Ep 386: 30 – 40% Growth From AI SEO For E-commerce Brands (The Exact Playbook) with Colin Ma

Every e-commerce store that I work with, they don't have enough of these. If you have like two products, they don't have enough PLPs to like be able to capture more traffic. They just don't know how to properly categorize it and map these products to more category pages, which is in turn more pages that Google can optimize.

Right. You have this compounding effect of like you have all these pages and all this data that you can show Google, you can show these LLMs, and they start to rank in indexes.

Hey, I'm Jaryd Krauss, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Colin Maher. He's been on the podcast before. He's a digital entrepreneur and an SEO operator with over 10 years of experience building, buying, and selling online businesses. He's acquired, grown, and exited 15 media and affiliate brands, including multiple six-figure deals. And he's known for his data-driven, systems-first approach to SEO.

GEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it. And Colin now manages a portfolio of large digital brands using AI powered workflows. And he's been able to get results to drive thirty to forty percent year on year growth with leaner, more consistent teams than ever before in these brands. And in this pod, we talk about how did he help these brands get the thirty to forty percent growth in their businesses using AI.

But also using some other strategies that can help him rank and build traffic massively. We also talk about what would he do if he was to buy a media business or a content business today. We talk about how he's using AI as leverage in his online business to get scale in other areas. We also talk about how you can use AI to make your life better, but also where it becomes super dangerous in terms of outsourcing AI.

You shouldn't be outsourcing your responsibility. Specifically talking about acquiring businesses. Now, when we are talking about acquiring businesses, I'm sure you're listening to the podcast because you want to do so. If you haven't got my J Dolden's framework, make sure you do get it. It's free.

There's a link in the description. It's made people millions of dollars and it's saved people millions of dollars. Also, lastly, you've been asking for a long, long time and I've been building. Our full stack Digital service is finally here.

So for deals $100,000 and up, we've got different packages and every every package includes a personal MA strategy with myself, which no one is offering in these DD services. So if you're looking to do good due diligence and you want a professional to make sure you don't take a leap that is too risky for you and could be catastrophic, head to the link buying on the business.com forward slash due diligence. All the links will be in the show notes. Let's dive into the pod.

Colin, welcome back to the pod.

Yeah, it's been maybe like I think we said maybe over two years, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I'll link to our last podcast episode in the show notes for everybody as well. Colin, you've been in the space for how long now?

Like ten years, I think.

Yeah.

Jaryd, thanks for having me again. It's been a minute.

Yeah.

Something like that. Yeah. Just over ten years now actually.

Yeah, wow. Was it you was you was you were growing businesses and content sites before you got into the acquisition part, right?

Yeah. And I would say that was like always core, you know, focusing on my own businesses. But, you know, as I sold businesses, I got experience, I got contacts, and then people started to reach out to me for help. But I haven't helped you know, do a deal or helped anyone on that end for probably like three years now.

Yeah, that was I think you have was were winding that down or already finished that last time we chatted actually in terms of acquiring and helping people acquire deals. Yeah. 'Cause you 'cause she did acquire a fair few deals. I think it was with Michael, yeah. Michael Bear is like yeah.

Yeah, yeah, Michael from you know, multiple six figure businesses. You know, I I acquired some on my own and I was helping him grow it at the time before he sold to he kind of just sold and exited the business actually. And yeah, since then haven't really been into the content game as much, really just been focusing more on e commerce businesses.

Did he sell the whole domain magnet or did he you know I don't actually know the details of it. he might have kept a small percentage, but I know for like six months after he did the deal he didn't do anything in the business. So he could have sold the whole thing. I really don't know.

Yeah.

Good for him. That's awesome to hear.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I'd reach out to you and I was like, what's going on? What have you been getting up to? And you mentioned you've been doing some cool things, you know, 30 to 40% year on year growth for some some of your businesses, or or branch, I should say.

Say, what's the and I would like to talk about AI and this and and how you're leveraging and using this. Where do we start? Like walk me through your do we go through your actual AI workflow, what a week looks like operating these brands now versus two years ago and then move into the results? Or how how do you think we should go about.

Yeah, I mean maybe we could start with the results so people know that I know what I'm actually talking about. So yeah, yeah, as you mentioned, you know, seeing up to thirty, forty percent year on year growth for established brands. you know, it's fairly easy to claim for an unestablished brand.

What an established brand? Like are we talking e commerce brands and what sort of

Yeah, e-commerce brands, let's I'm not allowed to say, but they are pretty high profile.

