personal brands are actually quite difficult to do because of ambiguity and because of competition, which is surprising. The competition for a personal name is huge and for corporations… Sorry.
Bob Gentle [00:19:33]: I was going to say, funny story for the listeners. The Bob Gentle that I was competing with in Google for ranking is the guy who painted all the backgrounds for Scooby Doo. If it wasn’t for that pesky Bob Gentle, I would have had the top ranking for Bob Gentle many years ago. Sorry, I interrupted you.
Jason Barnard [00:19:51]: No, no, no, it’s absolutely fine. So it does seem from the outside that personal brands are going to be the easiest and actually in many respects, they’re the trickiest. But that’s where our specialization comes in. That’s the experience we have. We know what to do in any given circumstance, and it depends on the popularity of your name, where you’re living, what you do, how big your digital footprint is, how messy it is, and what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to achieve peer group authority, influence? Or are you trying to build notability and famousness? Or are you trying to keep things quiet and just be in a position where you control how these machines understand you? And those are the three phases that we have at Kalicube. Phase one is let’s get these machines to understand you. If you want them to become peer group famous or peer group influential, we can build your credibility on top of that.
Jason Barnard [00:20:44]: That’s phase two, and you can stop there. If you want to be famous to your audience, then we can do phase three, which is visibility. Let’s get you visible across the entire digital ecosystem. And all of the three phases of the Kalicube Process, which is what we call our approach, each of the phases is aimed primarily at the audience, not the machines. Because if you can walk the walk across the entire digital ecosystem, the machines are looking over your shoulder constantly, as we said earlier on, and they simply replicate what they’re seeing. So if you’re engaging the right audience in the right places at the right time with the right offer, the machines, Google, Bing, ChatGPT, see this and replicate what they’re seeing. That’s where you win the game. So we focus on audience first and we package it for the machine so they can understand and they see.
Jason Barnard [00:21:38]: And we demonstrate to them that we are walking the walk and that works for people, it works for corporations. It works for podcasts, it works for products. It works for films, it works for music groups and so on and so on. This is universal.
Bob Gentle [00:21:55]: So there’s a danger for the listener that this is all a little bit abstract at the moment. And I don’t think there’s any, there’s only way, there’s no real way around this because it is a particularly nerdy topic, but it’s one that has real world dramatic implications if you can get it right. So what I think. Go ahead.
Jason Barnard [00:22:16]: No, I was just going to say the word nerdy or geeky. I think it sounds it, but actually isn’t. Because if you boil it all down when I say you need to be standing where your audience is looking, providing them with proof of your credibility and providing with the content that helps them understand that you can solve their problem, then it becomes an audience-focused digital strategy. So if my audience is hanging out on YouTube, I need to hang out on YouTube with the credibility signals. I demonstrate my credibility and the videos that make sense to them. If my audience is hanging out on Forbes, I should be writing Forbes magazine, the information that will help my audience. So it’s not geeky, it’s marketing and branding packaged for the machines.
Jason Barnard [00:22:58]: And if you forget about packaging for the machines and you think, well, I just want to do my digital strategy and I want to stand where my audience is looking with the right convincing credibility signals and the right offers, the right content, then I can do that and I can trust the machines to get it right. Fact is, right now they won’t get it right, but over time they will, they’ll get smarter. So if you forget the machines and you just walk the walk across your entire digital ecosystem in the correct places, with the right offer for the right people, at the right time, in the right places, then you’re already winning the game and the machines are a bonus.
Bob Gentle [00:23:32]: So getting very practical, because I think it’s probably for the listener, the easiest way to follow or to maybe visualize what we are talking about here is if I were your client, you probably had a look around my world very superficially. What practical steps does that actually include?
Jason Barnard [00:23:55]: Well, I mean for you, I’ll tell you what I would do, when I see your Knowledge Panel and your Brand SERP, what I see is, as you said, amplifyme.agency is cited. Upcoach.com. who, I don’t know who they are, but they’re cited too. Your Instagram profile is at the top. Your LinkedIn is second. Amplifyme.agency is third. Upcoach is fourth.
Jason Barnard [00:24:19]: YouTube is fifth. Bob Gentle, your personal website is sixth. That’s wrong. Your website should be top, and the website cited in the about section of your Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side should be your own website and your own description from your own website. So my first focus would be to look at your website and package what you have for the machine so it understands that is the focal point. This is where it will get information about you, from you that it can then verify across the Internet. So we would start with working on your site, which is traditional SEO. Traditional search engine optimization focuses on the website.
Jason Barnard [00:25:01]: So we would focus on that to start with and then start to look at YouTube, Upcoach, amplifyme.agency, LinkedIn and Instagram, and start to optimize those both for your audience and for Google and the other machines.
