nadosi.com

John Jantsch (00:00.962)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Bill Kennedy. He is a seasoned global business executive with 30 plus years of leadership in industrial and consumer markets as chairman of OTC Industrial Technologies and CEO of Arrowhead Engineering Products. He has driven significant revenue and profit growth.

He’s passionate about business strategy and founded the 80-20 Institute to help companies scale profitably. We’re going to talk about his latest book called From Panic to Profit. Uncover value, boost revenue, and grow your business with the 80-20 principles. So Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill Canady (00:44.578)

Hey, it’s great to be here, John, and you’re a fantastic hype guy, so I should hire you.

John Jantsch (00:48.238)

I’m just reading what you gave me. So, I like to sometimes start with words that are in the title of a book. So, what does panic mode generally look like for a business?

Bill Canady (00:52.526)

You did perfect.

Bill Canady (01:05.378)

Yeah, you know, that’s a really interesting question. And if you think of the scale from your house is on fire and your boat is sinking to, maybe you’re just not making enough money, right? But a lot of times it’s situational and companies are looking out and they cannot figure it out. And in today’s world, what that means is interest rates have gone up, can’t cover your debt, cash is not coming in the patient needs.

John Jantsch (01:30.274)

You know, probably wasn’t going to go here first, but I think I will now since we talked about, I’m talking to a lot of business owners that in 2025, even if business seems okay, are, are feeling a little panic of uncertainty. like change is happening faster than anyone can keep up with it. And of course, you know, we could unpack the whole political, scene, you know, that is causing a lot of disruption as well. So is, is, is.

Can Panic Mode actually be, I just don’t know?

Bill Canady (02:02.945)

I think for most of it, it really is that, you know, being a CEO or an owner or founder, you know, I’ve heard other people use this site. This is nothing original for you. It’s like staring in the abyss, but having someone throw rocks out of it that you can’t see them coming and chewing glass from time to time. So when you’re in this chair, no decisions that you get to make are the easy ones. All the fun stuff, like where we’re going to dinner and how big a bonus to give, someone else makes those, right?

John Jantsch (02:17.58)

Yeah.

Bill Canady (02:30.975)

It’s the, I’m not sure what to do next. That’s what arrives here. And today, maybe it’s always been this way. I don’t know, but it moves so fast, right? Whether it’s a tariff that’s in or out, whether it’s a interest rate that’s going up or down, you think you’re going left, you really, maybe you’re going right. Perhaps you’re not even sure. So it’s the lack of control that causes us staying awake.

John Jantsch (02:39.736)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (02:54.082)

You know, know a lot of business owners, leaders of organizations feel that part of their job is to exude the posture and the, you know, everything’s going to be just fine, you know, for the team. But when you’re in panic mode, how do you do that?

Bill Canady (03:08.587)

You know, it’s an interesting piece. So I kind of go the opposite. Not like I don’t know what I’m doing, but more about the unvarnished truth. This is where we are. It’s what we’re facing. However, we have a plan to deal with this. And our plan deals with understanding where we’re going, because our destination hasn’t changed. But you know, like use a sailing metaphor. Sometimes the wind blows from the left. Sometimes it’s from the right. We have to be able to deal with that.

And that’s really what the book is about. It’s a, do you actually get through it? What’s the simple, basic stuff that you need to do? And most of your money, most of all the good stuff comes from just a few pieces of that. So having a destination, being able to articulate, that’s what people want.

John Jantsch (03:54.232)

So this might be a good time to visit one of the principles in the book. You talk about the Stockdale paradox. I think that’s a little bit of what you described there. A lot of listeners may have encountered that. The first time I’ve heard that term was maybe in Jim Collins’ work. I don’t know if he created it, but you want to define that based on what we just talked about.

Bill Canady (04:17.195)

Yeah, absolutely. So your own point there. So Jim Collins was interviewing a gentleman by the name of Admiral James Stockdale, or Jim Stockdale, and he had been a prisoner of war. And Jim, and he was the highest ranking one, and he’d got a lot of men through it, where he did a fantastic job. And he asked him, so who didn’t make it? And Stockdale goes, well, that’s easy. It was the optimist, right? And what he meant by that was,

John Jantsch (04:44.622)

Yeah

Bill Canady (04:47.285)

You have to have a sense of unvarnished truths. This is what’s gonna be hard, but you have to believe you’re gonna get through it. And when you set false expectations or really unknown expectations, we’re gonna be here on Friday, we’re gonna be here by Easter, whatever it is, you don’t really know. So you’re better off to share that, but give people hope, the confidence that you are gonna get in through. And that was what the Sockdale Paradox was all about is it’s gonna be hard, but we’re gonna make it.

John Jantsch (05:17.554)

There is another end to that of course is the pessimist too, right? Who is just, never going to make, you know, it is kind like you just have to balance that optimist pessimist, right?

Bill Canady (05:25.709)

You do, you do. And some of us, you know, we like to think we’re realist and all that. you know, it’s funny, I see this in so much. You see it in today’s climate. It’s like when you’re a CEO, you need a goal you’re going for, whatever that goal is. So it’s a destination. You need a strategy to get it there. Your highest chance of success is having your team come in, buy into that strategy. Even if it’s just an okay strategy, it’s perfectly fine for it to be that way.

But if you’re all pulling on the same ore, rowing in the same direction, you’ll get there. You can have a fantastic strategy, a wonderful strategy. No one buys in, you’re not going anywhere. So this is where the negative person kind of falls apart a little bit. You’re trying to get everyone together, but you have this, and a lot of times they think they’re doing you a favor, like a voice of reason. That’s good early, because we need to challenge and pressure test and be little battle tested, if you will.

Some point you got to put all your hands in the middle and stack hands and go after it. If you can’t get that person on board, this is probably not the PlayStation B.

John Jantsch (06:28.526)

Yeah, well, again, going back to, I guess in this case, the subtitle of the book, you spent a lot of time talking about the 80-20 principle, the Pareto principle. You know, it almost sounds cliche because every business book, not every business, a lot of business books, a lot of business blogs, you know, people talk about that principle. But why do you think that it has become so universally accepted?

Bill Canady (06:54.379)

Honestly, I think it’s a couple of things. One, it’s really kind of a universal law, right? It turns out most of the good stuff comes from a very few pieces. And we use 80-20, the Alfredo Pareto figured that out, looking at pea pods and farming and all sorts of things. I use it because I tend to wear a blue shirt every day, even though my closet is full of red shirts and pink shirts, my wife has bought me. So we tend to do the same thing over and over and it tends to be where we get it. What happens is,

John Jantsch (06:58.69)

Yeah.

Bill Canady (07:23.805)

is that we get distracted by other things. Now the reason 80-20 is so attractive is it’s quantitative. It gives you the sense you can actually figure it out. It’s not just the black art. But as Eisenhower said, plans are useless. It’s the art of planning that’s critical here. Same thing with the data. You get that data. It is just factual. It just is, right? You can argue with it. You can say you’re different. It just is the data.

You have to decide what you’re gonna go do with it and you recognize everybody you’re involved with gets a vote too.

John Jantsch (07:58.222)

Yeah, and one of the pieces that you mentioned here, but I’m going to allow you to mention it more directly, is that if the agreement is, yes, 80 % of our profits or whatever come from 20 % of our customers or 20 % of our efforts, you kind of have to define what that 20, which 20%, right?

Bill Canady (08:18.807)

That’s right, because it won’t tell you what your strategy will be. It will tell you where you’re making money and even more importantly sometimes tell you where you’re losing money. It’s funny, you may think, well, I gotta go get more out of others. Sometimes if you just stop losing money, it turns out to be pretty powerful, right? So looking at that data and so there’s no surprise. So I always use an example. We talk about fair but not equal, right?

The example I use is people with their spouse and their sibling. You think about what you give to your spouse on their birthday versus what you might do on your sibling. My sister, I send her a text, right? And sometimes I’m late. My wife, do I take out to eat? I buy nice things. Why do I do that? Because my life is surrounded by my wife and my children and things. If I don’t take care of her, if I don’t look after her in a way that she’s got options, she can go somewhere else.

Same way with our customers. If you identify your best customers, the data will tell you that. And you know they’re your best because they buy a lot and they pay their bills. Go do more with them. They already value because they’re in. The one that you’re buying very low is buying very low. You’re probably their B vendor, right? They’re getting it from somewhere else. So identify with the data, then figure out how to take care of them in a way that they care.

John Jantsch (09:38.286)

Could you also bring that say to operations or even to how a CEO might use their time? You know, we all keep really busy because the clock says we’re supposed to be there from X to X. When in fact, know years of doing this myself that I would say 10, 15 % of my actual efforts deliver all the money. So maybe I had to just go fishing.

Bill Canady (10:03.029)

You know, there’s a lot of truth in that. see people who are, who are really amazingly efficient and do a lot of fishing too. I, I’m not that good, right? I, I, I, I think I’m still wasting a good portion of my time, but, but I, try, I try to get better at it. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s identifying those pieces surrounding yourself into it and, and, and getting after it is so hard though. And you know, when you start out, if you’re an entrepreneur, what’s the first thing you do, right? You’ll take any order. You just need to get started.

As time goes by, there’s only one of you, we’ll just make it a sole opener, and there’s only so many hours in a day. At some point you go, I’m maxed out, right? I don’t have anything left in the tank, I don’t have any time, I don’t have the resources. You have to start, you then have to start making decisions, right? You have to start those folks and you have to start saying no. And it’s important to say no to the right area. What typically gets our time is the squeaky wheel.

John Jantsch (10:40.59)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Canady (10:58.657)

And so if you have a small customer, they can wear you out, you’re doing all these things. You look at results at the end of the year, it was de minimis. That big customer, may not, they may be self-sufficient. They’re clearly happy because they’re a big customer. Go get more of that. Go spend that time around. Then you can go fishing all you want.

John Jantsch (11:16.398)

So you just revealed, I haven’t named this universal law yet, but one of my universal laws is that there’s this inverse relationship between how much somebody pays you and how much attention they need.

Bill Canady (11:29.459)

Absolutely. You know, there’s something about it, right? We all have the story, you know, of that tiny customer. So Motel 6, you remember that? We’ll leave the light on you, Tom Modep. So Motel 6, when I was in grad school, we did a study on it, or it was a case study that we read. And, you know, they ran that whole hotel with one person.

There was only ever one person, which by the way, if you ever stayed in it, you believed it. it was a wonderful hotel and all that, but they were so efficient. So we’re doing the case study and then they said, how do you think they did it and what they did? So if you came into a Motel 6, there was a counter there, a person behind it, that was the person running everything. Behind them was the laundry, right? They could just turn right around. It wasn’t a pretty wall, it was laundry machines.

John Jantsch (11:59.042)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:19.598)

Hmm.

Bill Canady (12:22.433)

This was back in the days when I was there, when he had VCRs and they would at eight o’clock, they’d put the VCR, the video in, right? And things like that. And so the biggest issue they had with their employees and they would fire them for this is an employee would get a call from a room, say room 10 and that person would be having a problem and whatever the problem is, right? The employee would leave and go check on it. Now, what would happen is during that time they’re going to solve this one issue,

They’d have 10 people come in, try it, no one’s at the front desk. Phone or ring? No one can answer the phone. So they had to put in hard and fast rules that you cannot get distracted by trivial things. And so it’s a really stark example of that, but they ran a whole hotel with one person. And I don’t remember now what was it they were charging, probably 30, 40 bucks, but they made money at it because they were efficient.

John Jantsch (12:54.947)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:17.698)

So there’s a line in the book.

somewhere, but I wrote this down that you talk about businesses needing to earn the right to grow before they can scale. And I think that’s fairly nuanced. So I’d love it if you’d kind of unpack what you mean there.

Bill Canady (13:35.917)

It is.

Bill Canady (13:40.056)

So my favorite line with that is a baby does not make a bad marriage better, right? So what we mean by that is it’s interesting. You can be really good at getting customers, but if you can’t satisfy them, what you wind up with is a whole bunch of short-term unhappy people. When you come into an operation and you’re looking at it and there’s problems, it’s generally not just a sales problem. There’s operational problems.

John Jantsch (14:07.499)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Canady (14:07.533)

There’s inventory problems. There’s supplier problems. You need to correct a lot of those as you’re going so you can actually earn that right to go get the business because you know, a customer, don’t care what our problems are. They just want what they want, just like anyone else and as they should, right? So if you can’t ship on time, if you’re a problem, if you have quality defects, before you go get more people to see how bad you do, perhaps you want to go back in your factory and clean it up a little bit.

and do some tech time studies and look at your sourcing and on and on because there’s very few of us that have products you can’t get anywhere else, right? Most of us have something that’s easily attainable, no matter what our differences are. Make sure you start with getting the machine running well, get the engine in the car capable of getting where you need to be while you’re out getting those customers. It’ll make a big difference for

John Jantsch (14:57.954)

Yeah, that, I’m not sure where I heard this, it reminds me of the line, we’re losing money on every sale, but we’re making it up on volume, right?

Bill Canady (15:05.645)

in volume. That was the old spark plug things. We’re going to sell spark plugs for $1. We buy them for $2, but we’re going to make it up in volume. We used to say that on it. I started out as a sales guy. I love them, but I always felt like it gave me a license to make fun of them. There was never, just, man, if operations can make this thing and I can only sell it for $1, that two bucks needs to be their problem. When you own the business or you’re running the business, you have to look at the whole P &L.

John Jantsch (15:12.43)

you

Okay, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:20.97)

Hehehehe

Bill Canady (15:34.015)

and you got to figure it all out. Just because you can get it out on time doesn’t mean you make that money at it, right? It takes a lot of effort.

John Jantsch (15:38.254)

Yeah. So if I was a business owner, I had a variety of issues that I’d identified that had me in panic mode. And I said, Bill, come on down and take a look at our company, fix us. Where do you generally start?

Bill Canady (15:54.902)

You know, it’s the most amazing thing. So I get everyone together. I get them in a conference room. And the first thing I ask them is, what is our goal? What does good look like? And not some, we’re going to be better human beings and treat people with dignity. That’s all important too. But where are we going? What’s the destination? I have yet to have the same answer out of two people. You go around that table and operations will say something operations like, we got to be on time.

John Jantsch (16:17.902)

Hmm.

Bill Canady (16:23.467)

The majority of times, the goal is set by whoever owns it. In private equity, typically they want to get at least three times whatever dollar of equity they put in, it’s called Moit, multiple loan invested cash. A private company is whatever the values of the owners are. Sometimes it’s parochial, take care of my employees in my town. Almost always it’s the dividend as well. That’s how they take care of their family and themselves, what they live off of. That’s really very important. In a public company,

John Jantsch (16:47.438)

Yeah.

Bill Canady (16:50.303)

It can be all sorts of things. That’s why it’s so hard to run a public company. At the beginning of a quarter, it’s one thing. At the end, you need that penny to make your earnings per share. Start with that. If you start with what the value is, what that goal is, your job as a CEO is then to figure out, make that goal, and you and your team figure out the strategy of how to get there. Most people never do that.

John Jantsch (17:16.716)

believe that we’re going through, you I’ve been doing this 30 years. know you said you’d been doing this, this work for 30 years. So we’ve seen some, the world is ending moments and know, ups and downs and cycles and whatnot. I feel like, and here, this is maybe a record. I’m 17 minutes into the show. I’m just now mentioning AI, but I think, I feel like what’s going on with AI and how that’s going to change business is really,

We’ll get through it. There’ll be new industries, there’ll be new jobs, but I feel like we’re in a time where people have to decide, do I go this way or that way with my business? Standing still is not an option. How do you feel like that’s going to shake out? This is just a guess, but what’s your view on how that’s going to shake out the next two, three years maybe?

Bill Canady (18:05.293)

I remember in the 80s, late 80s, I didn’t have a cell phone and never heard of computer. And then I get a cell phone and my first cell phone was analog, right? And they were coming out with digital. I’m like, I don’t know if I want to switch, right? Same thing with computers, right? If you’re old like I am, you’ve gone through all this. AI is not only coming, it’s here, right? It is absolutely going to have an effect on us and already in our businesses.

John Jantsch (18:26.488)

Yeah, yeah, right.