Yeah, industry apparel. Apparel. Mm-hmm. So, you know, really well known brands.

Working with Mahi basically.

Maybe not quite as big as Nike, but these are household named, at least in the US. You know, I think if you're you're thirty and up like me, then you've heard of at least three of these brands. And would be for a slightly older audience. You know, so they're they're big, you know, they're they're doing, you know, all together probably nine figures in revenue or something. Right. and so on the SEO side, this is growing.

Awesome.

Thirty to forty percent year on year growth.

Well, so they're doing nine figures in revenue through all channels. I'm helping them specifically with with SEO. So yeah, not up there. So we're seeing good results on their SEO and helping them with their AEO GEO, whatever you want to call it, right? Yeah.

Basically getting traffic from chat GPT or whatever chat bot you're getting, which is all the craze right now. And it people are saying, Is SEO dead? Is SEO dead? No, it's it's still very important and actually you know how chat GPT ranks is a lot of it is from SEO itself.

And so you need a little bit of both. But a lot of companies that I'm working with, they're looking to they're asking about it, they're looking to grow their presence and don't really have a lot of visibility into how that works.

Wow. Cool. Congrats on your results, man. I agree. There's so much like even me just getting on Chat GPT and Claude and going like what where am I not, you know, showing up in L L Ms. There's a big mismatch and some things are worthy of you doing, some things are not worthy of doing.

And I guess what I wanna like dig into is like what's been valuable and then also what do you think would because you're working with brands here. would it also be valuable, you know, smaller brands? And I'm I'm suggesting so. But what's where did you start? A where did you start with this process? Did you just start making sure the SEO was good and then start moving into the AIGEO, whatever you want to call it?

Yeah. So there's there's really two approaches. I'll speak specifically to so for for established brands, it's a little easier. And not necessarily just because they're an established brand, but they have more sales data. They're ranking organically a little better, not even including brand terms.

And so you have more data to work with. And so with with these brands, it's easy to say to to get customer emails, get specific real questions that are being asked and answering them on the site.

You know, a lot of SEOs like, go look at Google Search Console, go look at SCM rush, and you'll get questions. But that's not how people that's not how a lot of people actually ask questions.

Yeah.

You know, they're kind of like grouped together and categorized to be like broad, right? But people want to know really specific questions. And, you know, it it's not just, what is the material of this cotton shirt, right? Or what is the material of this shirt, right? Nobody nobody's really asking that that they can't see online.

And so getting real customer data is like the most important thing. I would say as far as, you know, for for newer brands, definitely working on SEO before AEO. Like I said, SEO is still the foundation of AEO.

You need to work on that. But the nice thing is, once you do get SEO going, AEO will actually pick up a little faster. So, you know, SEO, probably in most cases for for e commerce, it takes, yeah, about, you know.

three to six months on the quicker end to see results, sometimes longer. With AEO, you can see results in sometimes like two to three months on the quicker end. And so it's great working with brands that have some sort of SEO base because I can start with AEO and some other optimizations before I really start going into SEO that's gonna take a little longer.

And that always helps to build like trust early on in the beginning because, you know, at the end of the day, it's all about sales, right? I don't care about impressions. I don't care about clicks.

I know a lot of like bullshit agencies will kind of like speak to that. But at the end of the day, it's about sales, you know, removing your bottom line. And with AEO, it's more reactive than SEO, typically speaking. And so that's a great win. A couple of wins we're able to get early on while we kind of wait for our SEO plays to kind of kick in.

Yeah, cool. So did these brands have basically SEO? I mean, I'm sure they had a bunch of SEO set up already before you came in and then you came in to did you tweak a bit of SEO, look at it, analyze it, and then move straight into AEO or did how did it work?

Yeah. So for these brands, for the most part, I was actually able to work on both of them pretty much at the same time with slight focus on AEO. They had seen some results in AEO, but definitely working with their customer data was like the biggest win, right? They have like thousands and thousands of emails.

That said, they're not the most responsive team. So when we were blocked, it's like, okay, what can we do on like the SEO side to get this going, right? Because they're an established team. So sometimes you're blocked by like one getting the data to like their engineers that you know they're working in like three-week sprints.

Sometimes they're not getting to your task for like two weeks or two sprints. So that's a month and a half, right? And that is actually one of the frustrating things in dealing with these larger brands. I actually prefer to work with smaller brands because we can move a little faster. And even though there's less data to play with, there's still a lot of things that we can do to move the lever pretty quickly.