Bob Gentle [00:25:17]: So at the moment, I am directing from all social media, from all content everywhere to amplifyme.agency. Similarly, the podcast lives there, the blog lives there, because that’s how it organically evolved. Is what you’re suggesting that the Bob Gentle might start to become a home for some of that stuff?
Jason Barnard [00:25:42]: Yes, yes and no. Not necessarily. It depends on how you break down your personal brand versus your corporation, your corporate brand. So amplifyme is a corporation. So anything that naturally drives business, I would focus on the business website and then use the about Bob Gentle website to amplify what you want Google to understand about yourself. So your website represents you and you work for your business, and that’s the logic you need to follow.
Bob Gentle [00:26:17]: So we’re maybe looking at the bobgentle.com as the left hand, the amplifyme.agency as the right hand, and that we blend content across the two of them rather than having one as the Bob Gentle is at the moment simply a placeholder.
Jason Barnard [00:26:35]: Yeah, well, I mean, you could, if you look at the personal website and you think, this needs to describe who I am, what I do and who I serve, and then point Google to the resources that help it understand and believe that everybody agrees with me, then you call it a placeholder. I would call it the hub. And your agency website is simply one of the resources that you’re telling Google to go and look at for you as a person, and that will help you to distinguish between the corporation and the person. The corporation will have a page about you, but that’s not the focal point for Google or indeed your audience who want to know about you personally. So let’s say you’re a huge fan of skiing. On your personal website, you can talk about skiing. On your professional website, you wouldn’t.
Bob Gentle [00:27:23]: Yes.
Jason Barnard [00:27:24]: So if your podcast is driving business, and it’s principally business focused, keep the podcast on your corporation website. If your podcast is about life, skiing, how you feel about the world every morning you wake up, keep it on your personal website. And that helps you also distinguish in your own mind when you’re being you and when you’re being the corporate you.
Bob Gentle [00:27:50]: So there is actually a lot to think about there.
Jason Barnard [00:27:54]: Yep.
Bob Gentle [00:27:55]: One of the things that you mentioned was consistency across different platforms. And my interpretation of this is consistency of how we refer to ourselves in terms of social bios. For example, the profile pictures, possibly the image files. If they’re consistent across all platforms, Google knows. Okay, this is the same picture. What else can we do to make life a little bit easier for Google so they understand what our estate looks like?
Jason Barnard [00:28:27]: Well, the absolute key is the first semantic triple. Now that sounds geeky, but it’s actually just subject verb object. Looking at your Brand SERP, I’ve just searched on Google for your name and I can see these different descriptions. Bob Gentle is the host of The Personal Brand Business Show Podcast. That’s the semantic triple. Bob Gentle is the subject, is the host of is the verb, and The Personal Brand Business Show Podcast is the object. So we have two entities, two things, Bob Gentle and the podcast. And the relationship is the host of is the verb.
Jason Barnard [00:29:03]: So subject, verb, object. I hope that’s clear. It’s a little bit confusing. I do apologize. But then if I look to the next one, you’ve said, the globally top-ranked podcast. Now that’s the… Sorry. Bob Gentle is the host of the globally top-ranked podcast.
Jason Barnard [00:29:20]: The object of that is globally top-ranked podcast. So all of a sudden, we’re looking at something different, and then we have… Where was it? Bob Gentle is a UK-based speaker, consultant, coach and creator. So right now, we’ve had three different messages from three different websites that you control for Google. Are you the host of a specific podcast? Are you the host of a famous podcast which hasn’t been named, or are you a speaker and consultant? You’re not consistent. Google will never understand.
Bob Gentle [00:29:53]: That’s really obvious when you say it.
Jason Barnard [00:29:57]: Yes. And that doesn’t mean to say you have to say exactly the same thing everywhere, but it does mean to say you have to be consistent with that semantic triple verb, subject object. Bob Gentle is a speaker, or Bob Gentle is a consultant, or Bob Gentle is the host of The Personal Brand Business Show Podcast. Now, the other thing in terms of your audience is which is most important to your business. If you’re trying to drive business, I would argue coach or consultant. The fact that you’re a speaker isn’t your primary business, so I would push that further back. Your podcast is just a vehicle for your business. So that isn’t the primary thing about you, in my opinion.
Jason Barnard [00:30:39]: It’s up to you, of course. But I would suggest you’re primarily a consultant to coach and creator, or a consultant and coach, and that secondarily, you’re a speaker and a podcast host.
Bob Gentle [00:30:51]: There’s enough here to give a gentleman an existential crisis.