Bill Canady (18:32.173)

it is making an impact. Not in maybe some of the really meaningful ways, but I think I saw the other day on, you know, we’ve got a terrible war going on around the world. I think I saw where they’re trying to fight the war with robots. Now, I don’t know if you saw that in there. So, I mean, look, we are definitely in the future now. AI, just like we thought computers would get rid of everyone and cell phones all of a sudden would kill all these. It changes things, but it means we can do more. And you, as a person,

If you want to do it, maybe you got to get new skills. Sometimes that’s the case with it, but you can continue to grow and go on and on and on. So whether you embrace it or not, doesn’t matter. It’s happening. It’s happening around us every day. Everybody I know now either has, if you’ve got Microsoft co-pilots in it, this is a very simple example. If you’re my daughter, means I’m paying for her subscription to chat GPT, right? So everyone’s got it and they’re using it to just even write simple documents now, right? We’re doing faster in our…

John Jantsch (19:23.214)

you

Bill Canady (19:30.005)

our turnaround time is, it will allow more throughput for us. It will cost us some jobs for sure, but we’ll also create a whole new industry we haven’t even thought about. So embrace it, whatever level you’re comfortable with. This rocket’s leaving the platform here.

John Jantsch (19:41.699)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:45.836)

Yeah. Yeah. No, I’ve, I’ve said that at least for the last couple of years that, the only risky move right now is to just try to stay put and hope it goes away. Sure. That’s right.

Bill Canady (19:55.501)

It’s never worked even without AI, you know, there was not going anywhere as making the decision. You’re basically punching out. So you’re going to go backwards or forwards. My thought is go with it. The other thing I would add to it is, you know, for most of us, I mean, there’s some big fancy companies out there that do all this. Most of us are at best fast followers, right? I’m just really starting to embrace it and use it. I sat on a university board. We have students from all over the world.

John Jantsch (20:18.318)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Canady (20:25.357)

Now when you call our number, they actually interact with AI because they can do over a hundred different languages, right? And can you imagine having a hundred different people available at any time and they’ll send it all out? You still need people, but it’s really enabling a lot of different growth opportunities.

John Jantsch (20:32.078)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:37.368)

Alright. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:43.512)

Well, I was going to say opportunity is really the word because a lot of people fear change, but change always brings opportunity. And that’s really where I think we are.

Bill Canady (20:52.747)

Gotta be agile, gotta be flagged. It hurts though, right? I mean, Jesus, what else? I had someone like today, I don’t know if you experienced this, but you can get ahold of me on a cell phone, text, email, Teams. I’ve got a new thing they call Notion they’re sending me things on. So I’ve got all this stuff and I’m like, can’t they just like, know, can’t they just pick one? Well, they’re never gonna pick one. That problem’s a build problem, not anyone else. I’m the one that has to change.

John Jantsch (20:55.894)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:18.498)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Bill, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. there anywhere you’d like to invite people to connect with you and find out more about from panic to profit?

Bill Canady (21:29.441)

Yeah, so first I can just go right to my website. It’s my name, BillCanady.com. You can see it right here on the screen. I encourage everyone to come there. You can look at the book, look at my other stuff. Happy to help in any way possible.

John Jantsch (21:40.78)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Bill Canady (21:45.943)

Sounds good, John. Thank you so much for having me. This was fantastic.

John Jantsch (21:49.016)

Awesome.

How to Outrank Big Competitors in Search

How to Outrank Big Competitors in Search written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Sam Dunning

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B, an SEO firm specializing in SEO for revenue—not vanity metrics. Sam shares his insights on how small businesses can compete with industry giants in Google rankings by focusing on B2B SEO strategies that drive organic traffic and real conversions.

We discuss the dangers of falling into the “traffic trap”, where businesses chase high-volume keywords that don’t convert, and instead explore long-tail SEO tactics, strategic keyword research, and the role of AI in SEO. Sam also shares practical techniques for competitor SEO analysis, leveraging on-page and off-page SEO, and adapting to Google search updates to maintain visibility.

If you’re tired of seeing competitors outrank you in search, this episode is packed with actionable strategies to help your business dominate Google rankings and drive revenue.

Key Takeaways:

Avoid the Traffic Trap: Prioritize keywords that drive inbound leads over vanity metrics. Focus on search engine optimization that brings paying customers, not just clicks.
Use Long-Tail SEO to Compete: Instead of targeting high-competition terms, optimize for landing pages SEO with niche-specific keywords that align with customer intent.
Maximize EEAT for Authority: Build trust and credibility through technical SEO, backlinks, and authoritative content that aligns with Google’s EEAT framework.
Adapt to AI and Google Search Changes: Stay ahead of Google AI overviews and algorithm updates by creating high-value, user-focused content.
Leverage Local SEO & Competitive Analysis: For service businesses, local SEO is critical. Optimize Google Business Profile, target location-based keywords, and analyze competitors’ weaknesses to rank higher.
Invest in SEO Strategy, Not Shortcuts: SEO is a long-term game. Avoid SEO mistakes like low-quality backlinks and keyword stuffing. Instead, build a sustainable SEO content strategy that drives consistent business growth.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Sam Dunning
[00:31] Approach to SEO Strategy
[03:42] SEO Isn’t for Every Business
[06:21] SEO is a Long-term Game
[08:53] Your Marketing Niche
[13:00] Google Search vs AI Search
[15:24] SEO and Local Search
[18:46] Where to Start with SEO

More About Sam Dunning:

Check out Sam Dunning’s Website
Connect with Sam Dunning on LinkedIn

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by

Want to elevate your marketing game? AdCritter pairs Connected TV ads with precise digital retargeting to drive real results. Discover how their full-funnel strategy can help your business grow smarter. Let them know Duct Tape Marketing sent you, and you’ll get a dollar-for-dollar match on your first campaign! Learn more at adcritter.com.

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.98)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Sam Dunning. He is the founder at Breaking B2B, an SEO firm and the host of podcast by the same name, Breaking B2B. So Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Dunning (00:20.738)

Hey John, thanks for having me on man. Looking forward to the chat.

John Jantsch (00:23.822)

So I know that one of your promises, taglines, messages, whatever we want to call it, SEO for revenue, not vanity. So let’s start there. How do you define that distinction and how do you use that to sort of differentiate yourself from other SEO firms?

Sam Dunning (00:42.742)

Yeah, great place to start. So in short, it’s after going through the pain myself. It’s so before I got into SEO as a profession or ran my own consultancy or agency, kind of working with past agencies, teams, contractors, and also potential clients, prospects, and customers that come to us. So much of the time get frustrated as they’ve either tried to do SEO themselves.

hired contractors, hired teams or whoever it may be, but have focused on the wrong metrics or wrong outcomes. So they’ve fallen into what I call John the traffic trap, which is even more important in the world of AI as AI search, LLMs take over slowly beat at Google’s market share. They’ve fallen into something called the traffic trap. What does the traffic trap means? Well, it means they go for informational based keywords on Google search.

John Jantsch (01:38.48)

businesses.

Sam Dunning (01:39.734)

So think of things like simple searches, like what is a KPI, how to build a website, what is a CRM, stuff that’s easily answerable nowadays with things like AI overviews in Google, which show up as really high juicy traffic terms, but are not likely to result in conversions, AKA inbound leads, demo requests, booked calls, or whatever that main call to action your B2B company wants.

John Jantsch (01:50.49)

Yep.

Sam Dunning (02:07.092)

So they fall into that trap thinking we need to get traffic at all costs, but it’s not going to result in, or it’s very unlikely to result in a book called demo or conversion. Now I thought, well, that’s a waste of time, especially running, running a business myself. And I’m sure you’re the same John, like most marketing that we put, whether it’s our own resource or agencies or contractors want to result in actual kind of qualified leads or revenue. So we flipped that on its head. thought, how can we do the opposite of that?

and focus on what is a dream client actually searching for when they need our offer, when they have this very specific problem we solve or they’re comparing alternatives and how can we show up and start driving qualified inbound traffic for those terms.

John Jantsch (02:50.0)

Yeah, and I think one of the things, know, there are a lot of people that have enjoyed what looked like a lot of good organic traffic that are kind of freaking out because all of those information searches are going away or Google’s like hoarding them, right? And so a lot of people have seen real drops in traffic and they’re freaking out, right? But what you’re saying is that was garbage traffic anyway, wasn’t

Sam Dunning (03:03.566)

Mm.

Sam Dunning (03:10.978)

Yeah, now, now don’t get me wrong, top of funnel or informational based SEO isn’t completely dead. But if you’re doing a very light version of it, stuff that can be simply answered by an AI or LLM, then that probably is a waste of your time. And those prospects that are searching for that kind of stuff, like very simple what is or very simple how to terms are probably just going to land on your page, get the info and bounce off.

John Jantsch (03:35.93)

Yeah, yeah, I do. I do it dozens of times a day myself, right? You because I just want to figure out like, how do I make that thing work in this tool that I’m using? And I know I could find somebody who’s written about it, but I can’t even tell you what their website was or what it was about. So SEO really, with a lot of small business clients, is so misunderstood that it gets a really bad rap, you know, because a lot of people hire SEO people, they don’t know what they’re doing.

Sam Dunning (03:51.522)

Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

John Jantsch (04:04.804)

they’re getting some reports once a month that seem to say they’re ranking for something and ultimately they get really frustrated. And, so, you know, what is it that you think, the, the, the, true, like value-based, let’s put it that way. Cause there are a lot of scammers out there. The true sort of value-based SEO firm is, is going to be telling their clients today. that is kind of different.

different than smoke and mirrors that I think a lot of SEO folks have used to describe what they’re doing.

Sam Dunning (04:37.238)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’d say one of the first things is that SEO is not for every business. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean, first and foremost, you have to be in a sector that actually has demand to capture. So you have to be in a known category and have folks, AKA your dream clients or prospects actively searching for your offer. Because if you’re trying to create some kind of new tool, new service, new offer, Google is, SEO is always best as a demand capture channel.

John Jantsch (04:43.216)

Hmm.

Sam Dunning (05:05.036)

So you need prospects in market searching for your offer. That’s the first thing. The second thing is you actually have to have resource to make it worthwhile. Whether that is your own cash, like you mentioned, they’re hiring a contractor agency, whoever it may be, that you can invest to actually give it a good amount of time to see success, or you need the resource in-house. Marketers that actually know what makes a solid SEO campaign.

know how to actually build a revenue driving SEO program, whether that is creating, doing solid keyword research around what your dream clients search or when they need the offer, building content that matches that intent that resonates with dream clients and is also following SEO best practices than the other elements of SEO, be it link building, technical SEO, et cetera. And you have to have the longevity to make it worthwhile. And you can, don’t get me wrong, you can see results with SEO done right as quick as 90 days, but

John Jantsch (05:56.613)

Yes.

Sam Dunning (06:03.762)

If you’re looking at it as a quick hit and you’re thinking, yeah, I’ll do this for a month. Then I might switch and do paid ads. Then I might do some social ads. Then I might try some outbound sales. Then I might do some review sites. Then it is a waste of your time. Do another channel that you can give a chance or stick to paid media.

John Jantsch (06:20.398)

Yeah. So what do you tell a client when, mean, because you, just told me something a lot of clients don’t want to hear, right? It’s like, no, I, you know, I, see my top three competitors are, know, on top of Google. How come I’m not? so, you know, how do you kind of set the expectation for that fact that it’s a long-term game? Because let’s face it, there have been SEO folks that I sound like I’m really negative SEO, but I’ve just seen too many small businesses get kind of burned by just not understanding it. And so not knowing what they’re even buying,

Sam Dunning (06:46.53)

Yeah, I get it.

John Jantsch (06:49.902)

So because a lot of SEO firms hide behind that, it’s a long-term game, it’s a long-term game, which just means you’re never gonna get results.

Sam Dunning (06:57.516)

Yeah, it’s that classic response, right? Like the client says, or the potential customer says, how long does SEO take agency says, six to 12 months, sign our 12 month retainer and we’ll be good. So what you said is correct in the sense that let’s face it. Most of us, whether we’re a B2B service company, tech company, software company, we have giant competitors, right? We’ve got the top three, the top four, the top five that always come up in sales conversations to an annoying level.

John Jantsch (07:06.298)

Right.

Sam Dunning (07:25.57)

And they’re probably, if we’ve not done SEO ranking above us for some of those core terms that we want to start driving leads for. Now, usually for those juicy terms, there’s quite often competitors owning those. So let me give you a tangible example. If let’s pretend we sold proposal software as a tool. We might want to own terms like best proposal software or best proposal tools, et cetera.

But those are gonna be extremely competitive. You’ve got massive software companies like Proposify, Quilla, PandaDoc, well-funded companies that have a ton of cash to spend on marketing and SEO. Now, how can we beat these companies? Because we’re probably not gonna get ranked for that keyword for years, realistically. Well, that’s when you need to do something called long tail SEO. And you need to, instead of thinking like we’re gonna rank for best proposal software in this instance, we might go for things like, we might pick niches that…

that are maybe underserved or that we’ve historically sold well into. So you might think, all right, short term, like the next three months or so, we’re gonna go for like proposal software for FinTech teams or for sales teams or for HR teams, or we’re gonna target competitors. Like we’re gonna go for Proposify alternatives or GetAccept alternatives, all that kind of stuff. there’s always quick wins you can grab with SEO, but it’s naturally knowing first and foremost, what niches you wanna target.

John Jantsch (08:28.464)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:43.14)

you

Sam Dunning (08:44.972)

what your prospects might be searching for and realizing that those really super competitive terms are going to be owned by the giants and that we have to chip away at the stuff they’re under serving.

John Jantsch (08:53.936)

Yeah. And I love that idea. You know, I have people come to me all the time and they’re starting a business and they’re like, should I choose a niche? And I’m like, well, my take is, mean, if you have a real reason, like you’re an expert in that and you’ve worked in it all your life. Otherwise, I think what happens is a lot of people choose niches they think are good. And, but, you know, then they’re like six months later having to start their business over again. but I’m always telling people you don’t have to choose a niche, but you should niche your marketing.

Sam Dunning (09:15.48)

Mm.

John Jantsch (09:21.412)

And that’s really what you’re talking about is that, you have campaigns that are like, say professional services is a category for you. Well, there’s 10 subcategories in there and you should be messaging to those 10 subcategories. And I’m hearing you say that that’s a, that’s a solid foundation for approaching SEO today.

Sam Dunning (09:42.122)

Exactly right exactly right. So I always say Like going back to marketing fundamentals like SEO Let’s ignore SEO for a second the main marketing fundamentals are have an offer But have an offer that serves a dream client that ideally has historically bought well into your service is in a niche that can easily Ford your offer Has the expensive problem you solve is motivated to solve it and has no issue spending cash on it

If you can get those lined up, that’s good, not just for SEO, but for marketing in general. So I have a very simple, I’m a simple guy. A lot of my strategies are straightforward when it comes to actually building out your SEO, like what keywords should we target? What type of content should we create? I recommend folks, whether it’s a founder, whether it’s your marketing leader, whoever in your organization makes sense. The very simple strategy for finding what I call money keywords, which in simple terms of commercial keywords that your dream clients will search for needing your offer.

Fire up a Google Sheet, fire up an Excel Sheet, split it into four main columns. Column one is what you actually call your offer. Going back to proposal software, that might be proposal software, proposal tools, proposal platform. Column two, what are those money niches that you’ve historically sold well that can have the problem you solve and motivate to solve it and can easily afford the offer? Could be, like you said, financial firms, accountancies, whatever those niches are. The third is what are those main competitors that always come up in sales calls? That’s column three. And the fourth is…

This is probably a framework you’ve talked about on the podcast. I’m sure jobs to be done. What are your dream clients jobs to be done? What are those struggling moments they face? Maybe they try to do something internally, like they cobbled together a solution on Google sheets or Excel, or maybe in the sales proposal world, like it would be like something like how to build a sales proposal within Google docs or how to, how to build out sales proposals that convert all that kind of stuff. Why do I build those four columns? Well,

John Jantsch (11:14.544)

Mm-hmm, true.