Cool. So what did you do? And what do you suggest people do? I mean, obviously SEO is a foundation. Like people can go through so much of my SEO content, just search SEO in, you know, on my and there's so many podcasts around it. And it's and I all the content is evergreen because I always wanted to create evergreen podcasts and content.

So the main SEO obviously, you know, keywords, ranking, making sure you've got good authority, EAT, all that sort of stuff, right? Meta descriptions and fast sight and all that sort of stuff. Top topical authority in your in your space. Then you come to customer data. What can a smaller brand or smaller business do to get customer data? And then how did you use this customer data to help with AEO?

Yeah. I mean, even smaller brands, like even when I deal with brands on the smaller end, just doing like, you know, ten thousand, fifteen thousand dollars a month, they're still gonna have valuable customer data, just not at the same volume.

Right. They're still getting these questions that essentially what you need to do is you just throw it on the site on the relevant pages, answer them, and that will begin that will help LLMs basically associate your site with these products and that you know how to answer them and it better understands what you have so that they can recommend your products more for these very specific questions. And I find that citation rate is probably two to three X better than when you get these questions from like SEM Rush like these other tools.

Right. So you're just using the main language that your customers are speaking and putting it in as an FAQ section. And I'm assuming 'cause I've done a bit of AEO work and looked like, you know, they they definitely want L LMs want some FAQ sections and and some some answers.

So how do you structure that on the site, I guess, once you've got all this customer data? How many questions is too many to answer in one section? How do you split it up? Like what is it what does that look like?

Yeah. So it it's a mix of using it within content. So you know, we'll we'll do blogs as well. And then yeah, FAQs kind of like at the bottom. But also, you know, if you have copy at the bottom of an e-commerce page anyway, you can naturally include some questions there. That way it's not just straight FAQs, hey, you know, here's more about like our leather short.

They're gonna contain like 200 to 300 words. You can put questions there and then having FAQs. But you know, personally it FAQs I try not to I try to aim for like, you know, four to seven. After that, it just gets to be a lot. I like to do an accordion style. Google can read them.

Bots can read them fine now. It's not like, you know, 2012 where Google couldn't really handle JavaScript. And you don't want to make it overwhelming for users. And so typically, yeah, you know, you the the most important questions, you know, you can get them answered and added onto the relevant PLP.

I will say another big win specifically for e commerce is actually having more P P or like category pages, collections pages.

Product landing page.

Landing page. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And these are these are collections pages. If you're on Shopify, these are your category pages. A big win is almost every e-commerce store that I work with, they don't have enough of these. You know, if you have like two phones they they don't have enough PLPs to like be able to capture more traffic.

Like they're they have the products for it. They just don't know how to properly categorize it and map these products to more category pages, which is in turn on their landing pages, like enough more pages that Google can optimize.

Right. And then you can get more FAQs on these additional landing pages. So you have this compounding effect of like you have all these pages and all this data that you can show Google. You can show these LLMs and they start to rank and indexes.

So why do they not have enough PLPs? Like do they have like one main PLP with different variations of the product which you could split out? Like do you have an example? Or what what what is it that they don't like, why don't they have enough PLPs and how can they I guess generate more from their main ones?

So I think why they just don't think about all of like the subcategories that their shirts can like or like their their products can really fit in. So like let's just take like a simple example. Like let's say I I have an apparel company and I'm doing like men's tops, right? This is a pretty bad I'll start with a pretty bad one.

And on men's tops, you have hoodies, you have jackets, you have tank tops, you have sweatshirts. And that's just one PLP where they might not have these further broken down. It's just men's tops. No one's looking for men's tops. No one googles you know what you know, black men's tops to buy.

Right. And so you have to break that out even more. A more realistic example is like, you know, men's, you know, T shirts and then, you know, you have different subcategories of even T shirts, right? And you still have to have that T shirts page, but it should be broken further down to, you know, polos, casual t shirts.

Yeah. May a page for like tank tops specifically sometimes. And so just thinking of all the subcategories that your product can fit in, and or your products can fit in, as long as you have like several products. You know, you don't do this if you have one product in each PLP. That's that's pretty crappy, right?

Yeah.

Like moves like t-shirts or shirts, like you could have men's shirts and then you could have t-shirts, long sleeve, and then you could have different variations of long sleeve t-shirts. Would you go would you subcategorize from that or would you just go just long sleeve shirts and then they click on each product page from that long sleeve shirt section?

Yeah. So, you know, you you can have a long sleeve shirts, but if you can go deeper, you know, flannels, dress shirts, you know, henleys or something. Yeah, long long sleeve button up.

