We Got Banned for Sharing SEO Secrets 😳

Jesse Cunningham, welcome to the show. How's it going? Julian, thank you for having me. It's been about a year since we last did a video, a year and a half maybe?

That's it. And picking up where we left off, if anyone's listening to this, we both had our websites hit by Google back then, right, for doing public case studies on YouTube. Right. I was, before the video, I'm like, okay, I've known Julian for a little bit of time, probably two and a half, three years.

We have like four commonalities. Can I share the commonalities? Of course. All right.

The weakest one is both of our names start with J. We'll take that, right. Both of us started YouTube. Our channels really went off when we started talking about ChatGBT, right when it came out, which was what, 3.0?

Right. What was the other one? We both got manually banned, right, by Google. And I remember during that time, we said during our last video, this is the golden era of AI.

And that was like a year and a half ago. And the weird part is, I think it still is. I agree with you there. Like it doesn't seem to be slowing down like that.

And we were just talking about it a minute ago before we went live, but this AI trend seems to be growing, not slowing down. If you look at like most trends where, you know, people blow up or they get big or whatever, typically that will last a year, a year and a half. But AI seems to be growing as it goes on longer, not slowing down. And the demand for content around it is just growing all the time too.

It's a great time to be an AI influencer. And part of me wonders, like, how do you play the game of AI? I mean, there's things personally that I do to make my operations like more efficient. Like for the everyday Joe, like how can they use AI is always on my mind.

But the fourth thing, and I like this, and I want to ask you a question here. The fourth similarity we have is when we did YouTube two and a half years ago, kind of side by side, talking about basically the same stuff, we both had the same style of screen share. We screen share, we show people, here's the websites. And then both our websites individually got clapped.

But you have since moved on and you can produce content like no other. I've never seen anyone produce like YouTube content at scale like you have. It's like, it's wild, man. If people don't know, like, I didn't know you have nine different YouTube channels.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. So we have a couple of avatars, a couple of female avatars, actually, because I feel like if I'm a man creating content, typically, and I look at the analytics, most of my demographics are men. And they're both basically like, you know, same sort of age as me as well. So I think, like, we decided, right, okay, we want to create multiple different formats across multiple different avatars.

And it's so easy to scale if you have, like, a good AI system in place. I mean, even on our main channel, we produce, like, eight videos a day and then, you know, about three or four shorts. We have this podcast channel, we have multiple female AI avatar channels, and then also we create, like, these clips channels, you know, where it's just, like, one or two minutes. And it'll be a highlight from one of my live streams.

So I guess we're just, like, chopping up all our content and trying to get the most out of it. It's wild, man. I remember I was talking to my wife, and I brought this up last time. I said, I have a friend on YouTube, right, and I kind of personally challenged him behind the scenes, like, a while back.

I said, what did I say? I don't know. I said something kind of obnoxious to you, kind of, like, challenging, like, let's see who can get to 100k first subscribers or something. And, like, you started just zooming.

And every time I see your channel, I just smile to myself. I'm like, you know, he not only ran past me, like, he's doing laps around me, too, now. It's wild. Oh, it's, yeah, I mean, it's good to have that sort of competition, but, um, I mean, you're, you're doing better than me in the school games this quarter, so congrats to you, man.

Thank you. School's wild. I love, I really like that community, and I'm not sponsored. I think it's a great platform to build a community on.

Yeah, 100%. Like, it's amazing the amount of people that can be on there, as well. Like, I know so many people starting school communities, building school communities, and there seems to be, like, enough market share for everyone to get a piece of it. I don't know anyone who's launched a school community and done badly.

I've had other forums on different platforms, and I can just say, like, they, they designed it really well. So, if anyone watching is thinking about a community, school is excellent. And did you see the update? They just, um, offered the freemium upgrade model today.

Has that just come out today? I'm looking forward to checking. That's, like, the tier options, right? For your big community, your free one, you could have the option to upgrade for, like, unlockable modules and stuff.

That could be huge. Nice. Yeah, I'm going to check that out, for sure. Like, I think that'd be a good one.

I know it's kind of tied into Alex Hormozy's latest book, because he talks about different sort of business models you can use, including premium tiers and free tiers and that sort of thing. So, yeah. What's your plan for that? Are you going to use it?

I don't. Well, I was talking to my, my co-founder. So, I have a partner in the, um, in my agency and in the academy. I call it the academy as the same partner, right?

We do the agency together. So, SEO agency, AI agency, and the community. And it's like, are we going to complicate things right now? Everything is working.

And we want to win the school games for this quarter. So, am I going to change anything right now? I don't know. I'm kind of hesitant to change anything right now.