Sam Dunning (11:37.486)

It helps me build out long tail keywords that my dream clients were actually going to search for needing the offer. And if I get, if I’m, if I have a team, then I might involve my sales team. So they can actually come with me to say, look, these are competitors that come up. These are the niches that are doing well right now. Um, these are the common frustrations or our clients jobs to be done or struggling moments. And then we can have well-informed keyword research. That’s also going to fuel our content when we get to that stage.

that our target prospects are probably actually looking for when they need our offer.

John Jantsch (12:10.248)

So one of the things that if we could do a quick search and find 10 blog posts on people saying SEO is dying and AI is going to eat all SEO organic traffic. one of the things I’m hearing you say is, or at least that I’m seeing is, if you’re really focused on high demand, AI is not really returning results for somebody who is looking to hire

an accountant in their community right now, right? mean, if somebody who’s really doing that level of search, they’re not getting an AI overview for that, are they?

Sam Dunning (12:46.766)

Not so much not to say there aren’t it’s like right now from what we’re saying a lot of the AI Overviews and more for informational based searches Not always but quite a lot of time now. There’s there’s obviously two sides to the coin with your typical Google result now There’s sometimes an AI overview at the top Then you’ve got some a couple sponsored listings. Then you’ve got the organic results in between but that aside You’ve also got LLMs like chat GPT search perplexity, etc

John Jantsch (12:49.956)

Mm-hmm.

Sam Dunning (13:16.416)

Now, a lot of folks are saying stuff like, when I say a lot of folks, mean, random marketers on LinkedIn, et cetera, they like to make a lot of noise and saying stuff like Google search is dying and all this kind of stuff. the truth is that LLMs, whether that is chat, chat, GPT, perplexity, et cetera, are gaining chat. GPT is especially are gaining a bit more market share, but it’s nothing in comparison to Google. Google’s still growing and it still is by far the most searched engine. when it comes to those prospects.

John Jantsch (13:26.405)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:44.752)

So what do we, just to put a number on that, 2, 3 % for the LLM?

Sam Dunning (13:50.67)

I can’t, I can’t remember what it’s last valued at, but Brian Fishkin has just done a report. So one of the, one of the well-known SEOs he’s just put out a report to show that I mean, Google is literally kind of a hundred X or so more compared to some of these LLMs. So what I’m saying is the thing to consider is if you have a more technical user, so if your end clients are more technical, they’re probably using more AI search. If not, they’re more of a layman.

They’re probably still using Google for now, but it’s more to be aware that AI is on the rise. We can certainly dive into some ways that you can rank on LLMs and chat to you between similar happy to dive into that. But I think that’s one thing to bear in mind. Most folks are still using Google when they have intent to review offers.

John Jantsch (14:36.848)

Yeah. Sometimes we forget about, you know, what our target market does. Like, do they read the newspaper? Do they, you know, it’s like, that’s what we need to pay attention to. Right. So, so, uh, instead of ranking on the LLMs, I’d let’s for a minute go into local search. Um, so a lot of, let’s say I’m a local home remodeler. Um, I mean, in, in this day and age search has really been, I mean, we can run ads and do things, but search has been a big driver of business, uh, for me, especially if I can get myself in that three pack.

Sam Dunning (14:50.211)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:05.776)

So how is local search going to be impacted?

Sam Dunning (15:10.614)

Yeah. I mean, to be blunt, I don’t do tons with local businesses. most exactly, exactly. So a lot of my clients are kind of more national, not necessarily serving, serving small end industries. Now, yeah, some of that, again, some of that, certain searches will, will be appearing in whether it’s Google AI overviews. So you get the quick review, and that sort of things. And I think more of it is understanding the crux of SEO in my opinion, at least.

John Jantsch (15:14.67)

Yeah, because B2B is more national, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Dunning (15:40.814)

is yes, you follow simple guidelines with technical. So for example, if you were, say, I don’t know, providing HVAC in a certain state of the U S so let’s say in New Jersey, those kinds of HVAC services in New Jersey, for example, if we actually want to typically what’s going to rank for that is probably a landing page. And the usual framework I like to follow for a landing page is problem. Are you facing this problem with whatever’s going on in your home? This is the impact of that problem.

We’ll agitate a bit and then this is the solution. This is how we’re well equipped to solve these issues, these bleedneck frustrations. And then you’ll probably show some examples of your offer. You’ll have some client testimonials and reviews might have an FAQ like what’s your pricing? How long does it take? What’s your refund policy? And you have a call to action to book a call. The crux of SEO is reviewing what’s ranking right now. In this case for our target search term, this offer in this location.

And how can I completely blow that page out of the water? How can I make my page more helpful, more useful, more educational, trustworthy and convincing to this dream client? And a lot of that comes down to customer research, like knowing what your prospects actually care about their jobs to be done in their end goals. Yes, you need basic technical SEO. So you need your focus keyword in the URL. You need it in the H1 in the MetaTitle description. And you might want some internal links on that page to other blog articles or other useful pages. But if you can follow that framework.

With local SEO, in most cases, you can actually outrank competitors without even worrying about backlinks. Cause a lot of these local websites, they’re not really doing a lot of SEO. They might have like a couple pages, like homepage, couple service pages, portfolio contact. If you can actually strategically build out what I call these money pages for like offer plus industry, offer plus location, and do that in a systematic way that’s custom research backed, then you can, you can probably start ranking quite nicely and pulling in some leads.

John Jantsch (17:14.412)

Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (17:36.034)

You said one of my favorite words that you Brits say, HVAC. I love that term.

It’s a little different than the way us Americans pronounce it.

Sam Dunning (17:50.23)

It’s also niche isn’t it when Brits say niche and US says niche. I always get those two mixed up.

John Jantsch (17:51.788)

Yeah. Well, I have learned niche too. I rather prefer niche. So that’s one. I have a lot of Canadians that are clients and a couple of their words of process is one that as opposed to process that I love to harass them about. you went into a business, they said, Hey, Sam,

Sam Dunning (17:59.071)

Okay.

John Jantsch (18:16.506)

Come help us. We’re not ranking for anything. You know, they’ve got a decent business. They’ve got a decent product or offer. I mean, that’s not really the issue. Where do you start? I mean, what do you, how do you kind of start the process? And let’s say they’ve bought into, it’s going to be a six month process. Do you have a set? You know, here’s what we do first. Here’s what we do next. Here’s how we expand that.

Sam Dunning (18:37.678)

Yeah, yeah, so you start with what we briefly touched on earlier. So understanding the main offer, problems they solve, competitors, industries that they serve well, that have that expensive problem and motivated to fix it and have cash to easily invest in the offer. So you build out that Google sheet, formulating those offers, industries, jobs to be done and competitors, make those four main columns. And then from there,

John Jantsch (18:42.82)

Yep.

Sam Dunning (19:05.026)

We’re making our money long tail commercial keywords. So what service do you want to make at us, Or what offer?

John Jantsch (19:12.99)

you know, let’s do mine, marketing strategy.

Sam Dunning (19:16.182)

Okay, it’s quite a nice broad one. And do we want to serve like specific niches? Are we gonna?

John Jantsch (19:18.442)

Yeah, let’s go with home service businesses where we’re going to serve like remodeling contractors, roofers, landscapers.

Sam Dunning (19:26.23)

Yep, lovely, lovely. Yeah, yeah, so we could, if we wanted to drill down on those niches, some of our offerings might be, some of our money keywords might be like marketing services for landscaping or best marketing agency for landscapers and hitting some of those home niches. And then once we’ve kind of worked out, once we’ve exhausted what I call these long tail keywords, and then if we go to kind of…

That would be kind of some of the high commercial intent keywords. If we, if we went more jobs to be done, it might be how to rank higher as my home services business or why is my business not showing up on Google? Why is my landscape business not driving leads or why is my landscaping website not converting? Those might be some of the struggling moment searches.

John Jantsch (20:11.442)

So those were all questions, by the way, right?

Sam Dunning (20:15.116)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are things that probably come up on discovery calls. That’s how you pull those. So make an exhaustive list of that. Like I said, if you’re the founder, you’ll know a lot of these, but if you perhaps have a sales team, they can help you contribute to that. Then simplest way to actually build content that ranks is to just Google those keywords. So let’s say marketing agency for landscapers or best marketing agency for landscape or something like that. Google the keywords, see what the top three organic pages are.

John Jantsch (20:15.952)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:28.4)

Sure,

Sam Dunning (20:44.652)

what type of page they are. This is called addressing, assessing the intent. Is it a landing page, a blog article, a how-to, a product list, a comparison, whatever. Probably gonna be, I’d imagine a landing page for that type of keyword. It might be a top 10 comparison, like we reviewed the top marketing agencies in 2025 for landscapers. Probably one of the two. See what shows more in the organic search results. Let’s pretend it’s a landing page. I’d review the top.

John Jantsch (21:03.12)

Mm-hmm.

Sam Dunning (21:12.396)

three landing pages. So what’s ranking now of my competitors. I look for gaps in those pages. Usually landing pages are quite thin. This is our offer. There’s some testimonials. Here’s a to action. So I would do what we talked about earlier, problem agitation solution based on our knowledge of the industry or ourselves team’s knowledge. So start with the hero area, the top banner. This is the offer. Here’s a call to action. Here’s a book of cool calls to action. Are you facing these problems?

around your landscaping company, like struggling to drive leads for your website, competitors above you in organic search results or spending loads of cash on ads and not returning pipeline. Here’s exactly how we fix it. Here’s three video testimonials of customers we sold it for. Here’s our exact process from A to Z. Here’s some FAQs around our offer. Why are we more expensive than other marketing agencies? Do we have a proven process? Do we have a returns policy?

How quickly can I see results? All those FAQs from those kind of really tight objections you get on sales calls. And then yeah, follow the technical SEO basics. So the focus URL has the keywords. So yourdomain.com forward slash best landscaping marketing agency. Same for the H1, same for the meta title and description. So that’s what I call the blow out the water strategy, review what’s ranking, make your page more helpful, useful, educational, trustworthy.

John Jantsch (22:10.03)

Mm-hmm.

Sam Dunning (22:34.84)

Google rolled out a framework called EEAT, Experience Expertise Authority Trust a while back. And for more, I guess, for less competitive terms, that alone, doing that at scale in a systematic way, like saying, look, we’re gonna publish, we’re gonna build out and publish five to 10 pages each month, whatever’s realistic for your company, we’ll steadily get your rankings. When you get to more competitive terms, I don’t know, in the marketing agency world, like things like best marketing agency in the US or whatever it might be,

John Jantsch (22:37.626)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:52.624)

Yeah. Right.

Sam Dunning (23:03.886)

you’re gonna have tons of competitors. That’s when you’ll need the help of backlinks to build up your website’s authority. And there’s a bunch of ways to build links, happy to dive into, but that’s just a starting point that I’d recommend.

John Jantsch (23:07.918)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:17.348)

My favorite is guesting on podcasts, quite frankly, because we’re going to link back to your site, Sam, and we’re going to promote the heck out of this episode. so that to me is one of the best backlinks that you can get is going on people shows. Plus you get the exposure, you know, you might actually get a client because somebody listens to it. So that’s my favorite. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Dunning (23:36.79)

Yeah, it’s great. It is one of the best. I’d probably put that as number one or number two for sure. My other favorite is building partnerships, which again has more holistic business play. So this is finding partners that serve the same ICP, the same idle client profile as you, but are not direct competitors. So as a real example, I partner with a LinkedIn ads agency, Impactable. They serve just like me, B2B service and B2B SaaS clients, but they’re not going after SEO clients because they don’t offer it. So.

John Jantsch (23:44.911)

Right.

Sam Dunning (24:05.518)

I approached their founder guy called Justin a while back and I’m a big fan, John of weird, painfully short messages if I’m trying to get stuff done. So I probably sent you one. I find the founder or the marketing leader on LinkedIn. I’ll say something like, Hey Justin had a weird idea to scale your organic traffic and in bounds you against a conversation. He’ll probably connect with me on LinkedIn or whatever channel I outreach email, whatever, and say, Sam, what are you on about? But let’s hear what you’ve got to say. Then I’ll shoot him like a loom video.

John Jantsch (24:30.084)

Yeah.

Sam Dunning (24:33.006)

and just say, look, I’ve got an idea. In this case, partnership play. The small step initially I might offer is I’ll write out a guest blog article for you that will be really useful to your audience. And in return, I just want to link back. And then they might do that and that might grow into, okay, let’s do a podcast together. Okay, let’s do some more content together. All right, let’s start presenting business each other’s way. So it’s gone from just a small SEO play to like reciprocal business. Just like your podcast is kind of has so much more play to it than just SEO.

John Jantsch (25:00.878)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Sam, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the duct tape marketing podcast, where would you invite people to connect with you find out more about your work?

Sam Dunning (25:09.942)

I really appreciate it. Three, three main ways. Really one is LinkedIn. I post ramblings on SEO each and every day. The second is the Breaking B2B podcast where we interview just like this marketing leaders as well as solo episodes on SEO and what’s working on marketing today. Or the third is if you’re tired of seeing competitors above you and organic search results, stealing traffic inbound leads and more, then we might be able to fix it with our unusual approach to SEO. It’s BreakingB2B.com. Happy to chat.

John Jantsch (25:37.584)

Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Sam Dunning (25:43.022)

Cheers, man. Thank you.

Weekend Favs March 15th

Weekend Favs March 15th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

Munch AI – AI-powered content repurposing tool that automatically extracts engaging clips from long-form videos, optimizes them for social media, and enhances them with captions and trends.
Wisecut – AI video editing software that automates cuts, generates subtitles, and enhances audio, making it easy to create professional videos with minimal effort.
FlexClip – User-friendly online video editor with templates, stock media, and AI tools for creating marketing videos, slideshows, and social media content quickly.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

7 Paths to a Successful Startup

7 Paths to a Successful Startup written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Lori Rosenkopf

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School and author of Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: Seven Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation. Lori’s research on entrepreneurship, business growth, and innovation has been published in top academic journals, and she has spent years studying what truly sets successful entrepreneurs apart.

During our conversation, Lori shared insights from her book, focusing on the seven distinct paths to startup success. She highlighted the importance of resilience, adaptability, and business strategy, emphasizing that there is no single formula for success. From bootstrapping a business to leveraging venture capital, each path offers unique opportunities and challenges.

Key Takeaways:

Startup success isn’t one-size-fits-all – Entrepreneurs can achieve success through multiple pathways, including business innovation, technology startups, and business pivots.
Bootstrapping builds resilience – Many successful founders delay seeking startup funding, giving them more control over their vision and business growth strategies.
Recombination fuels innovation – Entrepreneurs who blend unique experiences and skills often discover breakthrough ideas that lead to business success.
Mindset matters – A strong entrepreneurial mindset helps business owners navigate startup challenges and seize growth opportunities.
Pivoting can lead to major breakthroughs – The ability to adapt and shift direction is a key trait of thriving small business owners.
Funding isn’t the only path to scaling – While venture capital is one route, many startups achieve business resilience by reinvesting profits and expanding strategically.
Success takes time and persistence – The media highlights overnight success stories, but real entrepreneurship is about long-term strategy, innovation, and problem-solving.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Lori Rosenkopf
[00:53] Telling Real Entrepreneur Stories
[03:59] The Six Rs
[06:33] The Realities of Disrupting the Market
[07:37] Bootstrapping
[09:58] Technology Commercializers
[11:17] Accidental Entrepreneur
[15:20] Defining Innovation

More About Lori Rosenkopf:

Check out Lori Rosenkopf’s Website
Connect with Lori Rosenkopf on LinkedIn
Read Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovationl Guide by Lori Rosenkopf

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.792)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch and my guest today is Laurie Rosenkopf. She is the Simon Imidge Pauley Professor, Professor of Management and Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School. Her research on technology and communities and knowledge flow has been published in top journals. She’s served as a senior editor and consultant and has led significant curriculum and diversity initiatives. We’re going to talk about her book.

Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, Seven Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation. It’s going to be out in, depending upon when you’re listening to this, it’ll be out in April of 2025. So Laurie, welcome to the show.

Lori Rosenkopf (00:43.803)

Thanks, John. Great to be here.