Button up.

Absolutely, got you. So sub so categorizing down from even just a regular so men's men's tops and then men's T shirts and then baggy boxy T shirts to slim fit T shirts. Right.

Exactly. And it's it's rare for people to have like way more categories than they should. I find that is almost never the case. So, you know, if in doubt, create more of those pages. But all there's also a way to do a sanity check where, you know, just Google whatever you're thinking of.

If you're like, huh, should I have one about like long sleeve Google it. Does you Google and you know if if Google is showing long sleeve flannel pages for that keyword, that's a good indication that they want a page specifically or long sleeve flannels. So Google's like the best sanity check.

Yeah.

And then like say for example you got men's jackets and then you've got jackets and then you've got like waterproof jackets, snow jackets, street street jackets, or whatever you're Googling to find out is something that's ranking for in different types of jackets. So it's better to keep categorizing down as much as you can, it sounds like. All right.

Exactly. And you have you have like the higher level categories as well just to kind of have that hierarchy. But yeah, definitely break it down as much as possible. Like that's probably the easiest way to get incremental traffic, especially if you're a brand that has like some amount of SEO. You know, for new brands, you're not gonna get a lot of benefit. But you know, that's a great way to get some quick wins from existing products where you don't have to do a lot of work. I love that.

And then so on those PLPs you add all these different variations of the language through FAQs and answering questions on each of those pages where also if it's on the main product page, these are typically the way I think about it in terms of CRO and sales is making sure you're just knocking off objections, like objection handling right there on the product page by answering questions around shipping times and I don't know, you know.

Return policy.

Exactly.

Yeah. And on the product pages, you know, it you could put some FAQs there as well. You know, especially if there's like some bleeding over from the main PLPs. 'Cause like, you know, like I said, if you're only having five to seven on, you know, your your PLPs, sometimes you have twenty questions that you want and just fit somewhere else.

Yeah.

And stuff like that, yeah.

Cool. Okay. So that's a lot there's a lot of work in that, especially for yourself for a brands of this size. Are there other things that you've done that have contributed to that, you know, that growth in thirty to forty percent you know grow?

Yeah, I would say another big lever that I've actually kind of just unlocked in the last six months is helping people with their their SEM feeds, their Google feeds. And so, you know, I don't help with it, but basically there's there's this feed file that you upload to Google Merchant Center for your your paid sem ads, right?

But what that also feeds into is free listings, which are products that are shown organically when you Google something, but kind of like in those product cards. So if you Google just about like any product, you'll see them come up naturally, kind of like lower a little lower down in the SERPs, you know, you'll see there's no ads, it's just the actual I mean, there will be ads, but these are not ads. And so these are called free.

And that is another great opportunity. And one of the first things that I'll do with a client, especially if they have an established feed, is how can we enrich this feed to get more data, more context?

And Google picks this up really fast. In like, you know, one month, two months, you can see results, which not only help you with the free listings, but can actually also SEM performance as well.

Yeah, Sam. So I was gonna say Sam search engine marketing, right? Just that acronym. Just…

Yeah, so paid paid Google app.

Yeah. And so it's just adding these to paid Google ads with a low ad spend, right?

sorry, what was that?

So you're saying getting these products on Google with ads, but just with a low ad spend is that…

So what you're doing? No, okay. So you you have this like product feed and when you upload it to Google this from Google from Google My Business or is this a different okay, Google Merchant Center. Cool.

Yeah.

So this is Google Merchant Center. Yeah, yeah. This is Google Merchant Center. And so if you you have this one feed and this single feed feeds both into paid ads as well as the free organic listings.

So I'm optimizing it for the free organic listings. For sure. But side effect is better performance in ads. You know, anywhere from like 10 to 20 per on the ad side, even though that's not what I'm doing, still helps me look great, right? And then for the free listings, because you're enriching it with like so much data you're actually gonna see, you know, sometime like recently we went from like literally 200 clicks a month on the free listings to just under 5,000.

And while revenue didn't twenty five X, it did move, you know, from like one thousand a month to just under twelve K a month. And that happened within two months. you know, that's that's a good result.

I'm not gonna say I get that every time. But one thing that's you know, Google is starting to use more metadata to test different product options and titles, even more than it did before. You know, Google, you know, you have a meta title, but Google has been playing around with that for years. They're doing the same.

Stuff like that. Yeah. They do it in U Exactly stuff, yeah.