So, I would be exactly the same. I'd be like, because I have messed it up in the past, where I've, like, made a little tweak, even on the sales page or something like that. And then, like, all of a sudden, the conversion rate drops to, like, you know, 0.5. Or, like, for example, I'll change the funnels that we send traffic to.

And, like, first couple of days, I'm like, oh, this is great. We're getting loads of traffic here. But then, to the funnels that were working before, the traffic drops, you know, oh, no. And then, you pay the price for that, like, seven days later.

Because it always takes a little while to catch up. The grass is always greener, right? 100%. And I think, as well, like, you're a marketer.

I'm a marketer. It's, like, the thing about marketing is there's always something new to try. There's always, like, a new test you can make. But there's also always, like, second or third order consequences to that.

And I think about that with AI. So, like, both of our channels are predicated on how to use AI to do a thing, usually ascribe in some sort of value or make money, right? And the simplest things can make a huge difference for most people. Like, you don't have to overcomplicate using AI in your life to make a difference.

And I don't want to talk about, and I don't think you do either, like, too much, like, money aspects. But if you want to have a big difference in your life, something as simple as me, instead of watching YouTube channels, I push it to Notebook LM, I get the transcript, I read, I get a summary, and I'm done. I don't recommend that people do that to my channel, because I'd prefer you to watch it. But, like, something simple like that allows me to still get the information and then go on about my day.

Yeah, that's it. You can move, like, five or ten times faster, right? But then it's like, okay, if we can move five or ten times faster, are we ever going to have leisure time? Are we ever going to have time to just chill?

Because I'm still working harder than I ever have been, because I see it as an opportunity, right? But my kind of fear in the back of my mind is, like, am I going to burn myself out, right, if I'm just going to run 12 hours a day every day? Isn't AI supposed to make our lives easier? I guess it's a personal choice, right?

Yeah, that's it. I mean, the way that I see it is, I won't burn out as long as I'm doing the things that give me energy. So, for example, if I'm doing a podcast like this, I know, like, after a podcast, I have a conversation, like, I enjoy it during the time, I feel good pretty much the whole day afterwards, you know, like a good chat with someone that you respect. When it's something like really boring admin, or filling in a spreadsheet, or something like that, that has to go.

Like, that has to go straight to someone else, because if I don't, like, I will burn out. If I'm doing tasks like that all day, it's just, it's draining my energy like a vampire. I agree. I'm a major introvert, so YouTube suits me well, and the admin stuff, too, kills me.

How big is your team right now? So, we have over, like, 50 people in the team. You know, a lot of those are virtual assistants, so they're just working on, like, a fixed price basis, doing a certain job each day. But yeah, 50 people across the team.

I'm about 10 to 15, so your operation has just exploded. Yeah, just blowing up. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Mostly, to be honest, like, if I look at the school side, I see, kind of, two big drivers of revenue in the business.

Like, you've got the school side, so the AR Profit Boardroom, and that's really small. We just have loads of little VAs, like, doing marketing, and then there's just me and Vic, who run it together. On the agency side, it's huge, because, like, you're basically arbitraging people with an agency. So, we have, like, loads of people in operations.

They're all building backlinks for our clients. Then we've got the account managers, the sales team, you know, and we've got all the... a few people in finance as well. But the operations team is big.

But, thankfully, I have an operations manager who looks after that team, so that's... that saves me a lot of time and a lot of stress. My... focus, my goal in like life right now is to have one big lever that I just pull over and over every day.

Right. And that's pretty much YouTube, right? Have you gotten to that point where you just do your one thing? Yeah.

Uh, well, I mean, I wouldn't say I focus on one thing, but we have something that we're building, like you were saying with marketing, right? So you're, you're building on YouTube and that's a big lever that generates a lot of traffic and a lot of attention. So for us, we have something that we've built over the last probably month or two called the thousand X machine. And it's all of our content across all of our platforms.

And we publish a fat, uh, sorry, we were originally publishing 300 pieces of content per day. Now we're up to the point where we're generating over 800 pieces of content per day. And so like, I'm just trying to make that lever as big as I possibly can. So I can crank out as much attention as I want.

It is. So it's so, it just blows my mind because I know how much work it goes into just one YouTube video, right? Like a screen. Let's classify that a screen share video takes more energy than a scripted video, which takes more energy than an AI avatar video.

Right. So I've been trying to think of it because you've been pushing me to, you know, just through motivation competition is like, man, I look at Julian's numbers. I look at your school numbers and I can imagine your agency, the AI avatar stuff obviously works. I've tried it myself.