John Jantsch (00:45.88)

So you talk about, I’ve got a one word underlined here that you talk about stories from entrepreneurs that you call the unvarnished stories that you find that really deeply resonate with folks. wonder if you can talk a little bit about that.

Lori Rosenkopf (01:01.231)

Sure. So many of the stories that we see in the media about entrepreneurs tell a successful path without so many of the obstacles and challenges that were faced along the way. And we know that all entrepreneurs are really facing daily, if not hourly, challenges. And so I wanted to tell stories of people who were going

through these challenges and how they got through them because there’s a lot of lessons for all of us across the different stories.

John Jantsch (01:34.796)

Yeah, I would agree. mean, the media loves the unicorn, you know, stories and things. And even in some of those stories, you know, the whole like, we tried this eight times and pivoted eight times before we hit on the thing. And all that really happens is like, look at this big success story. I mean, there’s lots of really big success stories, you know, that people mentioned Ubers of the world that were, you know, other things before they were that. So I think that.

Lori Rosenkopf (02:00.853)

Absolutely. And it’s not just even choosing to pivot because the first approach isn’t working, but it’s like you’re Caitlin, who’s the social entrepreneur in my book, and she has taken a set of girls to discovery days to see different companies, to learn about careers, because that’s her mission, to help girls find great careers. And she’s running bus tours and COVID happens. Well, her business is gone. There’s no bus tours.

John Jantsch (02:27.236)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (02:30.183)

And she winds up doing a virtual program, which allowed her, once she digitized, to Forex her business really quickly. And now it’s grown into a really thriving endeavor. She’s an EdTech now, instead of a bus tour operator.

John Jantsch (02:42.606)

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I never want to say that the pandemic was a good thing, but you know how many industries, you know, that really came out of that out of necessity that everybody went, oh, this is actually a better way, but probably would have never really got tried or adopted without that set of circumstances. So you like all good authors. Well, actually, before I get into your methodology, I want to ask you,

How much is your environment at the school really fed into your learning and certainly what you put in the book?

Lori Rosenkopf (03:22.387)

I’m so glad you asked that. role as Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship means that I’m the Faculty Director of our Student Center for Entrepreneurship at Warren. And we have a host of students with a host of different interests who are demographically diverse and are trying to learn how to be more entrepreneurial, whether or not they’ll go and become entrepreneurs right away. And I was seeing stories in the media which were

just the celebrity entrepreneurs, the unicorns, like you said. And those were a singular type. And I really wanted to tell stories of so many of our amazing students and alumni entrepreneurs to give them role models because role models matter.

John Jantsch (03:53.272)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:06.764)

So you talk about entrepreneurial mindsets and I’m so glad you picked on the tech bro a little bit image, but mindsets that you call the six Rs. Yeah. Reason, recombination, relationship, resources, resilience and results. I butchered it there, but you can maybe expand on that idea that you’ve distilled into these six Rs.

Lori Rosenkopf (04:31.955)

Yeah, in each of the seven stories we tell, so the seven different paths, there’s not a one size fits all path to entrepreneurship. We talk about each of these different aspects and they’re motivating principles that can help anyone to be more entrepreneurial. And so without going through the laundry list, my personal favorite is recombination. My research has focused on that historically, but the idea that each of us has a unique set of experiences.

John Jantsch (04:36.748)

Right, Yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (05:01.361)

both in our workplace and our education, but also in our family life and where we’ve lived and the like. And it’s through mixing all of the different experiences and relationships and resources to throw in a couple of others that we’re able to see ideas that allow us to innovate. And innovation is what allows entrepreneurs to create value.

John Jantsch (05:23.8)

So are those mindsets something that we can adopt or have, or are they actually, or have they’ve actually become more like tactics or strategies, you know, that somebody, so like recombination, that can be somebody’s mindset. They might think that way. They may look at architecture or calculus and say, what if we took some of those principles and did this with them? Or they might actually just say, you know, that’s who I am. That’s how my mind works. mean, how

Lori Rosenkopf (05:42.654)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:53.016)

How do you kind of, how do you balance kind of that idea of strategy versus mindset?

Lori Rosenkopf (06:00.209)

Well, when we’re educating students, we’re always talking about growth mindsets and figuring out how you can push yourself in new directions. And so I think that recombination, it’s something that one can look backwards wherever they are and say, what’s my mix? And take a little bit more stock and say, if I put these two things together and start to do some idea tournaments with yourself, but also in looking ahead, particularly for younger folks who are saying, what kind of job should I be looking to take or what kind of major?

John Jantsch (06:06.115)

Yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (06:30.045)

might I take to say, let’s stretch yourself a little bit. Let’s not just take the standard path that everybody follows because then you’re going to be very cookie cutter. But the people who are able to be the most successful and the innovations that have been really the most provocative and disruptive are ones where there’s some novelty involved.

John Jantsch (06:49.492)

I’m glad you used the word disruptive because you actually have that as a path. You feature, I think, is it Amy? I think a lot of people tend to think that way. Like, I need to create something that just disrupts the market. I think a lot of people, that’s their mindset, but it’s actually really hard, isn’t it?

Lori Rosenkopf (06:51.593)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Lori Rosenkopf (07:11.133)

Yes, it is very uncommon, let’s say it that way, in addition to being hard. And I selected Amy specifically because she wasn’t a tech bro. She’s selling originally women’s hair color, but she’s built out a phenomenal omni-channel empire. And at the beginning, she had a little bit more struggle raising funds than someone who was doing it for, say, Dollar Shave Club. But she knew she wanted to do something big and disruptive.

John Jantsch (07:15.724)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:22.999)

Yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (07:40.937)

She had worked as a venture capitalist, so back to recombination. She knew what was the pattern to recognize, and she saw this market and went for it. she’s essentially a unicorn. She’s doing extraordinarily well. You’ll be seeing more of them in the news.

John Jantsch (07:59.352)

So you mentioned venture capital. I do think that there’s a common feeling amongst people that startups like we’ve got to raise money or this round we’re in this round. mean, that’s a lot of the talk you hear. You give a lot of ink to bootstrapping. And I’m curious kind of your thinking or your approach to that path.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:02.623)

Mm-hmm.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:15.317)

Yes.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:20.467)

Well, bootstrapping is what we recommend to all of our young people starting off. Go as long as you can without raising. And I think these days that advice is getting out there more, but five or 10 years ago, everybody was saying, I need to raise, I need to raise, particularly in a place like Wharton where everyone wants to build high growth enterprises. Bootstrapping, I love this story. Jesse is my bootstrapper. He built a

John Jantsch (08:26.848)

Right. Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (08:36.301)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:49.038)

Mm-hmm.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:50.739)

digital marketing firm. This wasn’t his original training. He was just looking for a way to be entrepreneurial after being a banker. But he was one of the first in Facebook’s API. So lots of digital spends managing that. He sold that. now, all bootstrapped, and now he’s building out additional companies to help other entrepreneurs. You should have him on the show as well. for example,

John Jantsch (09:02.904)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (09:16.366)

Well, make an introduction, I’d be happy to.

Lori Rosenkopf (09:20.755)

Okay, but to go back to recombination, because this is why it’s my favorite, because he built this digital marketing firm, because he had spent a couple of years working in banking and private equity sorts of environments, people from private equity firms are saying, could you help me assess whether this $10 billion acquisition I’m thinking about actually has a capable digital marketing strategy? He’s built a new consulting business on that.

John Jantsch (09:37.582)

Yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (09:50.025)

Others come to him say, you outsourced your talent to the Philippines and got all these growth assistants. He’s built another company that hires growth assistants and places them for everyone. So like his entrepreneurial spirit is just incredible and everything he does is bootstrapped. So it’s quite remarkable.

John Jantsch (10:07.512)

Well, and you said there’s a statistic that you shared about bootstrapping and 80 % survival rate after five years. mean, that’s not the common statistic, is it?

Lori Rosenkopf (10:16.724)

Well, right, because you’re not worried about satisfying your investors or your debtors right away. So you have a little bit more time and space.

John Jantsch (10:21.069)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:27.928)

So there’s another term that you use in the book, technology commercializers, that again, I guess that’s a bit of a recombination maybe, path kind of bridging the gap between existing innovation and new market applications. Talk about your story there.

Lori Rosenkopf (10:32.853)

Mm-hmm.

Lori Rosenkopf (10:45.043)

Yeah, I love to use that term to refer to a path where somebody sees that technologies exist and figures out how to bring them to markets that need them. So in the book, I talk about Joan, who had been working as a scientist, a PhD scientist at a large pharmaceutical firm. She calls herself an accidental entrepreneur.

because after many years of doing that and worrying about whether the pills should come in a two pack or a four pack, she wanted to work on life changing medicines. She wound up building a small investing arm herself, not in the pharmaceutical firm, and then becoming CEO of one of the portfolio companies. And now they’re working on cures for cystic fibrosis, which that’s life changing for people. And she didn’t invent.

John Jantsch (11:38.007)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (11:40.787)

the science, but she was able to assess the scientists and small biotechs that were developing it.

John Jantsch (11:48.618)

It’s you’re reading my questions. I was going to the accidental idea because it seems like that’s a threat. Like you mentioned her, but it seems like almost all of the people, there was some little bit of, I wasn’t really trying to change the world. I was just doing this and it led me to that. mean, is that, do you think that that’s, is that just coincidental with your stories or do you think there’s something to that?

Lori Rosenkopf (12:09.413)

Well Well one of the other ours in the book is Reason, know your reason for doing it and there are two kinds of people I’ve seen and and some are Very much. I want to be an entrepreneur from square one They’re like I had the best paper route when I was a kid, you know I was selling candy and middle school etc and it’s just continued and I just had to find a good place to go and be an entrepreneur and make money and some of the stories in my

John Jantsch (12:17.122)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:29.198)

Right.

Lori Rosenkopf (12:38.313)

book are those types. But there are others who people, their reason is a deep burning personal passion. And some of them like Caitlin knew that she wanted to do female empowerment stuff from when she was very young. But others came to that through their series of experiences. we don’t say people need to go and be entrepreneurs right away when we’re training them. We just want them to be entrepreneurial thinkers. We want them to go out.

Do some work, learn a space, and then see opportunity and then capitalize on it.

John Jantsch (13:13.42)

I imagine that you have particularly pick on your younger students, if I can for a minute, that they come to the program and initially it’s like, what technology is ripe for, you know, disruption like, or, know, or what’s the app I can create, you know, to create this huge commercial success. How do you help them figure that out?

Lori Rosenkopf (13:35.039)

Well, we do a lot of experiential learning. We have 25 programs in my center where students can do anything from get a $500 award to test out their grandmother’s cornbread recipe and see if they can build it into a brand to $10,000 awards that we give to our students in accelerators who are really pushing and working on ventures. But the experimentation is incredibly important because most of these ideas that people can come up with

when they’re this young age are not the ones that are going to be the source of their career. You know, again, outsized attention to things like Snapchat. But that’s not what we’re typically seeing. But by playing with any venture idea, one can develop a repertoire to become more entrepreneurial, see more of those opportunities and pursue them more effectively in the future.

John Jantsch (14:11.82)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

John Jantsch (14:29.656)

What are some of the kind of most innovative things you’ve seen entrepreneurs do beyond sort of the creating financial returns, you know, for community, for mentoring, for, you know, other things that you’ve seen founders do?

Lori Rosenkopf (14:44.853)

Jared is the founder of a venture capital firm and it’s a venture capital firm that has the mission of creating a thousand diverse entrepreneurs. He felt like he’s an underrepresented minority and he felt like money was being left on the table because there are documented biases about the amount of funding that both women and minority entrepreneurs are able to access.

John Jantsch (15:11.694)

Sure, sure.

Lori Rosenkopf (15:14.323)

He built a firm expressly to do this and the firm is Harlem Capital. And they’ve been able to bring in a portfolio. Everyone is welcome in the portfolio, but diverse entrepreneurs are more represented and they built ways, special ways in which the founders support each other. They’re not just independent portfolio companies and they’re very proud of their statistics, which show that one in nine people who are minority entrepreneurs

minorities working in venture capital have gone through at least one of Harlem Capital’s training programs or internship programs.

John Jantsch (15:51.566)

So are they located in Harlem or that was just a chosen name?

Lori Rosenkopf (15:56.117)

They’re in New York City and I think that was specifically chosen to indicate their mission.

John Jantsch (15:57.838)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this last question is either going to be the dumbest question I asked you or the hardest question. Okay. All right. So how would you define innovation?

Lori Rosenkopf (16:07.029)

Okay.

Lori Rosenkopf (16:12.457)

Hmm. Let me start by saying I define entrepreneurship as value creation through innovation. And that’s why I can come up with those seven pathways, because it’s not just founding a business and disrupting like that media stereotype. then innovation is the application of knowledge in order to create a productive

John Jantsch (16:20.206)

Okay.

Lori Rosenkopf (16:38.293)

product or service or process. It’s anything that’s going to allow us to do something differently and hopefully create value from it and therefore be entrepreneurial.

John Jantsch (16:51.982)

And I guess doesn’t exist today would be one aspect, right? Something new.

Lori Rosenkopf (16:56.819)

Well, in many cases, innovations are adoptions of things from other places. You start off by saying, what if I put out architecture together with calculus? In many cases, people are able to take something that’s effective in one domain and transplant it into another market, for example, or another geography. So those are very common sorts of approaches. So it’s innovative to that place.

John Jantsch (17:22.574)

If I’m reading your book, am I to choose one path or is it amalgamation?

Lori Rosenkopf (17:32.041)

You, if you are reading my book, you should be inspired by all of the stories. And what you would see is that most of the people over the span of a career, so those who were have a little bit more age under their belts, like you and me, they’re able to take different paths at different times. Jackie was a banker originally, she went into tech, she went to square.

John Jantsch (17:53.933)

Yes.

Lori Rosenkopf (18:00.361)

You know, used to have those little white square, I still do the square white point of sale terminals, but that’s where it started. And because she was a banker, she said, my gosh, they can use this data to make loans. She builds out a banking business, Square Financial Services, within Square. And then she sees these banks don’t do enough for fintechs like Square. And then she goes and acquires.

John Jantsch (18:03.308)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.

John Jantsch (18:13.614)

Right.

Lori Rosenkopf (18:27.731)

in a traditional bank and turns it into this disruptive fintech bank. So what did we have there? She was an intrapreneur. She was an acquirer. She was a disruptor as well. really a career can be an amalgamation of many paths.

John Jantsch (18:47.106)

You know, it’s interesting, you, you mentioned age. and one of the things I’ve seen a lot of and heard a lot of people talk about, I think the media tends to play up these very young, you know, startup founders when in fact, a lot of 55, 60 year olds are actually, driving some of the most innovation, aren’t they?

Lori Rosenkopf (19:06.665)

Yeah, one of my colleagues, Danny Kam, he’s a fellow professor in the management department with me, he’s done some research on the cream of the crop in venture capital, top firms there. And the majority of them are founded by people, the median is around late 30s, early 40s.

John Jantsch (19:19.138)

Yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (19:27.025)

And I think you’ll see even more of the older entrepreneurs now as we’re seeing all these changes in the workforce and job dislocation and the like. So here are people with a lot of expertise and necessity is a big promoter of entrepreneurship too.

John Jantsch (19:41.814)

No question. Laura, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to learn more about your work? Obviously, find unstoppable entrepreneurs.

Lori Rosenkopf (19:54.581)

Well, absolutely. Google my name. I’m the only Laurie Rosenkopf in the world. you can also find the book at all of your favorite places. Read about Venture Lab, where our student entrepreneurs are doing great things. But it’s been wonderful to have this conversation with you, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (20:11.918)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Lori Rosenkopf (20:17.141)

Sounds great.

The Truth About SEO, AI, and Content in 2025

The Truth About SEO, AI, and Content in 2025 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Bruce Clay

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Bruce Clay, widely regarded as the “Father of SEO.” With a career spanning nearly three decades, Bruce has witnessed every major shift in search engine optimization—from the early days of simple keyword ranking to today’s AI-driven landscape.

During our conversation, Bruce shared powerful insights into how Google ranking, AI-generated content, and SEO strategy are evolving in 2025. We discussed the impact of search engine algorithms, the role of content marketing, and why businesses must rethink their approach to website optimization and organic traffic.