A hundred percent. They're doing the same with these products now. They're calling it like agentic, I think it's like agentic workflows or something. where basically with all the data that you provide for product, if it's a t-shirt, you know, you know, material, is there like sun protection, long sleeve, all this stuff, they're starting to play around with different titles even there as well. And that's why, even though they're just starting now, you're probably gonna be able to see even more benefit later on when you enrich these feeds.

Yeah, when you get that customer data of like the questions they're asking and you can use that language and this is why it's so important to do a proper brand strategy in and and audit your customer language and what they're looking for and the problems they're looking to solve and how can you put you know, how can you word that problem solving in listings and throughout all of your you know, you're speaking their language.

They it's it's top of mind. This is what they want and you give it to them. It makes it so much being able to put it in the Google Merchant Centre acr and across your site. So you're basically taking that data and using it in so many places as working as a as a copywriter and brand strategist, right?

A hundred percent. And I I don't know why so many people are so resistant to doing it. Maybe 'cause it's a little more work. But like the first thing you do boring work for but like we've got AI, right? You can have like AI crawl so much of your customer data in through chats that you have, emails, download so much customer data from your CRMs and whatnot, and just ask it what is you know, what are the top questions for all of these subcategories and all of these products and it's is that how you're doing it?

Is that how 'cause you said to you said I think it maybe in the email you SEO AI made SEO fun again after ten years. Is that what you mean by it's just like, okay, I could take all this data and or is there other things that you feel it's helped make you know, that's that's a big part of it. Like I can do higher quality work with way less time. And I'm not doing as much like I'm doing I'm not doing any of like the mundane work.

You know, like yes, going through like five hundred emails to learn customer questions and paypoint it kind of sucks. But having yeah, having an L L like generate that from emails and C R Ms and Slack messages and Jira tickets, you know, you can connect all of that in a matter of minutes. You can get a pretty good report.

Within fifteen minutes if there's a lot of data, maybe thirty minutes. And for most brands, you can, you know, it's gonna be faster than that. But that's that is one of my favorite workflows, right? And then now, you know, I come from a developer background, I don't use it as much. I'll even have Claude help me basically like kind of generate the HTML elements to throw on the Shopify pages before.

Whereas before I'd be like, Okay, you need to have your like your dev do this, etc. I mean, yes, you know, for these four brands that I mentioned, it has to go through their dev work. That's just their process. But when I'm working with smaller companies where they don't really have dev support. I can feed them like these HTML widgets and and and get like these related links, these questions up on their site like relatively fast. And that's just one of the cool workflows, you know.

Before also just before you mention the next thing is like I use Claude to create four web pages in a day and create four products and all I did was just go check out all of like everything that everybody's saying about my business and then what they want and go through go through everything, use my brand, my website and create these these products. And it created four products, one big landing page with four products split off it.

And I just tweaked it to make it be the way that I and then just copy and pasted these HTML codes in. And I am not I hate web design and development and all that sort of stuff. I even I understand the SEO part of it as well.

So I made sure it was like to make sure the code is not too heavy, it loads fast, it's got these things in it. Yeah. It's actually I actually found it enjoyable and it's a thing that I used to just despise, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah, me too. Like I, you know, throwing up a new website sucks, but I can have Claude spit out a really great one probably within like twenty, thirty minutes. And and so like there's this fun aspect of what like you're doing so much.

And it's just, you know, I think once you get comfortable with it, everyone should be able to like at least 5x10x like their output for a lot of tasks, right? For all of like the mundane things so that you can focus on higher level strategy. Right. Like I don't want to write copy for 200 PLPs, like you know, that's either something you pass off and that's fairly expensive, or like you do it yourself and you know, there's gonna be a difference in quality.

Now you can have quad do it based off of a skill that you built, do really great internal linking, and then you go in there, you make some tweaks. And instead of something that probably took like two or three weeks, honestly with some agencies, even months, you know, this is done in like two or three days.

Fraction of the cost, the quality is really good. And you know, I think most importantly, you're not beating yourself down for doing for spending, you know, weeks and weeks just doing this copy.

Right. A lot of it can be done with Claude with really great results. If you know what you're doing. I think a lot of people will blindly use Claude and some people will be like, I actually had to fire a client the other day. Recently actually. Just a couple of weeks ago.

They kept bringing every suggestion from Claude to me and saying, why aren't we doing this? And everything I would do, they would question Claude. And it's crazy because one, I'm actually using Claude, only I passed it way more context.