I haven't been like totally happy with it, but then I've dabbled in scripted stuff, which is going well too. And that really clears up my time. I can do a scripted video in 30 minutes, opposed to a screen share in like an hour, hour and a half, which is a big time saver. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm searching for that ability to push out more content too.

But when you say something like 300 to a thousand pieces of content a day, I mean, my mind, like, what does that even look like? You know, let me pull this up. Let me find my spreadsheet here. So I mean, we have like 49 different platforms, right.

And that we do publish across, across like every single channel. So for example, you know, if I look at our latest posts, obviously we have like Instagram and Facebook ads, you know, and we test a few of those new ones each day as well. And then we distinguish between agency and community. Uh, yeah, yeah.

So we, yeah, we're, we do, we have run Facebook ads for that community as well. They just don't perform as well as for the agency, but the agency Facebook ads have been doing a lot longer. So yeah, in terms of like, for example, just publishing for, for the community. So for example, like even just for giveaway posts, so we have a giveaway competition that we do each week and we announce a winner and they win like the, the school AR Profit Boardroom lifetime access and the SEO elite circle access.

And so like, just for that alone, we published 20 pieces of content per day. Cause like we'll publish, uh, two to four times on YouTube community, four times on, on both school groups. We have two free school groups, LinkedIn four times, and then the Facebook group. So like straight away, straight off the bat, we've got like two VAs publishing 20 pieces of content on the giveaway competition each day.

I mean, okay. So we could get into the details, but what I'm more curious about is when did this like become your brain child? Like, how did you, this is something recent. Yeah, this is something recent.

So I was watching, I'm quite inspired by people like Alex Mosey. And he was talking about how for the launch of his book, which obviously like, but it broke a bunch of records, for example, like the number of sales within 24 hours and for a book launch nonfiction. And he was saying like, there's a very clear correlation between the revenue and the amount of marketing you do. And like all things being equal, if you publish more content with more volume, your revenue goes up.

And I've found the same. It's like, you know, back when I was doing one video a week, I was our revenue was much lower than one video a day, which was still lower than two videos a day. And so like the more we publish, the more we we get out of our machine. And so I was like, right, okay.

Here's what I'm going to do. I want to put it all on a spreadsheet. I'm going to set weekly targets, I'm going to track how many pieces of content are published per day across all my platforms. And then I'm going to figure out, okay, what levers can I pull or what changes can I make in the system to scale that up even more and hit more and more and more volume to the point where, you know, for example, even, um, even the clips channels, right?

So we, we do these little clips where it's like one or two minutes of YouTube footage from a live stream. And we're like, right, okay, well, that works really well on this YouTube channel. Why don't we just do that across all of our YouTube channels? And then we can five or 10 exit.

You get the data, you're getting data off of different like micro channels and then you, you can blow it up. Yeah, exactly. And then also what we can do is like, we can that that same publisher who's creating a clip on say YouTube, or why can't they just publish that same clip on like school, both free school groups, all our social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook group and, and everywhere else. And then like when they post one video, actually, we get like 10 pieces of content out of it.

Okay, so then that, and I'm learning here live, like I know people will be watching this video hoping for like AI tactics, but I'm selfishly asking you questions because we don't talk often. So when you, when you hire a VA, there's two typical philosophies, right? There is a VA, a virtual assistant, a team member that owns a whole project. So when we used to create websites, for instance, or Pinterest or Facebook pages, whatever, and use AI, what I would do personally is have them own the whole website.

Whereas some people have them do a particular task to every website, right? I'd prefer to tell someone go one time and then they kind of have like their own decision making throughout the whole process. Just do your thing, man. This is your website or websites.

If you have questions, ping me, but they're your responsibility though, right? Do you train your VAs to do like a particular task over and over? Like, how do you run that? Yeah.

So for every single process I do, I'll create a step by step operating procedure with like the instructions written down. So for example, it could be, okay, here's how you clip a video. And then I'll create a video of me doing that task as well. So that people know how long it takes and what it looks like live on screen.

And then I'll just assign that VA that one task. And so like, every time they do that task, we actually create a tracker on a spreadsheet so they can put like, here's what I did, you know, here's the places I posted it, here's the day, here's the date. And then also I can quality control it. So I can just open up all the, all the places they posted and give them feedback.

So that's basically the way that I do it. It's like they, they do individual tasks. And then if they're good or if they're fast, we can give them more tasks and assign them more stuff. So for example, like if, if, if a virtual assistant is really good at clipping a video and publishing it consistently, well, we can, we'll ask them, like, can you do like four or five of these per day?

Okay, great. Can you do like 10 of these per day? And then just keeps scaling up until they run out of time or energy. See what they're made out of.