SEO is changing fast, and Bruce Clay’s insights highlight why businesses must adapt or risk being left behind. Whether you’re an SEO consultant, marketer, or business owner, focusing on SEO strategy, usability, and high-quality content will be critical in 2025.

Key Takeaways:

Quality Over Quantity – Google now prioritizes on-page SEO and content marketing strategies that focus on user experience rather than sheer volume of content.
AI-Generated Content Needs a Human Touch – AI can create thousands of pages, but search engines favor SEO best practices that combine automation with human expertise.
Link Building is Still Relevant—But Different – Google ignores low-quality links, meaning only the highest-authority backlinks contribute to organic traffic and rankings.
SEO Success Depends on Usability – Factors like site navigation, search engine algorithms, and mobile-friendly design impact website optimization more than ever.
The Rise of AI Overviews – Google’s AI-generated answers are shifting how users interact with search results, making SEO consultants rethink search engine optimization strategies.
Brand Mentions Are More Valuable Than Ever – As AI prioritizes trusted sources, appearing in podcasts, guest blogs, and digital marketing discussions is key to staying relevant.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Bruce Clay
[00:53] SEO in 1996
[04:47] The Growing Importance of SEO
[11:19] How to Create Quality Content for SEO
[14:50] Is Zero-Click the End of SEO?
[18:59] Guest Podcasting Can Help SEO

More About Bruce Clay:

Check out Bruce Clay’s Website
Connect with Bruce Clay on LinkedIn

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.26)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Bruce Clay. He is known professionally as the father of SEO. He’s been a world renowned expert in the field of SEO since 1996. A lot of people couldn’t spell SEO in 1996, probably, right? Bruce programmed the first webpage analysis tool. created the search engine relationship chart, which is earned

Bruce Clay (00:22.021)

John Jantsch (00:27.734)

over 300,000 or did earn over 300,000 downloads in its first month. He wrote and taught how to optimize websites to be found in search, establishing bruceclay.com as the trusted source for how-to information in the field of search engine optimization. So Bruce, welcome to the show.

Bruce Clay (00:46.083)

Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch (00:48.174)

So I would ask you to tell me about your history in involvement in SEO, but that would take the whole show probably, right? So let’s just start with, what was kind of the kernel of SEO? Like 1996, a lot of people didn’t have websites. So what did SEO look like when you first got started?

Bruce Clay (01:07.333)

Let me give you a little bit of background. My background is programming. You know, I have one of these degrees in math and computer science, but I also have an MBA. So I was looking for something that was marketing, but programming and a long-term search, which is an algorithm.

John Jantsch (01:16.302)

Mm.

Bruce Clay (01:32.823)

So that’s what really attracted me to it in its entirety. I got in, programmed some stuff, came up with some of the first tools, and started doing optimization. I have a background in mainframe optimization, so I just moved it over and started optimizing web pages. And they were

John Jantsch (01:51.512)

Yeah, okay.

Bruce Clay (02:00.889)

You know, I was trying to become a consultant, right? And consultants name the company after them and they do consulting and that’s what consultants do, right? And there weren’t a lot of people that were really aware of the power of marketing online, but a lot of companies had websites. They were catching on.

John Jantsch (02:11.736)

Yeah. Right.

Bruce Clay (02:28.325)

If we remember back to 1996, that was when Al Gore invented the internet, right? I mean, the hype was started. This is where you got to be. And a few people. And by the way, I was being found not because people knew to use a search engine to find me, but I was high activity in newsletters. Right? So.

John Jantsch (02:33.762)

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:54.979)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (02:58.223)

People who would stumble into a newsletter would find some of my articles and then they would call me. And the original websites were small, let’s face it. mean, now there’s thousands of pages, but back then, you you get a 50 page website, it’s pretty good size.

John Jantsch (03:12.654)

yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:19.246)

Well, they were kind of brochure aware, you know, is how people kind of looked at him. So it was like, need, we need to put our products on there and how do people contact us? And that’s it. Yeah.

Bruce Clay (03:28.941)

Yeah. And quite frankly, that was my website. And when I think back about it, it was so weird because there were no rules. Right. And my very first website, the home page had a logo, had a paragraph about what we do, and then a paragraph about the main topics of the website. And those paragraphs were my only navigation.

John Jantsch (03:32.312)

Sure, it was everybody’s first one.

John Jantsch (03:37.795)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:58.584)

Yeah. Right, right, right.

Bruce Clay (03:59.277)

I didn’t have navigation across the top or down the side. You go in, you read the paragraph, you click, you go into that section. And when I think back about

John Jantsch (04:07.128)

Well, please tell me you had a sign my guestbook link on there somewhere so you could capture an email, right?

Bruce Clay (04:15.073)

No, I wasn’t even doing that. I mean, was, I’m, my philosophy for many, many years is I answer questions until they surrender. I gave away everything, all the information I could. But people who wanted to rank, that was why they called me. And they contacted me by email, because my email was in the footer, our phone number.

And the very first day, it was Wild West. mean, it was there were no rules. Right. This is three years before Google.

John Jantsch (04:56.535)

All right.

Bruce Clay (04:57.965)

I mean, Excite, AltaVista, Infoseek, I mean…

John Jantsch (05:00.12)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. AOL, AOL was in there already, I think even.

Bruce Clay (05:03.247)

This is back in 96. In 96, we were still on motive.

John Jantsch (05:09.198)

Yeah, yeah, sure. All right, well, let’s fast forward. We’ll go back and forth a little bit here, but I would say 2005. I’m going to pin it there, maybe beyond that, but not only were websites very prevalent, know, blogging had come on the scene. You and I were talking about podcasting. I started my podcast in 2005.

Bruce Clay (05:11.503)

So…

John Jantsch (05:35.82)

And certainly SEO had become really a significant marketing channel and practice. mean, you had SEO firms that that’s all they did. talk a little bit about, you know, maybe how important SEO had become at that point. I’m going to fast forward to where we are today, but say, you know, 20 years ago, how important it become and, you know, how people were winning.

Bruce Clay (06:04.229)

Well, there was no effective social media environment. There were newsletters and email. That’s always been here. But SEO on a bang for the buck was highly effective. Remember, for many years, even when Google started, it was just 10 blue links. They weren’t even promoting a lot of ad sales.

John Jantsch (06:29.23)

Sure. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Bruce Clay (06:34.309)

it was, it was very weird. advertising online was just getting going on a lot of environments. but for traffic purposes, it was really, you had SEO and, it was common to have, because Google came out in, 98, 99.

PageRank promoted a lot of people to do links. So there was a lot of early stage spam that were out, they were buying links. There’s no such thing as a bad link. Every link counts, you know, one of those kinds of things. And in fact, was whoever dies with the most links wins. And quality didn’t matter and sentiment didn’t matter. I could say I hate you or I love you and it’s

still page rank. So it was pretty wild at those early stages. If you fast forward to today, Google has exactly the opposite. They only count your best links and the rest are ignored. Going out and getting more links is usually a waste because they’re not going to be the best. And if they’re not the best, Google doesn’t need them.

John Jantsch (07:50.595)

Right.

John Jantsch (07:58.275)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (08:02.497)

My speculation is Google only uses 20 % of your links and then they only use the ones that are recent. Freshness of your link inventory counts. So yeah, what was going back then for PageRank and manipulation and spamming, those days are long gone. So the actual SEO has changed.

John Jantsch (08:27.138)

Yeah, well, I would say 15 years ago, so moving up a little further forward, all of sudden content became everything. know, people, more content, blog content, know-how content, you know, to the point where it became ridiculous, but it still became a huge, you couldn’t do SEO without new volumes of content.

Bruce Clay (08:50.989)

And that is especially true today. However, the usability of the content has changed dramatically. And you see, I mean, I’m in the same boat as everybody else. We have clients that come to us and say, I just need content. And the answer is more of the same doesn’t help. Let me help the listeners.

If I want to rank for Mouse.

Doing 20 pages on the keyword of mouse is counterproductive and actually hurts your ranking. What you need to do is build a hierarchy of mouse and then the types of mice and et cetera. You build a content expertise and the quality of each page is why the search engine wants you. But having 20 of them on mouse

is not going to help you. also, if you have a lot of pages on information that’s 20 years old, that doesn’t help you. Classic example. I had 6,000 pages on my website. But early on, I would go to conferences, and we would, I’d have a team go, and we would live blog sessions.

John Jantsch (10:24.14)

Yep.

Bruce Clay (10:25.029)

which were great and we’d have links from the people who were speaking and it was wonderful. However, live blogging a session from 2004 on SEO does no good today.

John Jantsch (10:38.91)

A little bit irrelevant, right?

Bruce Clay (10:40.677)

That’s not relevant. And so I went through a process. cut out, I’m down 1800 blog pages, which by the way, still a lot, compared to 4,000, I mean, I had a ton of pages that I cut off my site. And so it isn’t an issue of quantity. It actually turns out that the current issue is the quality of your page.

John Jantsch (10:49.998)

Yeah, sure.

Bruce Clay (11:10.997)

and the fact that you only have one of them. And so you gotta build a hierarchy, you gotta understand architecture, gotta understand how to build it. And now along comes AI. And I can generate a thousand pages a day. And I mean, it’s crazy because those pages are terrible.

John Jantsch (11:32.826)

So let’s talk a little bit about, mentioned the word quality and I think everybody gets that. It’s like that phrase, quality over quantity, everybody gets that fundamentally, how do you, what does quality mean? I know Google tries to give like the EAT guidelines and things like that, but like how should somebody who’s trying to promote their business go about thinking about creating a quality page or quality content?

Bruce Clay (11:57.957)

think that, well, you would look at the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. It’s 160 pages. And you would go through that. And Google does a moderately good job of defining quality. That’s where they’ve defined the EEAT definitions and things like that. However, Google.

also has usability, which isn’t really well defined anywhere. I mean, what makes a page useful? I mean, little things that a site wouldn’t do are usability factors. For instance, do I have jump links at the top of the page? That’s clearly a usability factor. It’s not so much an SEO factor. Do I have breadcrumbs? Clearly a usability factor.

Do I have search on the page? A usability factor, right? Are my links easily seen? A usability factor. And all of those things are also part of what causes you to rank. And I can look at my keywords and do I have them in the right tags and am I running a schema and do I define things correctly?

but that has little to do with is it usable? I mean, okay, I have the keyword in there too many times. I’m a spammer, but that isn’t usable, right? It doesn’t affect usability and usability is an external factor now. So sites that used to rank number one and vanish, that page isn’t less content-wise, less valuable. It’s a

John Jantsch (13:40.077)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (13:53.817)

The standards have changed. And now usability is a big factor. AI. When AI came out, and I want to mention this, AI came out and originally Google said it has to be human created. Then they changed it. Actual on their website, they changed it to where it has to be useful to humans. Right? Which is a good factor. I think it’s great.

John Jantsch (13:55.331)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:17.474)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (14:23.609)

However, it was interpreted that AI is okay. And our tests show that if we have a bunch of pages, AI will always be last among equals.

And Google has now got a statement out that says, what we expect of your page is that it is consistent with common knowledge and creates new knowledge. Right? They sound a little diametrically opposed, but, and it’s because the LLM is built based upon common knowledge and consensus. But

John Jantsch (14:55.448)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (15:06.015)

they’re expecting the human touch to be, and this is my creativity component. And how it’s going to work in the future is something else. But those factors, other than just usability, affect how you rank.

John Jantsch (15:23.63)

So you mentioned earlier the idea of the original Google home screen had the 10 links and nothing else on it. Well, now it’s a shopping mall, right? It’s got all kinds of ads on it. It’s got things for like local, for maps. It’s got organic stuff. It’s got the AI overview. So a lot of people today are screaming about this whole zero click thing is the end of SEO. I’m curious where you stand on that sort of extreme.

mentality.

Bruce Clay (15:54.681)

Well, yeah, that is somewhat extreme because, and wrong. If you want to rank in social, you participate in social and you have your followers. If you want to rank in organic, you qualify based upon the SEO components that allow you to rank in organic. If you want to rank in AI, right, it isn’t

really so much the social component about who you are. And it isn’t the SEO component about who you are. When a consensus is built, individuals are lost. It’s collective information, right? The problem is that the LLM doesn’t go out and spy their websites and chase links or worry about canonicals or

care about your schemas. What it does is it gathers all this information, puts it into an LLM. Now it keeps track of sites, but it’s really consensus information. If you look at search for chat GPT, in order to qualify to be in their search results, they rely on Bing to have previously said,

You’re a trusted site.

John Jantsch (17:24.226)

Right.

Bruce Clay (17:26.549)

AIO requires that Google has you near the top of the results so that they know you’re not a spammer, you’re a trusted site. And then those trusted sites are aggregated to form their results. So the LLM really has the search component as a filter. And that means that you still have to do SEO.

John Jantsch (17:35.928)

Right.

John Jantsch (17:48.972)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so if I can maybe summarize that a little bit, your, keywords or keyword phrases that you’re ranking for today, highly, probably makes it more likely that you’re going to start seeing some chat GPT traffic, for example, for, for, for similar searches. Yeah.

Bruce Clay (18:08.453)

You could very well. Right, now the chat, using chat GPT or AIO, either one, they’re question-based. They’re typically information rather than transactional. And we have written a lot of tools. We have a product called Prerider. And what it does is it analyzes the intent of the page.

And then the intent of the competition and matches them. Right. So you find that intent is important. All this stuff is very, important. But what triggers all that, and this is a very complex world, what triggers it is, is it a question, a how question? And about 16 % of all searches in the Google world are how.

John Jantsch (18:45.72)

Yeah, sure.

Bruce Clay (19:07.663)

So that’s what triggers the AIO. That means that my website has to answer questions. It means that my website to be an AIO has to have an informational bias, right? Transactional sites are harder to have an AIO even show up. So information, how do I do this type query?

John Jantsch (19:29.89)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (19:37.059)

That is really the trigger. So I have to have a website that qualifies for the question being asked of the chat world.

John Jantsch (19:47.608)

Yeah, sure. Yep. So I’ve got one final question. You’re on this podcast and I’ve always on top of hosting a podcast, actually also am part owner in a podcast booking service. We book a lot of our clients on those and I tell people all the time that being a guest on a podcast is a great, well,

You get exposure, you get content, you get backlinks. I’m curious how you think about, know, cause we, we went through that period where everybody did guest blogging and that stuff just got buried. And I’ve really trying to preach people guest podcasting. So I’m curious your take on that. Do you see that as a strong SEO play still?

Bruce Clay (20:33.677)

I think that podcasts are a massive play. Now, so I’ll come up with the next level. It turns out that since AI is all question-based and because they are not doing searches and establishing all this stuff, they’re relying on the search engines.

mentions are really important. And I think that podcasts are one of the best PR components that there is right now. I’m on a podcast. I believe the podcasts are going to be massive. They are exactly what the doctor ordered in order to get what’s referred to as mentions.

John Jantsch (21:04.174)

Yeah, yep.

John Jantsch (21:18.274)

Right.

Bruce Clay (21:30.245)

And I think that in the AI world, the brand mention is, is dominant. Rand Fishkin just did a session that I watched and he emphasized that a lot of his traffic is from brand mentions of his name associated with certain words and it causes him to get traffic. And I think that.

John Jantsch (21:50.542)

Yep. Yeah.

Bruce Clay (21:59.311)

There’s a lot of people who are concerned about with AIO, you might get less traffic from organic results. I also believe that podcasts and YouTube and all these other mechanisms out there are very, important. And you have to be there. If you’re not there in a year from now, you’re going to be really sad.

John Jantsch (22:23.694)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:29.1)

Yeah, you’re speaking my language. Well, Bruce, I appreciate you taking a moment to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to find out more about your work and connect with you?

Bruce Clay (22:41.199)

Well, my website, as I said, I’m a consultant, right? brucoclay.com. It was rather nice and easy to get at the time. brucoclay.com. And then I have other websites that link from there. seotraining.com, seotools.com. Great names, right? And Free Rider, I’ve got others, but brucoclay.com is the best way to reach me.

John Jantsch (22:44.49)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:50.432)

Sure, man.