So the fact that you're using Claude to question my Claude, which is way better than your Claude, is ridiculous. And two, like, she doesn't know SEO that well, but she's like just like blindly trusting Claude and like not even proofing like what she's sending me. And it's like, like, why does this page say this? It's been two weeks. And I'm like, I updated this the same day. Your Claude was lazy enough to.

Like was so lazy, it didn't even check the page to see if I updated it. And so like it was like two months of that when like I'm I'm done with this. I don't need this. Yeah, good on But like Claude, yeah.

You you have to question Claude, you have to get familiar with it to build the skills and be rigorous. You know, you build these skills one at a time and you're usually building this for one client at a time, right?

And you're testing it, you're testing it, you're making sure you get good results. But then you also have to say, Hey Claude, like let's let's turn this into a skill, but take a step back because we're not always just gonna do this for in apparel company.

Yeah, absolutely. It's Claude is so damn good when you know exactly what you want. It is so damn bad when you don't know what you want and you're asking Claude, what do I do here? How do I do this? Is this right? Is this wrong? If you don't know what's right or wrong, you're stuffed, right? Which is where your client is, versus you, you know what you want.

Precisely, and you tell it to give it what you want, and a lot of times it doesn't, because you need to prompt it in a different way until and then you can keep asking it until you get exactly what you want. But if you're using on the other s other way of like, hey, is this right or wrong? Or what should this be or shouldn't be? You're you're so f so damn lost. Could you imagine, Colin?

I'm heavily in this space and I just recorded a video on this, and I recommend everybody listening go away and watch this video on YouTube about how AI nearly cost us a hundred and seventy eight grand in a deal, right? That it just fully glossed over. Could you imagine you bought businesses?

Could you imagine how dangerous Claude is in the hands of somebody who's a first time buyer going, Hey, can you just do due diligence on this deal for me and tell me if it's good? Like, could you imagine how dangerous that is and irresponsible?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean the scary thing is people I bet you people are doing it.

People are getting losing so much money. People are getting so wiped out here. It's this is why I need to get this message out more and more is like, man, like you're you are gonna put your life savings on the line with Claude telling you if it's the right thing to do or not, or do due diligence and you've never you don't understand the principles of it.

Yeah. A hundred percent. And I think people don't really understand Claude at its core either. Like, you know, yes, I use Claude for but I also take probably like five to ten hours a week to just learn more about Claude itself. Not in the context of SEO, but how do I optimize like workflows? How do I improve the output?

And so it's really twofold, right? Like educating yourself on the tool and then applying it to your domain expertise. Most people don't have patience for one of them, let alone both of them. And so, you know, because of this, you know, you can, you know, I'm probably doing like what I'm doing now, I could not have done two years ago.

Like I've probably five X, seven X my output. It used to require a team. So I'm able to do way more work just with the help of like a Claude Max subscription. And it's way more enjoyable too. It's higher quality, it's more consistent, and I still double check everything. I think that's you know, I still like to keep like a human in the loop, is what they call it, especially for you know, just for like all deliverables, right?

I've never found consistent output where it's absolutely perfect, but you're still just able to increase your output. And that's why like we could I can do so much more work for clients at, you know, a fraction of the cost that they would do with like, you know, 20K a month agencies. And yeah, honestly, I just love Claude.

Yeah. I mean, I was pretty against all of it, like chat and Claude and I did some looking and some learning and realized like damn, it's pretty it's pretty amazing for what it can do. And then it's it's nice to learn it. Like you said, like gone away and and watched some videos and learnt a little bit about what it can do to help me not to create something new and to just like get lost in like getting obsessed with AI.

A lot of people are building brand new things with AI because it's super fun and vibe coding and whatnot. And I think that's a massive distraction. If you've already got something that's working well, how do you just take over a lot of those mundane things? But it's been nice to understand its limitations.

And I think we really need to understand its limitations massively or like fully comprehend as much as we can around its limitations before we go away and just it's you can't outsource responsibility to Claude or to anyone. It's yours to keep.

Forever. So I mean we could go we could go on this tangent for quite a while, but I want to come back to to businesses and and growing businesses. And I'm just curious, I got a question around content sites. You bought so many content sites and blogs, man.

And I've seen a bunch of decent blogs lately that have been have either been built on the b like in the last few years and are going decent or they've been obliterated and then come back to normality, normal levels over the last two years of traffic for those types of deals that look decent and you're buying it based on a fair valuation on the last few years, not just the last six months or twelve months when we were in the in the game a couple of years ago doing that.

But what would you do if you were gonna buy a content site these days with AI? Like how would you think about growing it using AI and and content and or have you even thought about this? 'Cause I might be putting you heavily on the spot.