Interesting. Okay. Well, we could segue into anything you want, Julian. What, what's on your mind?

Talk to me about how you're using AI. Like what, for example, what have you recently automated? Most exciting thing I think is last year. Well, this is all, I'll take a step back.

Rank and rent. You're familiar. Yeah. And I had a conversation with James Dooley, who's like, you know, a legend, right?

And years ago I worked for a firm as an SEO briefly that had 3000 rank and rent websites, right? And the guy was based down in Florida. He had GMBs, Google business profiles for each one. And I saw, I'm just like, mind blown.

So eventually AI comes around in my, my business partner, Sean, I'm like, man, is there a way we can automate this? And that's what we did last year. We created 50. I call them microsites, AI microsites.

There are 50 pagers. You know, most people think of landing pages as like a microsite. I call them microsites. It's probably not the best term to call them a microsite because there's 30 to 50 pagers.

They're local business websites that we put out there and we do not attach them to any Google asset. No Google search console, no Google business profile, right? It's all AI, a hundred percent. It's not WordPress.

It's a flat CMS system. It's templated. This is something that's big in the school community, right? This is like one of our driving things.

I think that's really driving a lot of signups right now. And then when people call into the local business, an AI agent answers the phone and talks to them. This is baby, baby.ai. I'm sure you know, right?

Baby. And they talk to it for three to four minutes at times. And they'll, people will, will give all that information away. And then we sell those leads to businesses or people in our community are building them for their own businesses.

And it's wild. The effects of just like your YouTube channel, it's wild instead of building one, you know, website for your business. If you're a local carpenter building. It's just flipping it on its head, like that's the biggest thing right there, just more volume.

Let's see why your school community is doing so well then. So you've created like, basically a custom system that allows local businesses to scale up with loads of microsites, and then even for the inbound lead generation, which is a total nightmare. I know from speaking to people like James Dooley, the hardest part is really getting those leads and getting them to convert and managing them well. And so you've automated probably the hardest part of the process, right?

That is still the hardest because I think then the interaction and the business relationship is the hardest part at this point. Like calling Bob who owns a roofing company, hey Bob, I got these leads. Are you interested in buying them? They're 150 bucks a pop.

That's probably the hardest part of the system because if you were to join the school community, you'd see here's the system, boom. And it's like right there. So it usually takes people a week to learn the system, but when they learn it, they can roll out a website in four to eight hours for about 10 bucks. It's wild.

That's crazy. That's what I'm most excited about right now. How do you see the internet changing? Because imagine if all these business owners are creating content like that on microsites and ranking them on ChatGPT or ranking them on Google, for example, what's the internet going to look like?

That's a good question, but I'll back it up a second with there's a reason we do this with local businesses because local SEO is much different than niche websites and everything else. I don't want to say it's easy mode to rank, but if there was an easy mode online on Google SERPs, it's local business. So that's the reason we can do that concept. If we had niche websites we could roll out, that's dead.

That's done. That's not going to work. But I think, I was thinking, I think it was yesterday or today in preparation for this meeting, I was thinking to myself, I'm going to go on Julian's podcast and I'm going to say, I think Google SERPs are better right now than what they were a year and a half ago. And I hate to say it because I'm an SEO, but I think AI overview was a good thing.

Ultimately, I can see why they did it. Yeah, I'm with you there. Like, I mean, there was just so much bad stuff ranking before, wasn't there? There was so much trash, a lot of it spam as well.

And also those AI overviews, they just tend to give better answers. Like in terms of, you know, if you compare, say, scanning a website and looking through all the content and information on there, particularly for blogs and informational versus just asking the AI review and then boom, you get your answer, that's 10 times better, right? I agree. And people will say, and I've seen them say, like, we are the culprits of, you're the reason this happened.

I've literally seen people say that. And you are the problem. You are the ones creating spam. And okay.

But you're mistaking the purpose of an SEO is to figure out the algorithm, right? So we can rank our clients' websites better, right? And so we use our, like, public-facing websites to show you, all right, let's test this concept out. It works.

It got clapped, right? And I think they should have got clapped in retrospect. At the time, it hurt and I was upset about it. But looking back, it's like, yeah, definitely.

I think mine should have got clapped. Same with mine, right? I mean, that was a bird's website fully written by AI and not even a good AI. This was like chat GPT-3, which was terrible writing.

When I look back and I look at the content now, because it still generates some ads revenue from Medivine. Does it? Amazingly. Yeah.

And when I look back and I check those websites, it's like the content is just so bad. It's embarrassing. The future of the internet. So do you remember during the HCU, there was a whole argument going on of people saying, do you think AI content will rank?