John Jantsch (22:59.776)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that. I did the same thing. I started my company was Jantz Communications, consulting, right? Before I went to Duct Tape Marketing. So I get it. Again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Bruce Clay (23:19.159)

Okay, great, thank you.

The 7 Roles Every Small Business Owner and How to Manage Them

The 7 Roles Every Small Business Owner and How to Manage Them written by Jordan E read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Ever feel like running your business is a never-ending game of keeping plates spinning? I remember watching a circus performer as a kid, keeping seven or eight plates balanced on tall sticks. Just when one would start to wobble, he’d rush over to give it a quick spin, only to dash to the next one teetering on the edge of disaster.

That’s exactly what running a small business feels like, right? Unless you’ve got an army of employees, chances are you’re juggling multiple roles every day—some better than others. So, let’s break down these seven roles and talk about how you can keep those plates spinning without losing your sanity.

1. The CEO (a.k.a. The Visionary)

Someone’s got to set the direction, and spoiler alert—it’s you. But let’s be real: in small businesses, the CEO role often gets pushed to the side. You’re so busy working in the business that you forget to work on the business.

Solution? Time-blocking. Set aside a couple of hours a week—call it your “big thinking time.” No emails, no client calls, just you mapping out where you want to be a year from now. If you don’t do it, no one else will.

2. The Salesperson (a.k.a. The Rainmaker)

No one’s bringing in the revenue but you. You’re out there generating leads, following up, and closing deals. And let’s be honest, if you stop selling, everything else grinds to a halt.

Solution? Automate your follow-ups. Tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot can send nurture emails, move prospects through a pipeline, and remind you when it’s time to follow up personally. Set up a system once, and let it work for you.

3. The Strategist (a.k.a. The Master Planner)

Marketing without strategy is just guessing.

Solution: Follow a proven framework. Our Strategy First framework provides a repeatable process to ensure marketing efforts are structured and scalable.

What is Strategy First? Strategy First is a structured marketing approach that helps businesses attract the right clients, differentiate themselves, and start charging a premium. It includes a full audit of your online presence, competitive landscape analysis, ideal client persona development, and a customer journey map using our proprietary Marketing Hourglass methodology. This process, completed in 30-45 days with three 1-on-1 meetings, delivers a clear marketing roadmap that businesses can implement themselves or with continued support from a Fractional CMO. Learn more about Strategy First process.

4. The Project Manager (a.k.a. The Organizer of Chaos)

Once you’ve got clients and a strategy, now you’ve got to get the work done. Campaigns, vendors, deliverables—it all needs to be managed.

Solution? Project management tools like Asana, Monday (what we use here at DTM), or ClickUp. These keep everything organized and show clients the progress you’re making without a million email check-ins.

5. The Client Manager (a.k.a. The Relationship Keeper)

If you want long-term clients (and you do), you’ve got to nurture those relationships. Regular check-ins, reports, and proving your value—week in, week out.

Solution? AI-powered reporting. Tools like SEMrush and Google Analytics spit out tons of data, but AI can help translate that into meaningful insights for your clients. Use it to show why what you’re doing matters.

6. The Marketer (a.k.a. The One Who Always Puts Clients First)

Raise your hand if you’ve ever put your own marketing on the back burner because client work comes first. Yeah, we’ve all been there.

Solution? Treat your business like a client. Assign yourself a project manager, use AI tools to repurpose content (e.g., take a blog post and turn it into LinkedIn snippets), and schedule social posts in bulk. Your future self will thank you.

7. The Accountant (a.k.a. The One Who Hates This Part)

Invoicing, bookkeeping, taxes—it’s got to get done, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it.

Solution? Outsource it. If you’re spending hours wrestling with numbers, you’re losing time you could be using to grow your business. Hire a bookkeeper and let them handle it.

How to Escape the Chaos

So, how do you stop feeling like a circus act?

Prioritize the most important roles. Sales, strategy, and client management should top the list.
Automate what you can. Email sequences, project management, reporting—there’s a tool for everything.
Delegate and outsource. Hire a VA, a bookkeeper, or a marketing agency. Free up your time for the work that actually moves the needle.

At the end of the day, you don’t have to keep spinning plates forever. Build systems, get support, and create a business that works for you—not one that runs you into the ground.

Need help creating a system that works? Check out our Strategy First program at Duct Tape Marketing. We’ve built a repeatable framework that helps agencies and consultants scale without the chaos.

Agency Growth Starts with Existing Clients

Agency Growth Starts with Existing Clients written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Max Traylor

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Max Traylor, consultant, author of The Agency Survival Guide, and host of Beers with Max. Max helps marketing agencies rethink their approach to agency growth by focusing on agency upselling, client retention, and long-term relationship strategies.

During our conversation, Max shared powerful insights on why agencies should move beyond constantly chasing new clients and instead focus on cross-selling strategies and client upsell tactics to generate sustainable agency revenue. From the dangers of relying too heavily on retainer agreements to the benefits of project-based pricing and strategic marketing leadership, Max explains why aligning with clients’ business objectives is the key to profitable, long-term success in today’s fast-evolving digital agency landscape.

Key Takeaways:

Successful agency growth relies more on deepening client relationships than constantly pursuing new clients.
Agency upselling and cross-selling strategies should be treated as core parts of the agency sales process, not afterthoughts.
Agencies should focus on providing marketing leadership services to guide small business marketing strategies, especially when internal leadership is lacking.
Retainers often lead to scope creep and reduced agency profitability — project-based pricing offers better control and margins.
Agencies that shift from transactional services to strategic marketing advisory roles build stronger, more resilient businesses.
Regular client check-ins, focused on business goals rather than marketing metrics, unlock new opportunities for client upsell tactics.
Pricing confidently — and aligning agency pricing strategies with value provided — helps agencies avoid the race to the bottom.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Max Traylor
[01:29] Are Agencies in Trouble?
[04:25] Leadership is Missing
[07:00] Growing Revenue with Current Clients
[11:46] Are Retainers the Right Way To Go?
[15:36] Productizing Your Services
[18:01] Advice on Starting a Consulting Service Today

More About Max Traylor:

Check out Max Traylor’s Website
Connect with Max Traylor on LinkedIn
Read Consultants Survival Guide by Max Traylor

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.009)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Max Traylor. He helps agencies upsell and cross sell their existing clients. His approach centers on building relationships with decision makers and aligning with their business objectives, which ultimately leads to long-term retention and growth. Max is also the host of beers with Max podcast where he interviews other agency advisors and the author of the agency survival guide book.

series. So Max, welcome to the show.

Max Traylor (00:32.11)

Yeah, I didn’t realize the intro was so long when I was writing it. But yeah, you nailed it. You got it all. What do do now?

John Jantsch (00:37.273)

I cut some out, believe it or not.

You know what? I stumbled on my name, actually, because this is my third show today. So I think I’m struggling. So did I also see you drink a beer?

Max Traylor (00:49.912)

Yeah.

No, that was water. Uh, well you, you caught me with some, uh, cambocha, you know, cause for the gut. Yeah, me too. But I, you know, I’m on, I’m on 10 and a half weeks, uh, after breaking my foot and I got out of the boot. got out of the big walkie boot thing two days ago and, yeah, beer does not help with the healing of bones. So I’m really trying. Um, I’m really trying.

John Jantsch (00:54.183)

I know, that a runner.

okay. All right. I was kind of hoping it was a beer,

John Jantsch (01:06.727)

yeah. wow. Wow.

John Jantsch (01:14.971)

I’m I’m out, out, I’m out.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, you, got to do it. You got to get back out there. So there’s a lot of intrepidation in the agency world right now. I’m seeing, you know, a lot of, our mutual friend, I think I saw you comment on, Marcus Sheridan had a recent post, basically saying the, agency world is over that, you know, AI is replacing a lot of the things that agencies traditionally have done. Where do you stand on, on that? kind of sky is falling.

Max Traylor (01:23.406)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:49.255)

approach.

Max Traylor (01:49.856)

Yeah, I I was, I was, I was saying that 10 years ago. and that’s when I started is 10 years ago. So I think, I think there’s always a healthy dose of one thing going out the door, but you know, I, I was originally, I was seeing what was going on in, in the, in the Martech boost. So you got a lot of, it reduced the barriers of entry for agencies down to zero. So a lot of new entries into the market.

John Jantsch (01:53.925)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:11.867)

Yeah, yeah, Sure.

Max Traylor (02:18.786)

They knew how to design things because it was, you know, CMS world of like low code sites. So people could look like they knew what they were doing very easily. And it causes prices. caused prices to drop across the board. Then you had that surge of, gig network websites, which I think was the first sort of chop at the tactical deliverable.

John Jantsch (02:22.961)

Yeah, right.

Max Traylor (02:43.31)

work that agencies were doing and then I think I think AI just gave it the you the one to knockout punch on On that one. So yeah, I would yeah

John Jantsch (02:49.285)

Yeah. you also, I would say a version in there, squeezed in there somewhere, is you had all the folks that had a team in Philippines doing work and that really eroded pricing as well.

Max Traylor (03:04.054)

Yeah, sure. Yeah. just all the but I mean, I’ve always been in on team strategic work. I think that the the value of a third party is in their expertise, not what they can do. And the the doing of things will always go up and down in terms of you need a specialist to do it or some piece of technology just took that person’s job. I think it’s very difficult to have a long term sustainable professional service business.

where the service you provide is constantly changing, whether that’s being taken by AI or whatever it is. But if you have something strategic, if you specialize in understanding the way people buy, I mean, that might change a little bit over the course of 10 years. And that’s where you can really build up some expertise and monetize it.

John Jantsch (03:37.671)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:50.821)

Yeah, you you see, I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I’ve seen the wave of digital marketing agencies, social marketing agencies, know, that just like kind now you’re seeing AI agencies, people just kind of hopping on the latest train, and they eventually all get wiped out.

Max Traylor (04:09.42)

Yes. the train does leave the station eventually and you’re caught reinventing yourself. Nobody knows who you are. you’re, you’re, you’re, cutting, cutting prices. Yeah. So, that’s, that’s sort of the narrative that I keep talking about is like, be careful aligning yourself with the tactical work. will constantly changed. It will constantly be undercut. is low margin. It’s volume game.

John Jantsch (04:14.503)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (04:37.056)

And unless you’re a volume player, which most of us in this game are not, then we’re going get hurt out there.

John Jantsch (04:43.975)

So I have been preaching that because I think what’s happening is not only strategy become more important. think especially in the small to mid-sized business that really doesn’t have a marketing structure, certainly no marketing leadership, that actually providing marketing leadership as a service I think is sort of the next level of what being strategic means. I’m curious what you think about that idea.

Max Traylor (05:09.474)

Yeah, I agree with that. However, I continue to find that leadership in general and decision making in general is at an all time low. So if the idea is that we’re going to provide marketing leadership and come up alongside sales leadership, product leadership, what I’m finding is that leadership just isn’t there.

There’s rarely a defined decision-making process. There’s rarely a delegation of authority to the members of that leadership team. There’s nothing that says, this is the information we’re going to look at, and we’re going to make a decision every quarter for our budget in this regard. So if that’s not there, then what are you coming up alongside as a marketing?

John Jantsch (06:01.799)

Well, I guess my point is, is I agree with you. there’s nothing to come alongside. So why don’t you bring it to them?

Max Traylor (06:10.412)

Yes. And, so with a yes and, because I don’t think the, I don’t think your task is to bring marketing leadership. I think your task is to bring leadership and you should be prepared for the first time to facilitate a leadership planning session. So I think it’s one, I think you need to skip, or just recognize that you’re, you’re not just leading marketing as the person that

that owns that space, you’re also needing to facilitate probably for the first time, a decision making process, a planning cadence. And so you need to be well versed in the other departments in the business and you can’t, you can’t just assume that everything’s going to function the way you think it should function.

John Jantsch (06:57.113)

I think you should assume completely the opposite. Of course.

Max Traylor (06:59.662)

Yes, assume complete dysfunction. is the way. Sometimes I talk to smaller agencies and they believe that going up market, those clients are going to have their stuff together. You and I both know that it’s more chaotic the larger the organizations get, which makes it a lot easier to provide value in a strategic way because they’re so dysfunctional.

John Jantsch (07:12.773)

Yeah, yeah,

John Jantsch (07:24.391)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s just more meetings. It’s what I’ve found. Yeah. So let’s, let’s get to your favorite topic. Shall we? I know that you have been for some amount of time talking about this idea of here’s an idea. You’ve got a client already. Why don’t you get more business out of them? Scale the relationship that you already have. So talk a little bit about, and I know you’ve got some success stories you could talk about.

Max Traylor (07:27.95)

It is more meetings. That’s correct. Yeah. So you got to charge.

John Jantsch (07:52.699)

But talk a little bit about that mindset shift even.

Max Traylor (07:56.386)

Yeah, I mean, we want to make, we want to make revenue. Let’s start there. We can all agree. We’re at the, we’re at the fireplace. Cool. you get revenue from two sides of the business. You get new clients and you upsell cross sell to existing clients. That’s the only way to get revenue. That’s the only way to grow revenue. And all of the studies are showing a downward trend in the number of new meetings, a downward trend in the number of new logos coming on. is getting harder.

John Jantsch (08:24.005)

Mm.

Max Traylor (08:25.518)

person I was interviewing the other day had some study in his hand. all do. it was meetings are across the board down 30 % in 2024 and it’s only getting worse in 2025. The numbers are irrelevant. Just go ask people. You and I talked to enough people. New logos are getting harder. That’s the theme of 2023, 2024. Everything was sunshine and rainbows before that. So my question to everyone out there is when new logos are hard,

why can’t we look at upsell cross sell as a reliable revenue growth engine. And the reason is, no one’s paying attention to it. No one’s incentivizing for it. No one’s training for it. No one’s holding people accountable. We’re completely asleep at the wheel. It’s as if we hired a bunch of salespeople without incentivizing them or training them. And by the way, they’ve never worked in sales before. That’s what’s going on in the agency space.

John Jantsch (09:23.015)

All right, so let’s talk about mistakes on this, because that seems like a simple concept, but it also seems like there’s ways to screw it up. Because I’ve seen agencies that have business development folks, and they’re like, no, that’s my job. But they have no real relationship with the client, whereas the account manager or whoever, project manager, whatever you call them, is working with the client every day.

How do you see that working? Is it a business development function or is it train your account managers to look for opportunities?

Max Traylor (09:53.134)

I think that if it had to be a business account function, that would be better than it is today because I don’t see what you’ve just described where an account executive that is responsible for a revenue quota is going, okay, I could sell to new logos. Okay, my pipeline’s a little dry. What do we have for existing clients? Who can I upsell there? That is not the mindset because what typically happens is the principal assigns

And I say assigns in big sarcastic quotes, assigns upsell cross-sell client retention to the services side of the business. And it’s actually a no fly zone. It’s a no fly zone. It’s a don’t go there. It’s not your job. You won’t be incentivized for it. That’s the attitude towards the sales team in an effort to, make sure they focus on getting new logos.

And so honestly, if, if we just broke down the barriers and just admitted that our service people aren’t willing to aren’t willing or able at the moment to pull their weight and upsell clients and you just unleashed the sales team on existing clients, I think they’d get pretty far. I think they do pretty well. But it’s not happening.

John Jantsch (11:06.799)

Yeah. Yeah. How, how, are they going to identify the opportunities? mean, theoretically, the account executive is in there going over the way they should do this. We should do this. Here’s an opportunity. How does, how does the sales person can identify those?

Max Traylor (11:20.618)

I don’t care who it is, but to identify sales opportunities, you ask questions. And right now agencies are spending months, if not years, not asking questions at all. They’re delivering reports on clicks and whatever we think the client says is their business objectives, which they’re never, we’re never delivering against business objectives. We’re delivering some marketing metric.

John Jantsch (11:24.881)

Yeah, yeah.

Max Traylor (11:43.722)

We’re talking about the things that we have delivered. We haven’t had a business conversation since the sales process. That’s the reality for most clients. So I don’t care who does it. I don’t care what dress you put on it. I don’t care if you bring in a third party. If it’s sales, you come in and you say, hey, I want to ask you some questions about your business. What are you? What are you? What initiatives are you investing in across the board? Let’s talk about sales. Let’s talk about product. Let’s talk about.

finance, let’s talk about anything that’s not marketing. Like let’s, let’s just, let’s talk about real stuff here. You ask questions, you understand what they’re spending money on. And then you say, Hmm, how can I add value, to those business objectives? Like that’s what sale that sales. So that’s what we got to do.