Jason Barnard [00:30:54]: It is, yeah. This is the first conversation we have with all our clients, and it’s existential. It freaks people out. But I’m just asking you to be clear. That’s all I’m doing.
Bob Gentle [00:31:03]: It’s very much as you described earlier. Just imagine that you had a group of five year olds and you needed to explain to them what you do. If you give each of them a different explanation and they talk to each other, they’re going to be very, very confused.
Jason Barnard [00:31:16]: Yeah. And then you need to think about what the five year old, even if you’ve been clear with the five year old and you said to the whole group exactly the same thing, they will then go and ask their parents, the teachers, the baker, people they trust, grandma. If those people say something different, the child is still going to be confused. So you need to make sure that all of these trusts, these people that the child trusts, say the same thing as you. That’s third-party corroboration. So if grandma says the same thing, if the teacher says the same thing, if the baker down the road says the same thing, then the child truly believes what you’ve said. So there’s one thing which is understanding when you explain it to them, and then that corroboration from third-party trusted sources is what builds confidence in that understanding. And it’s that confidence in the understanding that will make your life super easy, both with your machine.
Jason Barnard [00:32:11]: Sorry. Both with your audience and with these machines.
Bob Gentle [00:32:15]: So what I think would be useful for our listener, because what we’re describing here is potentially a bit of work. So we need to maybe need to explain what’s the payoff. And phase two is credibility. Phase three is visibility. I think the credibility for most people is going to be the payoff, but it’s probably a good idea for you to explain what the effect of this work can be.
Jason Barnard [00:32:39]: Yeah, that’s a really great point. Phase one is understanding and understanding doesn’t have a payoff other than security and self determination with these machines. So you can just say, well, that’s all I want. I don’t need a payoff. Credibility is when these machines present you as an amazing super duper top person. And we had a client called Jonathan Cronstedt who was the president of Kajabi. And we repositioned him from president of Kajabi to investor. And we built his credibility as an investor on the back of what he’d done for Kajabi.
Jason Barnard [00:33:16]: Now what happens is if you search his name, he has this amazing Knowledge Panel. He has a great Brand SERP, great recommendations from Google that describe him as an investor. And he says, I look fancy. He looks incredibly convincing to his audience. When somebody Googles his name to check, to research, they see what we call his Google Business Card that looks so impressive and it’s bottom of funnel, ready to convert. They believe that this guy is the bee’s knees. That’s perfect. And I have a friend called James Dooley who I’ve been giving advice to for years and years and years.
Jason Barnard [00:33:58]: And one day, he said, I’ve just got what you mean about managing my Brand SERP, and I’ve built it over the last year and I’ve made millions of dollars. And he gave me one specific example was that his company and another company were pitching for the same job, building a school playground. The budget was about 700,000 pounds. And it came down to these two last corporations and they researched, the buyer researched both of the CEOs of the companies and chose him because he as a CEO, as the leader looked much more credible. So the payoff can be huge in just one deal. But he says that happens all over his businesses. He’s got, I think, 13 businesses. He as the leader of those businesses can drive revenue for those businesses purely through his personal brand and how Google represents him.
Bob Gentle [00:34:57]: I think this is the potent thing people need to understand. Something for me that I did very simply recently was become quite active with social proof. So I have a few testimonials. The day I did that, sales happened more easily. This is taking things to a whole new level. I think what people, especially in the expert space, all know is people Google us all the time. If people are thinking about working with us, they Google us first. We’re not talking about regular people in the street here.
Bob Gentle [00:35:29]: This is people who generate revenue through their reputation. If that’s you listening, this will make you pretty much unassailable. People will feel foolish choosing somebody else over you. If you get this right, it’s that powerful. And I think that’s. That’s where the payoff really is.
Jason Barnard [00:35:50]: Yeah, 100%. And you mentioned trust content. We can call it trust content. Getting testimonials so that the human audience will trust you and will therefore choose you over the competition. All that we do at Kalicube is tell you which trust content you should be building. And the way we know what trust content you should be building is by using data. We’ve gathered 2 billion data points from Google and from other sources to understand exactly what you need to do. So you build a trust content like testimonials for your audience, and then we help you to package it so that Google will see that, understand it, and represent you using that content that you crafted so carefully for your audience.
Jason Barnard [00:36:36]: So, once again, we’re simply getting Google to replicate what you should already be doing for your audience.
Bob Gentle [00:36:43]: So I know you’ve written a book, The Brand SERP for Business, it’s called. Also on your website, there’s a ton of free content, free downloads. For anybody who wants to go a little bit deeper with this, there will be some people listening who might want to work with you. That’s awesome. Many people probably can’t quite afford that. This doesn’t have to be really, really labor intensive for a lot of people, but anybody who does want to take this into their own hands, you’re not keeping secrets. It’s all there. But if anybody does want to go deeper with you, where can they find you? How can they make that happen?