That was a big thing. And everyone's up in arms, like, it's never going to rank. Well, my, after two years or whatever, AI content does rank and it ranks well. But you have to be associated with an authoritative website, period.

It's that simple. Yeah. And also like back then, if you remember, like a year, even a year ago, like using AI for SEO was considered like a taboo thing. It was considered like you're a black cat or you're doing things the wrong way or blah, blah, blah.

It's not an ethical way to create content. But now you look and you're like, right, well, these AIs, they write better than most humans. The content is more optimized. It's way faster.

And you'd be crazy not to use this for SEO. Like, why wouldn't you? I mean, like, I'll give you an example. We had, we don't, thankfully, we don't get that many complaints.

But if I look at the complaints of content from clients and, you know, they're always going to tell you the truth. We always had more complaints from human content, from an agency writing with humans, versus the content we generated with AI. We got far less complaints on that. Do you see any difference of ranking factors of the human written versus AI?

It tends to be like easier to create more content, which means we get more opportunities to rank and then we get clients better results. Whereas like with the human content, it was so expensive that for most clients, like if you're Bob the Builder from New York, like you're not going to build, you're not going to create that much content because it's just not affordable. And so like now it's more affordable and you can create more so you get better rankings. I'm convinced if you went to like a generic AI tool and New York Times or Forbes were to post it, it would rank.

I'm still convinced of that. Yeah, for sure. We saw that with, who is it, that Indian parasite website. I totally forgot the name of it now.

I think they did a podcast. If it's the same one I was thinking. Was it Outlook India or something like that? Right, all the parasite SEO stuff.

Right, right, right. I never got big into the parasite SEO stuff. Did you? Yeah, we did quite a lot of it because there were some SEOs that we were learning from and they were giving us ideas.

So we were checking that out. And to be honest, like now, I don't know whether you call it parasite or not, but we'll create a lot of content every day in blog format across our websites, but also across like Reddit, Twitter articles, LinkedIn, et cetera. Medium, medium ranks really well. But as a whole, it's like we get a decent amount of traffic from that.

I mean our Reddit, for example, not just from SEO, but overall in general, we create articles on Reddit, on our subreddit, and that will get like 25,000 views a month, which is pretty good per year. That's excellent. I would consider the true parasite stuff like a high DR domain, whereas the social stuff is, I guess it's parasite, but it's less taboo, right? Yeah, that's it.

Like the high DR stuff is like, they call it domain reputation abuse, I guess, because you're taking advantage of that DR and then using it to rank. But if you look at someone like Forbes, the amount of content they create on stuff they're not an expert about is crazy. And so like they basically abuse their authority that they have, right? And there's nothing wrong with that.

Like if I would do the same, I would create as much content as I can if it's going to generate money. But it seems like they create content for SEO, not because they're an expert on that topic. They have in-house SEO guaranteed, if not multiple. I remember, here's a fun one, and I don't know if I answered your question.

What was the future of the internet? Yeah. Yeah, I think... I think ChatGPT and all the LLMs have a lot of hype right now, but I don't think they are driving true traffic to websites in any meaningful fashion, first off, right?

We're recording this in October, November, almost November of 2025, for the record. And I don't think, it's like 3% or less of true traffic. Google still dominates like purchase intent traffic for sure. And I like the AI overviews.

I bet you they're going to have good user experience with that. I bet you that sticks. I bet you local businesses still remain similar to what we see now because the way I see it is like an onion. This is how I've kind of perceived the internet.

An onion is like layers. So the core of the internet is inside the onion, right? And Google's job forever has been to put layers on top of this onion. Well, one of the first layers it put was Google Maps, right, MapPack, and all these local business things.

So local business always had the layers because they monetized via ads very quickly. So I like focusing on local SEO because of that because I think Google has already screwed with things. They already put their layers on. So the question then becomes, where are the more layers Google's going to put on?

AI overview is huge. What's the next layer? I mean, that's open to the table. Where is it?

Have you seen the AI mode, Google AI mode that's being tested? What do you think about it? I tested it out. I liked it.

But it was something that I never went back to because I think like, well, you've got all these different layers, like you were saying, right? So you've got videos and you've got images and you've got map search or whatever, but also an AI mode. But you have to make it stick. sticky and kind of like almost force people over, right?

Like, for example, when chat GPT Atlas came out last week, the new AI browser from chat GPT, like every time I log into chat GPT, even if I get rid of that notification, it's still trying to send me over to chat GPT Atlas. And I'm like, just stop trying to force me to use this. But the main thing is like, I guess they're trying to enforce a habit so that it becomes sticky. And then people actually use it because like you can have the best tool in the world, but if it's not a sticky habit that people come back to every day, then it doesn't matter how good it is.