Yeah, no, I mean it's something that I've thought about. I think if I were to acquire a content site now, one of the things I would be looking for is brand traffic. And that's hard with a content site, you know. It it genuinely is. So a lot of them, you know, that they aren't gonna get brand traffic.

But I think that to me shows Google that your business is sticky and people like it enough. And that's because I think content sites are extremely volatile. You know, you're getting less traffic from SEO, maybe you're getting some from S AU. But like the past couple of years we've seen Google condense traffic to brands. And so to me, that is one of the biggest indicators is their brand traffic coming to this site.

Apart from that, you know, I think it I it has to be in a niche now that I understand well enough to be able to have some sort of like some value. I think I'm not like gonna like my profession website was about swimming pool cleaners and I didn't know shit about swimming pool cleaners.

I'm not gonna be able to like prov like Google's so much stricter as far as like the quality of content that they expect now. Like you have to add some sort of value, I think. And yes, that's possible through like Reddit and stuff, but I want to have like a base understanding of the niche that I I feel like confident I can grow.

I wanna like the niche. You know, so if I want to do a content site, it'd probably be out like pickleball or something. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Play a lot of pickleball. That's so I I do something about that.

You know, SEO wise, there's your typical gotchas, you know, fresh domains, no shady tactics. I'm really careful about, like the links built to a site. A lot of guest posting services that are like really crappy, so it's it's easy to get good links, but those are probably like big gotchas now.

But I again I haven't really audited a content site in a couple of years. This is just kind of based off of, you know, my intuition now and my experience two years ago. What what are you seeing that you like to see for content sites now?

That's a question. I think I just want to see this stable traffic and I want to see the stability and revenue and traffic is is first and foremost. I'm pretty curious and interested around how it's making money. Affiliate revenue, ad revenue. What I'd be looking for is a business along the same lines as you, yes, you want to see us getting brand traffic and brand impressions, but I would just be curious around does it have that type of traffic and maybe an email list that's not optimized to sell products and it could I could just start drop shipping products instead of aff you know doing affiliate products.

I could start drop shipping products. And or if I was starting out like I mean I gotta think about the sho like put myself in the shoes of people starting out. For me when I was starting out I was hungry like I would ship stuff out of a garage.

If I needed to as and then work out like if it gets big enough, move it to a three PL. But yeah, what would the margins be based on the traffic I'm getting and the email lists that I've got in this business? I would look at it thinking about how do I take this from pure media and just blogs to selling products and then developing different types of media outside of just content on a website to get revenue from selling products to put that into YouTube videos and or building out some social content which is can get ranked in AI and stuff as well, you know. that's how I would think about it is build something that's a product. And it doesn't need to be a physical product. If you don't want to do the physical route, how can you build something that's a digital product and have maybe even pay an authority or a person to to build that digital product for you, you know? That's how I would be looking at it. Yeah, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. You actually kind of reminded me of of something in that I don't believe in buying content businesses like content sites unless you're trying to turn it into like a real company, like a real brand, right? Yeah. 'Cause like you know, these these like fake blog internet sites, there's there's not a lot of stickiness to it, right? If you're just a blog.

Yeah. But there's still s a few that like are hanging in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, and and they're there and you can build them. But I think for the most part, like I I think as long as the strategy is to really, you know, diversify your revenue, build something real that's it sounds basic 'cause Google says it, but really providing value, right? 'Cause like blogs don't really provide value for the most part. Like ninety five percent of them probably. And so, you know, how can you expand that to, like you said, your own product line, a YouTube channel? I think like the best example in my eyes that you know we can I can think of is are you familiar with epic gardening? It so if you read a journal.

Not at all. I think.

So this was in like 2015. And you know the authority hacker guys, Gael and so like you know, you pay for a thousand dollars for their course, and I was in there, I did it. This guy had like this website, Epic Gardening, Kevin Esperito, I think. And he had grown his blog, it was you know, getting like millions of pay views.

And then he started like a YouTube channel, he started like this homestead of like having like his own frickin' huge garden garden, like on his property and it's turned into a real business. Like actually, just yesterday, the reason why I rem got reminded of this, my wife was watching in a gardening video. And I'm like, Is this epic gardening?

Yeah. I'm like, I've never actually seen their their videos, but I recognize the guy. And he's turned his like shitty content website. Well, it was never shitty to begin with, but his content website into a brand that's lasted over 10 years. And I think that's really the only way to do it really is because you're not just selling media and then competing based on media on especially in an environment where media is cheap to create, especially written media, it's pretty much free to create and we can get our own media like nobody's searching Schoogle for answers for things.