Jason Barnard [00:37:22]: Well, the first thing I would suggest is visit our website. As you said, it’s all free. We publish everything we know and we’ve got lots of PDF downloads free. You read them, it will tell you exactly what you need to do. Because this solution is universal, because it’s timeless. It worked yesterday, it works today, and it will work in the future. We’re sharing this with everybody because we understand we can’t serve everybody. Not everybody can afford us, and not everybody needs us.
Jason Barnard [00:37:49]: As you said, some people have got a tiny digital footprint and it will take them an afternoon to sort out. Other people have got much bigger digital footprints, much bigger ambition. That’s a huge job. And we’ve built a software that we use internally to figure out exactly where you’re present. We audit the entire digital footprint and prioritize everything that needs to be done. So if you’ve got a thousand references to you, we can tell you which are the most important one is and then work down. That’s super, super valuable because you don’t waste time on things that don’t matter. And then the other kind of person who would want to work with us is somebody who understands that their time is incredibly valuable for their company and that they can have us shoulder the work, the stress, the worry and figure out exactly what needs to be done each and every day to build the understanding, build the credibility and increase the visibility if that’s what you want.
Jason Barnard [00:38:44]: But once again, I really want to come back to the fact that we give it all away for free. And this is 100% my approach and it always has been. If we look back to my previous career as a cartoon blue dog, we were giving the content away for free because I truly, truly wanted to share the cartoons and the education and the fun and the delight of Boowa and Kwala, who were the characters with as many children in the world as possible. I’m somebody who wants to share.
Bob Gentle [00:39:16]: Well, I think your entire business, it’s a wonderful contribution to brand positioning, brand authority, and everybody should be paying a little bit of attention to this. I know what I’m doing this afternoon, I’ll put it that way. Jason, you’ve been very generous with your time. Before I let you go, and I think you will be back for the listener, we’re going to go deeper on this at some time, if that’s all right with you, Jason,
Jason Barnard [00:39:40]: I would absolutely love to. I could talk about this all week.
Bob Gentle [00:39:45]: But yes, I need to ask you the one question I try and remember and ask everybody because it’s often people’s regrets that teach us the most. What’s the one thing you do now that you wish you’d started five years ago?
Jason Barnard [00:39:59]: Well, it’s kind of two things. The first is that I wish I had understood that the most value we can bring with this process is when we’re helping people with their personal brand because as I said earlier on, it’s seemingly simple but actually quite complex and people get lost very quickly and that’s where we can bring the best support. And when I say support, I’m going to go back to Boowa and Kwala, which is the cartoon we created, and I’ll explain a little bit who Boowa and Kwala are. Boowa was a blue dog. I played the role of the blue dog. Kwala was a yellow koala. My ex-wife played the yellow koala. And Kwala, the role of Kwala was to be the small child who’s frightened of the world, who doesn’t understand the world, and Boowa is the big brother who does understand the world and guides Kwala kindly, generously, supportively through this very scary world, helping her to understand and face a world that is just confusing and difficult and frightening for her.
Jason Barnard [00:41:08]: And I realize now that Kalicube’s value is being Boowa for our clients, Kwala. That we’re here to support and guide and help and help our clients feel safe, feel supported, feel confident, faced with the digital world that’s changing so fast that they feel that we have a grip on it. We’ve got their back, we’re supporting them, and we’re going to help them get through the jungle that the digital world represents, including Google, ChatGPT, Bing, Perplexity.
Bob Gentle [00:41:50]: Especially during this time where they’re just changing so fast.
Jason Barnard [00:41:54]: Yes, and the changes, as I said earlier on, have changed the face of search engine optimization. And luckily for me, our approach is primarily brand, secondarily marketing, and thirdarily, if that’s a word, SEO.
Bob Gentle [00:42:12]: Jason M. Barnard I’ve had great fun today. For the listener at home, thank you for bearing with us. It is possibly slightly more technical than our average show, but this stuff matters. That does bring us to the end of another episode. Thank you at home for listening and if you did enjoy the show then I would gently encourage you to leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to share the show with just one person. If you did enjoy the show, then you will love The Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It’s 100% free as a gift from me.
Bob Gentle [00:42:42]: Everything you need to start, scale or fix your expert business. Just tap the link in the show notes or visit amplifyme.agency/roadmap. Jason, you’ve been awesome. Thank you very much for your time.
Jason Barnard [00:42:54]: Thank you so much, Bob. That was delightful.