To that point. I mean, I'm in my mid thirties, right? And there's the mass purchase in power in the world right now are people older than us, right? And they're accustomed to Microsoft edge at times they're accustomed to Google.

Like we still have 20, 30 years of a whole block of people who are accustomed to a thing that are not going to change. You have the majority of purchasing power. People are living longer now. So for me, there's a timeline on every tactic, every strategy, SEO, AI, whatever.

There's always like a timeline of viability, but don't underestimate the people with the money right now in the world, older demographics, they're going to use their old school stuff. It's still going to be here. So I'm not terribly concerned. And I think it's going to change.

Yes. I don't know if I could predict how it's going to change, but I'm not concerned. Yeah. Yeah.

Me too. I think as well, you know, when chat, she first came out, did you get told by a lot of people or did you feel a fear that AI was actually going to replace SEO completely? Because that was a big thing, right? Like every other week I was publishing videos saying SEO is dead.

Right. That was the pressure point. Um, yeah. I mean, I didn't know how Google would handle the, the slop, but they handled it well.

I think they handled it well. I think my biggest fear was like, okay, if the internet sucks, if Google sucks, then where are we left? I didn't have the foresight. I think the Google engineers, they obviously are much smarter than I can imagine because they, I think they navigated that really, really well.

They were outrageously good. Like, for example, when chat GPT first came out, I don't know if you remember Google, they only had Palm and bar, right? Was it barred? Barred.

Yeah. B A R D. Oh yeah. Google barred and Palm API.

And they were both terrible. Like they were a one out of 10 and chat GPT, everyone was like flocking over to chat GPT and saying how good it is. But now I feel like out of all the products and all the companies in the world, like AI, Google were dominating, like they're creating the best technology. They make free tools that are better than pay tools.

For example, like AI studios, typically better than building apps with lovable or bolt. It feels like they've put some sort of master plan together where they've learned how to dominate the industry. And because it's growing so much a share price, it's just exploded, but no one would have guessed that a couple of years ago. They wouldn't have, would they?

Yeah. Google, I think I'm not like good on stocks or whatever, but I think they have so much cash available, right? That they can do whatever they want. I don't know about open AI.

I'd imagine they have investors there for cash, but don't underestimate Google is what I've kind of learned. Yeah, me too. In many different ways. So here's a good one.

Here's a good one. If you were to go back in time, I remember I had an internship right out of high school in 2007. And it was like a terrible internship because I had to travel 45 minutes to like a corporate job. It was like office space.

I had to go to the office. I had to literally scan papers into a copier to upload them to PDF documents to sort them in full. It was terrible. But back then I remember one of the interns, he's like, dude, I'm going to start something that's called e-comm, a store where I sell instruments.

I'm like, dude, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Ever. So like looking back, if you could go back to say 2007 when Facebook really became a thing or whatever, what would you do? No, I'm not going to do that.

I don't know. I don't know what you know now. So many things that would change. So many things.

I mean, yeah, so there was a point where Facebook ads was just crazy cheap, right? And you could, you could basically, for example, if I had an agency back in 2007, Facebook ads, knowing what I know now with funnels, I think we, you could maybe, you could get as many clients as you want if you have the right sales team. So that was a big point for sure. Um, I also feel like I wish I used chat GPT for SEO before chat GPT became so big.

Cause there was a lot of people creating AI websites, ranking them on Google programmatically with AI blowing up the revenue and creating some amazing sites that got a lot of traffic. But then as soon as everything got mainstream, it kind of got clamped down on, I think that was a big window too. Was that before chat GPT 3? Like 3.0 when it became?

Yeah, exactly. So like, you know, like before it had a chat interface and like people could use the API, you, you could still use it to create websites, but nobody really knew how to use it or was aware of it. Were you aware of some people doing it? No, not until later.

And then I started going to loads of SEO conferences and realizing, okay, wow, there's a lot of people out there using this stuff. So that's a couple of things. And then YouTube, you know, I, I wish that the day I started my channel, why was I hunting for the day? I started selling any sort of service.

Why was I trying to hunt for clients on fiverr.com or elbow.com knowing what I know now, if I just started on YouTube from day one and just gone, right, okay. Two or three videos a day about SEO, for example, I would have number one been an authority in the niche, like way, way faster, maybe 10 times faster, you know, instead of like taking three years to get there, doing it in like three months. And then number two, I could have got way more inbound clients before everyone else knew. I guess it's like having the knowledge and knowing what works before everyone else gets onto it.