Like who who who's doing that now? I mean, people that are sixty plus, yes, maybe. No offense that they haven't adopted the L L Ms, but I mean, you just vo voice note voice audio just you simple question and fact check it's on on LLMs like that's what that's what we were searching for is quick cheap answers basically on Google and it's not a thing anymore. So you can't you can't be in that in that landscape.

So you've got to have people now are looking for solutions. We can get answers and then we want solutions down the rap down the road in our buyers journey to purchase actual products. Like you can't like this is this is why e commerce like I buy so e com so many e commerce businesses for clients, is like you can't you can't get rid of the product and the factory. Like you need to have those to be able to, you know, service service the clients.

Yeah, and and personally for me, I I would be like if I were to buy a business, I'd probably lean more towards an e commerce business than a content business. And not even just because I specialize I've been specializing in e commerce. I think there's like a little more stickiness. I think there's like a little more that you can do.

They're not not really too much of a thing. There's definitely some value in them, but I'm I moved away years ago from calling it content sites to media businesses. And we do help people buy media businesses in the sense that YouTube channels are amazing. Newsletters are amazing. There's some Instagram accounts and groups that are amazing and they're getting traffic and it's it's warm, good quality traffic that might not have a product yet.

And like bang, you can create a product pretty fast for those things. Those types of media businesses. Huh.

I don't know a lot of people who have purchased like a like an Instagram account or anything, but that that would be very interesting. I've always been I've looked at accounts before, but I know they're also like really scanny.

Yeah. I mean, most Instagram accounts have a personal brand like influencers and stuff like that. That you just can't really buy those. But you can buy accounts that are just funny humorous media. Y different random things. You know, if you've got a bunch of people creating content, teaching some somebody something, and they're a bunch of different creators, you can purchase that, keep the creators in play and keep it going, you know. and then and then sell more products off the back of it. Like it's yeah, how to videos on TikTok and whatnot.

Yeah, those sorts of things.

Okay. I don't use TikTok, but I'm I'm sure those work. That was th th that's definitely a an interesting model that I would I would foll

Yeah. Colin, anything that you would mention that you're super excited about in building businesses and AI moving forwards? Like what are you excited for coming up and why?

Yeah. So, you know, recently hired actually a business coach to help me with my agency. And there's some pretty like interesting workflows that he's introducing me to about kind of like outreach and using AI at scale. I don't want to speak to it too much. but I'm really excited, basically just adopting AI even more for me personally. and also just very interested to see, you know, how much more can LLMs grow. You know, a year ago it was easy to like 10x your chat GPT traffic just because they're like there's 10x more people. I'm always interested in like, you know, what kind of adoption is it really going to get as far as like percentage of searches, right? Because it's still like one or two percent of searches. Yeah. But that's that's always like interesting to me, seeing kind of like this growth of like these this LLM phase and then potentially agentic shopping. You know, they've been throwing around that out for like three to six months. Google's beta tests, like.

I think with Walmart didn't perform that well, but I think that's gonna come within probably another like six months, maybe a year, and where people will be like really depending on it. I mean, I I don't know the I call it a gentic shopping. I don't know what Google calls it in the stocks, but it's like, hey, Claude, just like go buy this t shirt for me.

Yeah. So what is it? Agentique?

And link it up. Yeah.

Yeah, it's wild. It's there. It's right there. Like it's it's interesting. I think it's cool. I think it could create a lot of legal issues for sure.

For sure. It's it's dicey, but you know, I I anyone can find some way to use AI to help them in in any of their businesses or anything. Like s you know, sometimes even just like, you know, putting together your P and L. Very simple. And I'm I don't know. I'm i I've enjoyed watching like the Wild West that it is.

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely Wild West and it's and it's cool to s Colin, thanks so much for coming on. Really excited for what you've been up to and the real results you've been getting for some awesome brands and appreciate you sharing. Yeah, where to if people wanna reach out to you, where should I send them or you wanna be incognito, maybe LinkedIn. What do you think?

I have my website, macha growth dot com, created by Claude. It's not the best, guys, but it's there. I'll send you my contact info too that you can kinda add to the show notes. Colin Elmott Gmail dot com. You can reach out to my LinkedIn, they'll I'll I'll send them to Joe.

Cool, man. Cool. All right. I'll put the links in the show notes. Again, Colin, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate you. Everybody listening. Thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next one. Yeah.

Good. Thanks for having me.