John Jantsch (12:27.399)

Yeah. So a lot of agencies structure their fees around retainers. I know how you feel about this. So I’m just going to let you have this one. What about, what do you tell that agency says, well, we’re locked into this retainer. I, I, I’m, I’ll set you up. think you think retainers are not the right way.

Max Traylor (12:38.766)

Did I say that before? I don’t know.

Max Traylor (12:52.182)

Well, like, you know, when you go bowling and there’s the people with the bumpers? Yeah, yeah. Or or or you’re riding a bike and there’s training wheels. Yeah. Retainers are for the non confident. Retainers are a trade off. First of all, we all know that any retainer relationship is going to get less profitable as time goes on because the client is incentivized to get more and more from you for what they’re paying. Great. So profitability goes down.

John Jantsch (12:58.95)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:19.111)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (13:22.104)

The other challenge is it’s nearly impossible to grow or expand that account when you’re on retainer, because the whole point is we’re on retainer and you get whatever you need from us. So there’s no upsell. Retainer also breeds this sort of complacency throughout the entire account team. And all they’re thinking about is how do I hang on to this? It’s a very defensive posture. Ultimately, the client starts to gain control. They start to set

scope and tell agency what to do. You’ve lost control, you’re done, you’re going to lose that account. So you see a lot of agencies that are not confident in their upsell motion go after retainers. And honestly, I think it’s a false sense of security because if a client is going to cancel after month three, they’re going to cancel. The fact that you have a contract that lasts a year is completely irrelevant. They could berate you across the internet and you’ll be begging to get out

track. So let’s be real. What is much more profitable and naturally breeds upsell is projects. Everybody hates projects because you have to keep selling them. There is a middle ground. I always tell agencies, look, you want to have that long term conversation. You want to create a roadmap that aligns with their business objectives for the course of the year, because that’s when they decide how much budget is going to be allocated to say marketing.

John Jantsch (14:23.377)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (14:47.538)

But what I wouldn’t do is say, OK, here’s exactly what I’m to do with that budget for the course of the year. I’m going to say, look, we as as an as your new marketing leader and I know organization that you don’t have a cadence, but as your new marketing leader, I suggest that once a quarter we as a leadership team get together and decide how this budget will be allocated. Will create a plan that says here the goals here are the roles, the timeline, the budget considerations.

John Jantsch (15:08.817)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (15:17.27)

And what that does is it gives you the benefit of a project because you can scope that out very defined. So you maintain your margins and you maintain control of the client account, but it also forces the leadership team, the budget holding decision makers to come to the table once a quarter and you sit and you listen.

John Jantsch (15:33.574)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:40.241)

So this sort of relates to that. We work with a lot of, end up, I have ended up having a lot of conversations with agencies that feel like they, you know, they can’t get what they’re worth or what, you know, they’re always in this competitive environment. How do you, a lot of times it’s just, they won’t charge what they’re worth. You know, because they’re afraid they won’t get the work.

Max Traylor (15:59.446)

Yeah, honestly, step one, you don’t even have to you don’t have to pay me you don’t have to pay john just raise your prices like you’ll it’s a sobering exercise. There’s there’s someone there’s somewhere in between what you’re charging today, and what you’re worth and you got to find that but yes, that’s that’s step one for many people.

John Jantsch (16:05.221)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:17.575)

Seth Godin in his last book, and I never heard this put so succinctly. said, you know, pricing is how you pick your clients and how you pick your competitors. And I was like, yeah, that’s, that’s very real.

Max Traylor (16:31.212)

Yeah, yeah, my dad always said, you know, if you get a yes, that all you’ve learned is that you didn’t charge enough. No is the beginning of getting to the price that they’re willing to pay.

John Jantsch (16:38.627)

Right.

John Jantsch (16:45.243)

We went through a period and I don’t know if we’re out of it or still in it, know, where a lot of agencies were very much trying to productize their approach, you know, package their approach, their deliverables, you know, that they could say, well, if we charge this for this deliverable, we know what our margin is. Where do you fall on that type of approach? I still see a lot of it. It seems like it’s waning a little. Where do you fall on that?

Max Traylor (17:06.956)

Yeah, I mean, my first book was how to productize your consulting services. I mean, I think the term productize gets confused a lot. What I really mean is be an adult responsible service provider. Like you can’t just say it’s chaos. You can’t say it’s different for every client. No, grow up. You need a service process. Of course, clients are going to get, you know, different deliverables and things, but you have to decide these are the companies I’m working with.

John Jantsch (17:10.041)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:14.789)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:23.675)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Traylor (17:35.362)

this is the process we’re going to use to deliver the value and you have to make some decisions on on what you know, piece of the value proposition that you want to contribute to. So I for years, there’s been a general lack of decision making on positioning and on service process. It’s been complete chaos. So yes, I’ve used that term product ties just to say you deliver the same thing to the same people for the same price or you don’t have a business. have operational chaos. what I’ve, what I,

John Jantsch (18:00.945)

Yeah, yeah.

Max Traylor (18:03.35)

I guess what I’ve seen is yes, more and more companies have done that. let’s say 10 years ago, sales consultancy world was very mature in this area. The world did not need another sales methodology, right? There was 25 million books on this is the sales methodology and clients got tired of that. They were like, look, I don’t care what, I don’t care what your methodology is. Just what are you going to do for me? Marketing was about 10 years behind. had 10 years of taking chaos into these named.

John Jantsch (18:17.339)

Mm-hmm.

Max Traylor (18:33.07)

methodologies and this is our inbound thing. Now every buzzword in the English language has been claimed. Clients are fatigued. Yes, I think there’s no longer this. we have this proprietary named thing. So no, I don’t think there’s that there’s that lure to it from a sales standpoint, but you still need to create that product mindset within your services team to get

to get repeatable operations, to be able to set and meet expectations with clients. You still have to do it. It’s just not like, it’s not, you’re not putting it in bright lights and going, look at what we can do. It’s like, yeah, I look AI can tell me that too.

John Jantsch (19:13.37)

Right.

All right. So your answer may be don’t, but if somebody were listening to this and saying, I’m going to start a consulting agency today, how, would you tell them? Where would you tell them to go? What would you tell them they had to have to be thinking about? What would you tell them they possibly, you know, can’t possibly do?

Max Traylor (19:40.642)

Well, the first thing I would do is ask myself, where do I have experience? My grandfather always said, you have to know the territory. And the worst thing that people do, like you have perfectly capable business owners out there that start agencies, but they go through this phase of, we’re going to see what works. And, you know, they ask for some referrals and they’ll spend years in chaos, not really developing an identity for themselves and whatever identity they do develop.

completely tactical, replaceable, marginalized by people in decision making seats. So they have to just look at their career and say, what business acumen do I have? Okay, I’m going to do that. And they have to make that scary decision. And when they make that scary decision, you got to spend the first year talking to as many people as you can in that space, figure out what they need, do that for them. Those are those are the basics that I just don’t see.

people, people do. I think you can develop an incredibly successful business if you A, choose your target market and B, are relentless about speaking to them, understanding what their needs are. those two things. I think you’re good. think, I think agency is in a great place. but not for most given the mindset that I encounter, you know, day in and day out.

John Jantsch (20:54.748)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:02.053)

Yeah, I said a billion times, people don’t care, don’t want what we sell. They want their problem solved. I think that’s what, that’s what we have to continue to focus on. Yeah.

Max Traylor (21:10.188)

Yeah, so you are you are problem finders. So you got to your thing, you got to go figure out what their problem is. And then you got to help them solve the problem. I would I would still say that, you know, there are are two steps to solving a problem. It’s helping the client understand how to solve that problem. That I think is where the money is. That’s selling knowledge that’s selling expertise. Then there’s the doing of that thing. That’s the commoditized area that’s either going to be my AI or, you know, shark.

John Jantsch (21:27.463)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (21:39.278)

Price chopped chum water with.

whatever generation is entering the market now, I can’t keep track of it. But those guys, those people.

John Jantsch (21:47.431)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Traylor (21:55.197)

Uh-huh. But they’re out there cutting prices is what they’re doing.

Max Traylor (22:09.046)

As a great new social network, LinkedIn. Yeah. Max trailer, LinkedIn. I’m always saying opinionated things and posting videos.

John Jantsch (22:11.717)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s

John Jantsch (22:17.605)

Yeah. No, your, your feed is, is, lively and interesting. How’s that? That was a tough one. Okay. That’s how it was, man, as well. Again, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Max Traylor (22:23.458)

Thank you.

Max Traylor (22:26.978)

Yes, I took it as such.

Max Traylor (22:35.054)

Cheers.

How Small Businesses Win on Reddit in 2025

How Small Businesses Win on Reddit in 2025 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jim Squires

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Jim Squires, Executive Vice President of Business Marketing and Growth at Reddit. We explored how small businesses and marketing agencies can tap into Reddit’s communities to build authentic engagement, run effective Reddit Ads, and grow their brands through community-based marketing. Whether you’re looking for tips on Reddit organic engagement or want to maximize Reddit advertising for your business, Jim shared actionable strategies every small business owner and digital marketer should know.

During our conversation, Jim highlighted how Reddit marketing strategies differ from traditional social media marketing. With over 100,000 active Reddit communities, businesses can reach highly engaged, niche audiences in ways that simply aren’t possible on other platforms. From interest-based targeting to upvote/downvote dynamics that prioritize authentic content, Reddit for businesses offers a unique opportunity to build community trust while driving both awareness and conversions.

Key Takeaways:

Reddit is a community-driven platform where users gather around shared passions and interests, creating valuable opportunities for niche marketing strategies and online community marketing.
Unlike traditional social platforms, Reddit’s upvote/downvote system ensures the most helpful and engaging content rises to the top, rewarding brands that embrace authentic brand voice and transparency.
Small businesses can launch targeted campaigns quickly using Reddit Ads, benefiting from interest-based targeting that puts their message in front of the right communities without needing large budgets.
Reddit Pro, a free tool, helps businesses monitor trending conversations, track competitor mentions, and identify new content strategies through the Reddit trends tool.
Combining paid Reddit advertising with organic Reddit engagement allows businesses to build community trust while driving both brand awareness and sales.
For marketing agencies, Reddit offers unique reach into hard-to-access communities, especially for B2B marketing and localized small business marketing.
Successful brands on Reddit embrace transparency, engage directly with users through formats like AMAs, and avoid overly polished or sales-driven messaging, which is heavily discouraged by community self-promotion rules.
As online conversations and trust become critical to customer decision-making, Reddit offers small businesses a chance to be part of the dialogue in a way that builds long-term credibility and customer loyalty.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Jim Squires
[00:56] How Does Reddit Differ From Other Platforms?
[04:20] Impact of Search on Reddit
[05:54] Best Practices for Businesses on Reddit
[08:17] How Does Advertising Fit in on Reddit
[10:52] Getting Organic Reach on Reddit
[13:05] Small Business Mistakes on Reddit
[15:47] How to Measure Success on Reddit
[18:34] Meeting People Where They Are

More About Jim Squires:

Check out Jim Squires’ Website
Connect with Jim Squires on LinkedIn

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.981)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jim Squires. He’s a Reddit’s EVP of business marketing and growth. He oversees the strategy and expansion behind Reddit’s marketing efforts as they relate to our growing advertiser base. So their growing advertiser base is probably what I should have said. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Squires (00:23.662)

Hi John, it’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (00:25.437)

So I told you off air that I had Alexis on the show about five or six years ago. He’s no longer involved at all, In Reddit, Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, I think Reddit has started to get lumped into social platforms. I’m not sure that’s where they started. It certainly has its own.

Jim Squires (00:35.975)

Correct. Yep. Steve Hoffman is our CEO and founder actually from the very beginning.

John Jantsch (00:53.579)

personality, I guess, if you will. So talk a little bit about how the unique culture at Reddit on the platform kind of differ, is different from say LinkedIn and Facebook and some other social platforms.

Jim Squires (00:59.97)

Yep.

Jim Squires (01:05.176)

Yeah, yeah, it is unique. It’s a very different platform. It is, I describe it as a community of communities. And so you’ve got a hundred thousand plus active communities, everything from gaming to gardening, tech to travel, investing to interior design, really anything that you can think of is on there. And so people organize around their interests and their passions.

And it’s very different from other platforms in the sense that even the dynamics, there’s not likes on the platform. There’s up votes and down votes, which means that only the really universally valuable, interesting things float up and get distribution. The stuff that’s really divisive or controversial gets a lot of up votes and down votes and then never gets anywhere. So it feels very different. It’s anonymous. So people use pseudonyms on the platforms. And so there’s a lot of different dimensions, but the biggest thing

John Jantsch (01:38.923)

Yeah, right.

Jim Squires (02:02.318)

to think about is those communities and the passion and how people organize around that.

John Jantsch (02:05.525)

Yes.

Yeah, and really niche, right? mean, like subreddit, subreddit, subreddit of, you know, a very small community, right? But the people that are in that community are not just casual passerbys. I mean, they are like totally into it,

Jim Squires (02:21.838)

Yeah, yeah. I you have massive communities. There’s communities like be amazed or which car should I buy that have millions of people in them. And then to your point, you can go super niche and super deep into specific categories as well. So it really runs across the board.

John Jantsch (02:33.953)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:41.825)

So in terms of communication, engagement, participation, how would you say, you know, there in the early days, particularly, there was kind of this vibe of like behave here and be a good citizen or, know, you’ll get kicked out kind of thing, as opposed to say, I don’t know, all comers on Twitter or something, you know, might’ve been. So I’m sure as Reddit has grown, you know, some of that’s probably gone away, but would you say that that, that sort of DNA still exists? Yeah.

Jim Squires (03:10.218)

It definitely does. It is a, part of what I was describing before with this up vote, down vote dynamic that keeps bad behavior from bubbling over because it just, you’re just not rewarded for doing anything in that, in that area. You’ve got moderators for each of the communities that have their, their own rules and they govern how that community is going to, to engage. so,

John Jantsch (03:24.107)

Yeah, yeah.

Jim Squires (03:35.822)

between the rules of engagement and knowing that if you’re going to step out of line or behave poorly, one, no one’s gonna probably see it, and two, the moderator might ban you or take you out of that community. So it really keeps things positive and helpful for people.

John Jantsch (03:47.445)

Yeah, and-

John Jantsch (03:52.85)

And, poorly is not just calling people names. mean, it’s self-promotion too, right?

Jim Squires (03:57.294)

That’s exactly right. People, and this is great advice for small businesses as well, is people don’t, which is not unlike anywhere, even in our personal lives, they don’t like to be marketed to. They want to be spoken to. They know there’s humans behind these businesses and the more you can show that humanity of the business and engage with people in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re just being salesy or too overly polished, that resonates really well, especially on Reddit.

John Jantsch (04:07.809)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (04:25.451)

Yeah. So one of the things that it’s probably been going on longer, but certainly has been very noticeable maybe for the last three years is that, you know, Reddit used, it feels like Reddit used to exist in its own universe. And now you can’t do a Google search that doesn’t usually turn up some Reddit conversations. So how has that changed the dynamic of the platform?

Jim Squires (04:45.772)

Great. Yeah.

It has, mean, it’s interesting because Reddit’s been around for 20 years doing its thing. And there actually is just this rich repository of all these conversations that have happened over 20 years. But it really has become even more important and it’s having a cultural moment right now because, and my view on this is because there’s so much AI-generated content and search, AI-generated search results pages and

John Jantsch (05:09.013)

Yeah.

Jim Squires (05:18.616)

People have grown tired of paid influencers. They see through that and they’re much more savvy on being sold to. And so there really is this desire to have a more authentic connection, really hear from people, hear their real opinions about things. And so many people, to your point, they come in through a search. they’re looking for, they’re going camping and they’re getting into camping. Gear is a really big part of any hobby and passion that you have.

John Jantsch (05:46.849)

Yeah, yeah.