So like the, now what you'll see is like, and you're doing this with school and you're doing this with YouTube as well. It's like, now that you have that knowledge, you know exactly what button to press to get those customers in. And I suppose like the longer you play this game. And for me personally, I've only been playing this game at a decent level for like, I would say seven or eight years, the longer I play the game, the more opportunities I see in the faster I can take advantage of them.

Right. And that's why I think I brought up the point, like I'm working harder now than ever. Although AI is a thing because we see the opportunity. It's like, do these three things and you will be more successful.

It's like very, very clear. And I feel like I don't have enough hours in the day type of thing. Like, like that's like, it sounds like you figured out the inputs, outputs formula. So it's like, you know what recipe and what ingredients to use to get the outputs, aka the business growth that you want.

It's like, right. Figuring it out actively. Yeah. Like you've figured it out more than me.

You figured it out more than me and Alex Ramosi has figured it out more than you. Right. That's so it's like a process. Yeah, for sure.

For sure. I think the other thing as well, just keep learning, like for example, you look at Ramosi, the speed at which he's grown. And he's like, I don't know about you. I'm 36.

I'm pretty much the same age as him. It's like the speed that he's grown. He must be, he must be working so hard. I think he said he works on 90 hours weeks, but also the speed of which he learns, he just grows like exponentially at every single stage, which is pretty amazing.

I think he, cause he went to school near my high school and I'm 35 about to be 36. He is, I think 37, um, I think around our age, but I think his, I think you can do it too. The more you broaden your, your, um, your niche, what you have. Like, so, so that's the question I had for you.

Like, are you still passionate? Are you still stoked on SEO? Because you have broadened out from it. Like, cause you're an SEO nerd like me, like for sure.

Like what are you most stoked on right now? AI for sure. Yeah. I mean, like SEO is fun, but it's the same fundamentals that it's been like five or 10 years ago, which is like keywords, content and backlinks.

And like a lot of people are looking for the shiny, you know, silver bullet, but the keywords, content, backlink strategy, it works just as well today as it did five or 10 years ago. So for me, like AI is way more fun and interesting and it's 10 times easier for me to create a video that I actually enjoy making with AI than it is to make something about SEO. So like for us, I find, you know, most of our revenue comes from SEO. I love my agency.

I'm so grateful for every single client that we have and, and they get great results too, but AI is way more fun. And so like what I just try and do now is like, I'll create SEO related stuff in the AI videos that I do. So I'm like, okay, here's some actual ways I would use this for my agency. And therefore it still relates back to what I sell.

So that's the way that I look at it. How about you? Yeah. SEO is still driving factor.

Agency is still key, but I've, I've branched out for sure. We kind of had a conversation offline. It's a weird paradigm when, when your school community does really well. Like if people don't know, like go.

go crunch the math on Julian's community. Like he does excellent. And when you start to do excellent monetarily on a platform that is not about the SEO agency, it kind of messes with your head a little bit. Because what we used to do was build cool websites, rank them, make money, right?

And do that for other people too. And I still do that, you still do that. But then when you start to have a community or something that makes a lot of money, you start to think, well, I don't have to build the cool things anymore, right? I just have to focus on funneling people to the community.

But I've fallen into that trap recently, but I'm like, I still have to build cool things because everything else is kind of based on the cool things you build, right? Yeah, 100%. It's like, I was gonna do a live stream this morning. I was like, I can do that live stream just to funnel traffic to the community.

But if I'm not showing anything of value, is there any point? Because like, I'm just making the live stream to get traffic and I think people would feel that and pick up on it. And then the traffic that you get would convert less because you're not creating something fun. Whereas like, if I get on a live stream and I'm pumped, I'm gonna check out chat, cheap as the Atlas or a new tool like perplexing comment that just came out as well.

I think people can tap into that energy. You're showing something new that's never been seen before. And therefore that's only gonna help your business. So yeah, it's like, you should never stop experimenting.

And also like, when you're testing those new things, you're stepping outside of your comfort zone, right? It's like a new area of growth. It's a new area of value. And so that's what people wanna see.

That's why they buy from you. Have you had to upskill yourself a lot with, because I see you talking about things I'm not accustomed to, like, particularly the coding stuff. Like, how much knowledge did you have and how much did you upskill yourself? I basically knew nothing about coding.

And then like, I've learned, okay, here's how you put it together. Here's how you piece it together. Here's how you actually host that code. That took me a while to figure out, even little basic things like that.

And then also, yeah, I mean, you know what it's like, like when you create, even at an A to N automation, it's a form of pain, I think, because it makes you very fatigued. It tires you out. It breaks your APIs to let you down. Sometimes a new API comes out and it should be working, but it's not.