Jim Squires (05:48.268)

looking for something in particular, Reddit pops up in the search results and then they find themselves now in these conversations. So a lot of people discover Reddit through search and then they stay for the community because they realize, wow, there’s so much more here beyond just that camping gear I was just looking for.

John Jantsch (06:04.651)

Yeah. So, however, commerce is happening, right? on Reddit. So, so let’s talk a little bit about, if I’m in a small business and I thought, I’m playing on all these other platforms. How can I get into Reddit? Or if I’m an agency and I’m thinking, you know, how do I bring my clients, and get value out of Reddit? You know, I’m sure it depends on the business and the niche and what your goals are.

Jim Squires (06:10.188)

Right, it is, definitely.

John Jantsch (06:29.877)

But in general, is there kind of a best practice approach to get yourself up and going on Reddit?

Jim Squires (06:37.004)

Yep. I we keep it really simple and it’s relevant for really whatever category you’re in or whatever business that you’re running. There is a really easy to use ads interface. is the easiest way to, you small businesses don’t typically have a lot of time. They want to get to results and find new customers quickly. And so we make it easy to through ads, just quickly get distribution. And so you can take, you know, if you’re running advertising on another platform,

make it really easy to import that campaign over. You can use the AI tools to automate things and just get it going really quickly. And really, just with a few hundred dollars, you can start seeing progress and seeing and getting new customers. In fact, we should throw it in the notes, but we have for duct tape marketing listeners, we’ve got a promo code, duct tape 500 that they can use to get started on ads if they want to. But I recommend that’s just the easiest way to dip your toe in is just get

ads going and I can talk more about tactically how that works. And then the other thing I want to call out is we have a free set of tools to also get going. And so we call it Reddit Pro. And through Reddit Pro, you can get your official presence on Reddit, so your official profile, and you can start actually seeing trends. So what are people saying about your business, your competitors? What are people talking about in your category? What’s trending? What’s interesting?

John Jantsch (07:36.683)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:58.497)

Hmm.

Jim Squires (08:02.67)

and then actually shows you which of those communities you can go into and learn more. And you can even start engaging as the official business. People love to hear from businesses when they’re authentic and they’re talking as humans and getting some inside tracks. That’s the other thing you can do.

John Jantsch (08:13.974)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Serving and solving problems, right? So, so let’s, I want to get back to organic in a minute, but let’s touch on the advertising again. You said it’s duct tape 500. that’s D U C T T A P E 500. And if you spend 500, you’re going to get 500. So that’s kind of the way that deal works. How does advertising, I know some platforms that were traditionally very organic and then figured out, we got to make money.

Jim Squires (08:19.812)

I like that, yes, well said.

Jim Squires (08:34.562)

That’s right. That’s right.

John Jantsch (08:45.069)

we’re going to sell ads. The ads, they struggle with how do we get those in? How are people going to view those? And obviously an ad is a call to action quite often, by now kind of thing. So how does that fit in culturally?

Jim Squires (08:57.742)

Mm-hmm.

Jim Squires (09:03.406)

Well, it’s interesting. We took the reverse approach. So we started with ads before the organic. And so people got used to it pretty quickly as far as how it fits in. mean, a big part of it is kind of thinking about what communities are going to be most relevant to you. And we made that really easy as well. So for example, health and well-being, there’s lots of communities in that realm. So everything from

John Jantsch (09:09.387)

Okay.

Jim Squires (09:32.142)

The communities are always structured r slash. So r slash get motivated, r slash weight loss, r slash fitness. These are all in that health and wellness category. But as a small business, you don’t have time to go through and try to figure out which of these communities is going to be relevant to you. So you can just tag health as a interest category that you think is relevant for your products. And then the ad system will go out and pull all the relevant

communities that might be of interest and the people that are in those communities, it’s anonymous, so that you can then get your ad in front of them either in those communities or when they’re in their feed or they’re in some other community on the site. So it’s a really easy way to get into those interests and then your product is gonna be very relevant for those individuals because they’ve expressed interest in that area.

John Jantsch (10:26.155)

So let’s say I want to do a combination. I want to actually build an organic presence as well as doing some advertising. What’s a, you know, it’s probably not an overnight solution, but what is, what’s a kind of best practices approach for getting some organic reach on?

Jim Squires (10:43.82)

Yeah, yeah. Well, you would want to set up your official profile. So you get that. This is now my business on Reddit. So people know that you’re the official voice of that business. And you really want to start. We just released a new product called Trends that’s free as part of Reddit Pro. And I always suggest just quickly jumping in. can actually specify.

John Jantsch (10:48.289)

Right,

Jim Squires (11:09.966)

keywords that you think are interesting or related to your business. And you can start seeing through your category what might be trending, what are people talking about? Are people talking about my business? Are they talking about my competitors’ businesses? What are they saying? And that gives you an entree into, okay, do I want to engage yet? Or I just want to kind of check things out and see what the tone is and see what’s happening there. Now the businesses that really…

elevate and do really well are actually they start engaging and they start interacting with the community and people really appreciate. We talked earlier about showing the humanity of the business. They appreciate transparency. So having the good and the bad, it’s being, it’s, you know, talking about things that maybe not aren’t perfect, gets you a lot of credibility in a community and across Reddit. There is a

a business that’s on Reddit that sells diaper bags, like travel diaper bags. It’s called the No Reception Club. And they jumped on there and they’re running ads. They also have an organic presence. And people were commenting that the bags were too expensive. They had really high price point. And so instead of just kind of withering away or not addressing that,

John Jantsch (12:11.233)

Yeah.

Jim Squires (12:31.256)

they hit a head on and started talking about why it’s a high price point because of all these features, the quality, they’ve got a lifetime warranty and that built so much credibility with people in those communities and went over a lot of people that were saying, I see, they actually engage in me and explained what is going on and that just gives you a lot of points.

John Jantsch (12:52.479)

Yeah, sure. So what are some of the challenges you’ve seen or maybe we could even say mistakes you’ve seen small businesses make, you know, really trying to engage on Reddit.

Jim Squires (13:03.778)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, kind of the mistakes that get made relate to what we were just talking about. So you cut you come in and you can imagine like, like as humans, we don’t walk into a meeting or walk into a party and just start shouting about ourself. You you you ease your way in. You start talking. You get you get a feel for the vibe and what’s happening. And then you can talk about yourself and what you’re doing. And so the brands that that would show up or businesses that show up and and we coach on this so it doesn’t happen.

very often, but if you show up and you are just just shouting with salesy messaging and and not being authentic and engaging that way, it’s a you’re not going to get shouted away. I you can show up with ads. People are used to ads and they’re not going to, know, you can turn off comments and not really worry about it that much. But again, as we were saying before, if you really want to elevate, you really want to have success in the platform. Being aware of that, even turning comments on.

because you want to hear from people and you want to understand your customers, that’s kind where you elevate to the next level.

John Jantsch (14:08.289)

Ken, is there a type of content that performs questions, behind the scenes insights, educational posts, AMAs? mean, is there a certain type that you think performs better?

Jim Squires (14:17.486)

Yeah, that’s a great question.

I love that. It’s not one specific type, but I like where you’re going. The angle on this is, within the different formats, what type of content might resonate. And I would say that, in general, that transparency and being willing to engage always does well. So the AMA is a perfect example of that. There was actually Oatly, the oat milk brand. I love they did an AMA and they invited

Big dairy, know, big dairy businesses to come co-host with them and talk about climate footprint labeling. No one from Big Dairy showed up on that and took them up on it. Well, that small dairy showed up and there was a Scottish dairy farmer that showed up and actually engaged and talked through and they had a really good dialogue. So that type of content does well. Behind the scenes content is really, really good. I mean, you can imagine a microbrewery

John Jantsch (14:53.131)

Yeah, yeah.

Jim Squires (15:19.778)

taking you behind the scenes on how they brew their IPAs and people really want to geek out on that. They want to see the technical aspects of it, understand what’s behind the scenes. And what it does is it shows when you show, because we all, with each of our businesses, we have a passion for what we’re doing. That’s why we started that business. And so when you show that enthusiasm, that passion and that craft, these people in the communities, they have the same passion. And so it really resonates with them.

John Jantsch (15:28.715)

Yes.

Jim Squires (15:48.396)

and then they want to lean in and they want to learn more about

John Jantsch (15:52.363)

So imagine the CEO sitting around saying, okay, my agency says I need to be on Reddit. How do I know if I’m getting any return on being there? What type of reporting, what type of measurement is available for somebody to know? Am I having success?

Jim Squires (16:02.359)

Yeah.

Jim Squires (16:09.57)

Yep, yep. mean, that’s, that is the key. What am I, what have I accomplished here? So Reddit is a, it is, it’s multi objective. So it really, it really goes from, you know, top of the funnel reach all the way down to driving sales with what you’re trying to do. And so it depends on where you’re at in your life cycle and kind of what you’re trying to achieve. But I think about on the, discovery side, so people are showing up and they’re really open minded. They want to discover new products and services.

I do look at the overall reach that you’re getting inside of these different communities and try to understand that. I think for most small businesses, they want to move faster and they want to just get new customers. And so then I suggest looking at the traffic that is coming off of your advertising and your organic presence. You can measure that directly and see what traffic you’re getting. And then ultimately, I look at the conversions and the new customers.

that you’ve converted and the purchases that you can drive. So as part of the reporting, you have access to all of that to go to instrument it. And then based on your campaign, what you’re trying to achieve, that’s actually the key thing is a lot of times businesses show up and they haven’t crystallized. What am I actually trying to do with this campaign and making sure the creative ties to that? But having that really clear and then looking at the appropriate stats for that is really what I recommend.

John Jantsch (17:22.879)

Yeah, yeah, Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:33.835)

So you mentioned the word creative. Is there a form of creative, you know, maybe that’s a little more tongue in cheek, a little more, or a little more cynical or, you know, just rather than just the traditional, we’re the best, bye from us.

Jim Squires (17:46.382)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there’s lots of memes on Reddit, definitely. You can play into that, and some brands really do that. My advice on the creative is not unlike advice you would give a friend is be yourself on this. And so if you are a really tongue in cheek, kind of clever brand, then that should come out in your creative. If you’re not, and you’re doing

John Jantsch (17:50.093)

Right.

John Jantsch (18:01.695)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim Squires (18:12.858)

You know, B2B is huge on the platform. And so if you’re doing some, somebody’s B2B, that’s more serious and that you feel like that’s actually not your thing. you don’t want to show up on Reddit and then start doing that. Cause that stands out as well. So I always like to have the, what, what, what are you as a brand? What do you stand for? What are you trying to communicate? And then have that tie in versus trying to, change yourself, to try to fit in or, or feel like it’s reddity or something that’s, that’s, that’s going to fit in there.

John Jantsch (18:35.904)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it’s probably no, no faster way to fail than to try to be something you’re not right. Right. So one of the things that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, you know, ties into AI ties into zero click, you know, searches, now is that, advice we’re giving people is like it or not. You’ve probably got to be a few more places where people are choosing to get their information and hang out.

Jim Squires (18:44.866)

That’s right. As people in life or on platforms. Yes, exactly.

John Jantsch (19:08.737)

And it’s not always search engines. How have you seen that impact Reddit or have you? guess I should ask first. Yeah.

Jim Squires (19:09.005)

Yeah.

Jim Squires (19:13.186)

Yeah, mean, it’s absolutely it’s a great it’s a great point. mean, there is a one one thing that is interesting about Reddit is that it has a lot of unduplicated reach. So people that are on Reddit that are on Facebook or Instagram or other other places. And so that is that’s counterintuitive because these other platforms are so big. But there actually are a lot of people that are on those other platforms. So being able

John Jantsch (19:38.581)

Well, and I suspect trust has a lot to do with it.

Jim Squires (19:42.562)

Yes, what they look at, that’s a great point. mean, people, it’s anonymous as we talked about before, people are sharing their unvarnished real opinions. And so people trust that because they’re enthusiastic. Yeah. So I think that ability to get to customers that you can’t get to on other platforms is something really to consider and think about when you’re looking at it.

John Jantsch (19:43.553)

Or lack thereof. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:08.651)

Yes.

Jim Squires (20:08.812)

And so, yeah, so I think it does, that’s one of the things on why you would want to branch out. The other reason is that you have on all the different platforms, people are in different mindsets and they’re doing different things, which really affects what they may want to be purchasing or the decisions they may want to be making. So for example, on most platforms, targeting based on demo is really the standard.

John Jantsch (20:38.079)

Yeah.

Jim Squires (20:38.274)

If you were targeting me on another platform, you’re going to know that I live in San Francisco. I’m in my forties. you may know, you may know where I work. You know, there’s like certain things that you know about, about me. Well, you wouldn’t know that, know, on Reddit is that I’m really into mountain biking and that I’m in the market right now to get a, a, a heavy duty, bike rack for my car that can hold four bikes. Cause I want to have my kids and my wife be able to go with, with me.

John Jantsch (20:50.315)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:55.477)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:06.241)

Mmm… Yeah.

Jim Squires (21:08.002)

and that it can go long distances up into the mountains. You wouldn’t know that on another platform. And so that’s the different dimension. And so as a business, you wanna be where your customers are and you wanna be where they are making purchase decisions. We always say that conversations drive decisions. And so people are making those decisions through the process. That’s what I encourage.

John Jantsch (21:21.835)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:27.553)

Yeah. And I certainly notice a lot of, anybody got advice on, know, kind of post, which is pretty high buyer intent, right? Um, yeah. So by the way, the Thule hitch rack, I swear by it. That’s the way I would go. That’s the way I have gone. and, and, and so now, now we need to talk about your, your, your setup on your bike. Uh, I’m a, I’m a Santa Cruz guy myself. Okay. Awesome.

Jim Squires (21:34.318)

That’s right.

Jim Squires (21:39.162)

Is that the way to go? Okay. Okay, that’s enough. I’m down to three right now.

Jim Squires (21:50.401)

I’m a Santa Cruz guy also, so I’ll get to 50-10, yes.

John Jantsch (21:54.461)

Awesome. There’s probably a Santa Cruz subreddit or at least a mountain bike subreddit.

Jim Squires (21:57.806)

They’re 100 % there. I was going to ask you, do you spend time on Reddit? How much do you spend phone?

John Jantsch (22:02.825)

Yeah, we have the, have, we do a lot of training of fractional CMOs and marketing consultants and agencies. So we participate in a few of those conversations for sure. Yeah.

Jim Squires (22:13.966)

Okay, there’s a lot of great small business communities, small business marketers. And so you can kind of as business use it in multiple ways. You’re using it to get to your customers and potential customers. And then you’re also using it for your own benefit for advice and understanding how to run your business along with other small business owners.

John Jantsch (22:35.391)

Yeah. And I mentioned that’s actually a pretty, pretty good way to start getting engaged is go in there and just start asking questions, right? mean, of stuff you truly want to know, that probably is going to create some engagement all on its own. Cause people love to give answers. Yeah.

Jim Squires (22:41.806)

Yep, definitely.

Jim Squires (22:48.774)

That’s exactly right. There’s nothing when you, and I also encourage people to say, people to when they start using it, when you do that first post and people start up voting it and you get literally karma points, that’s what we call it. So it shows you feel like, wow, I just added something of value to the universe. I’m getting these karma points. It feels really good. It’s like you’re contributing to this community. It’s a nice feeling.

John Jantsch (23:06.261)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Jim, I want to thank you for something by the duct tape marketing podcast. is there someplace you invite people to connect with you? Obviously we’ve been talking about Reddit, reddit.com. we got a special for you listeners, a duct tape 500 to get some ad spend. Is there anywhere else you’d want people to connect with you?

Jim Squires (23:30.382)

We have a young on on Reddit, of course, I’m Jim at reddit.com. I’m happy to connect with people and and yeah, just it’s great great being here I’m a fan of the the podcast and love what what you do with small businesses. So thank you for having me

John Jantsch (23:47.381)

Thanks so much again. Hopefully we’ll run into you. I’ve got a daughter that lives out in the Bay area, so maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out on the road. Awesome. Take care. Thanks.

Jim Squires (23:53.666)

I would love that. I would love that. Thanks, John. Take care. Bye-bye.