And then you're on a live stream and it's not working in front of like a thousand people and you're like, okay, this is fun. So yeah, I think there's like, but each challenge like that brings out a new level of growth from you. And then again, I think that's where the value comes from. I think that's why people watch your content and watch mine.

I mean, for example, creating that system that you had of making 50 websites and then building them out and automating them and automating the AI voice agent. I've created even just voice agents, it's painful. Like that's tiring. So what you've created there is so valuable.

So everyone else so much pain that that's why they're buying from you, right? Then the issue with me is finding the new novel concept. Like how long can you talk about one particular concept? I don't know, maybe I'm just off base here, but like my fear is people get bored with one concept.

Although Alex Ramosi talks about the same thing, just different iterations over and over again, right? Yeah, I was reflecting on that recently. I was like, maybe it's not so much what you talk about, but how you reveal the insights is the most interesting thing as well. Like if you look at Ramosi, he'll do the basics, but he'll present it in a way that's so interesting.

Like, and that might be like analyzing someone else's website or taking in a live call from a listener on a live stream. Or for example, like being in the school HQ, and he's talking about exactly the same thing, but it's in a situation where it's like, okay, there's a hundred people in the audience and they're all asking him questions. Because, you know, I wonder sometimes, and I've done this to some of your videos and I'm not bashful about it. Like I will push your video through Notebook LM and get the script and like, okay, there's a video idea and then make it my own.

Like I've done it one or two or three or four, maybe more times, right? But the idea is like, maybe me and you, we do have the different presentation stuff. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder. But like, okay, so the 50 microsite idea is a novel idea.

It's cool, it's a big project. My fear is that there needs to be a new big project and a new big project, like a different one. But we're lucky, I guess, that AI comes out with new stuff all the time. So it's, you know, plenty of stuff to figure out.

Have you checked out Nate Hurk? I recognize that name. He's, I think he's number one in the tech category. Oh, right, exactly, he crushes, yes.

Yeah, and he's always pushing out like these new N8n workflows and automations. And like, and his content is great. Like people love his content. But I see, I don't know whether it's him or his team.

I actually think it might be a mix of both because I know he's very proficient at N8n. And he's always pushing out like these new automations that are insane when you look at them. There was one like a while back, you know, everyone was using like AI browsers and like using those AI agents to control their browser. He created automation before anyone else where like you could get the AI to control your browser inside the N8n.

And like, that must have been painful to create, but he's always innovating. I see that like every week from him. So it's pretty impressive. Robo Nuggets is another one as well.

Who was the second? Robo Nuggets on YouTube. Top tech. We have a team member that just creates N8n workflows now.

And that happened like two weeks ago. So we'll see, we'll see. That's smart, that's smart. Yeah, yeah.

We actually did that with, we were using N8n freelancers, but they would take like so long. And sometimes like the N8n workflows videos on YouTube just didn't get that much reach compared to like if I do one about the new Gemini update. Right, the Notebook LM video has 10,000 and the N8n has two. Like which one are you going to do?

But I wonder which one converts better to your goals. I wonder like, for example, maybe what I should do, and I'm just thinking about this as we talk about it now, maybe what I should do is set up like a short link where I track how much traffic comes from one video versus the other one. And that's probably the closest you can get to seeing what converts the best. And then you make an assumption on conversion rates.

And then- Based on the amount of traffic from that video, yeah. I'd be curious, that'd be good data. I mean, you would think, no, I wonder if their platform will ever do it for us, school, because I know they're always pushing, right? Analytics.

They're actually, they're doing one that's coming, right? And it's like, you can see the conversion rate across each platform that you get traffic from. That's coming soon. So they were saying, for example, like affiliates, affiliate traffic tends to convert 3% higher than if you get traffic from YouTube.

And then traffic from the discovery on school tends to convert way better than YouTube traffic as well. But YouTube is like number one. Well, Julian, it's 10 o'clock here-ish. I can feel my brain fatiguing.

10 p.m. for the record, people. I'm an old man, 10 p.m. What should we hit on before we roll out?

I think that's it. If you want to just talk a little bit about how people can get in touch with you and your school community or whatever, we'll put a link in the description so people can sign up. Yeah, thanks. So YouTube, it's probably the easiest thing, right?

Jesse Cunningham on YouTube. And then school is the Rank Expand Academy. And so the whole concept there is probably similar to yours is how to use AI to make money online in 90 days or less. Okay, great.

Yeah, awesome. So I'll leave a link in the description. Thanks so much for being on and sharing everything that you have. And hopefully catch you again soon.

Thanks, Julian. Thanks for having me.