well. And so, I can tell you that if you follow those four things, four simple pillars, you become the most known and trusted attorney in your market. If you follow those four things, but most aren't willing to do it.

That's great. Well, let's break them down. The four things are:

say what others aren't willing to say. Number two, show what others aren't willing to show. Number three, sell in the way others aren't willing to sell. And number four, be more human than others are willing to be.

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time this podcast finds you. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules Growth strategies for law firms podcast got a great guest today, Marcus Sheridan. He's a author, speaker, thought leader, and and he's he's one of the OGs. Marcus and I have both been talking about this stuff and theorizing about this stuff, and probably getting more right than wrong for the last 15 years. Marcus, 20 years, and he's got a great origin story. So, Marcus, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules podcast.

Happy to be here, Jay. I think we're going to have a very lively conversation with plenty of stuff. Let's call them takeaways for your audience.

So, why don't you tell everyone about your origin story? It's a great story, and you were doing it right. You had a home services business, and then a swimming pool company, a pool company, right?

internet, and started reading all these fancy phrases online like inbound marketing, content marketing, social media, and you know what I really heard in my simple pool guy mind, if you will, Jay, was you know Marcus, if you just obsess over your customers' questions, worries, issues, fears, and you're willing to address them online through text, through video. You might save your business. So I went to my business partners and I said, "Hey, this is what I want to do. I just want to become really obsessed with the buyer, with all their questions, and I and I want us to address them online."

and to the success that we had. And since that time, I've had, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of companies have approached me about implementing this, these philosophies, this framework of they ask you answer, and a third edition came out last year of the book called Endless Customers. So much happening with AI that it needed to be written, but ultimately comes down to this: Jay, most companies say they're obsessed with buyers, customers, clients, whatever it might be. But the truth is, most are not, and we know this because we tend to shy away. We tend to hide from the most fundamental

questions people ask, and that's especially true in legal. Legal is is prolific, and so I try to help these organizations see by actually giving the. The in this case the potential client what they want, which is the answer to the thing, you're going to gain the trust, which eventually means you'll gain the lead, which means eventually you could gain the client in the case, which is what that's what it's all about. What's wild though is a lot of people are saying nope, we do this really really well, and I guarantee you they don't. And do you know one example? Let me just give you one

example. Is that all? If I just give you, yeah,

please do.

What percentage of attorneys on their website right now address the question, "What happens if I lose?"

Never seen it.

You've never seen it. That's correct. What percentage of potential clients are asking themselves, "Well, what happens if I lose my case?"

It's a great question.

Tell you 100%.

You know, we've done hundreds of question and answer videos. Never address that question.

Yeah, nobody does. Nobody does. It is in the world of legal clients, potential clients really want to know. Oftentimes, two things. This is assuming it's not defense, but even so, number one, what happens if I lose my case? And the up the other side is, what is my case worth? What is my case worth?

Yeah.

Now, how many attorneys do you know have a great, let's even call like tool interactive experience on their website that addresses the question: What potentially is your case worth? Guess what? They don't. They've got to contact us. They've got to get your free consult. Maybe they say, "Hey, you know, we don't get paid until you get paid." But ultimately, we know that these are the things that your potential clients want to know, and they're not being addressed. And those are just two examples right there. And I've made my living helping helping one or two outliers in an

pillars, you become the most known and trusted attorney in your market. If you follow those four things, but most aren't willing to do it.

That's great. Well, let's break them down. The the four things are

say what others aren't willing to say. Number two, show what others aren't willing to show. Number three, sell in a way others aren't willing to sell. And number four, be more human than others are willing to be. Okay.

Well, let's look at say for a second.

Okay, let's look at say. Well, here's what we know. What we know in every single industry, and of course, you know this really well, Jay, because you've been in this game. You've been helping law firms, but in every single industry, there's basically five subjects that people search when they're looking to hire someone. Certainly, that's true when it comes to hiring an attorney, but it's the same five subjects when we're looking to make any type of purchase. So this is B 2b, this is B 2c. It doesn't really matter, but there's basically five subjects that everybody obsesses

about when they go online, whether it's Google or whether it's ChatGPT to ask questions. So here's the five subjects. Number one is cost, cost slash rate slash anything to do with money, i.e., what's my case worth, or how much do you charge? Right. For example, if you're a divorce attorney and you don't address the question, how much does a divorce attorney cost on your website? You're a fool. You're an absolute fool. You have no idea how the internet works today and how buyers work today, because if you did, you would say, "Oh my gosh, how do we not address this question?" And we can talk

more about the cost one here in a second. Number two, problems, problems, negative worries, concerns, i.e., what happens if we lose the case? Okay, that's number two. Number three is comparisons. We love to compare stuff online, so think about how many times you've gone online. You compared this thing versus that thing. This could be law firm versus law firm. This could be option A versus option B. But there's just in legal, there's a bunch of them. Number four, reviews. We're obsessed with reviews. The thing about reviews, we don't just want the ugly. We want choose. The good, we want the

good, the bad, and the ugly. So that's the thing about reviews. We want to see both sides of the coin. And then finally, best, best, most top, best law firms my area for years. Every single attorney has been bidding out the wazoo for best such and such type of attorney in their market. I mean, we know this is like this has been happening since the dawn of the internet and PPC, right? So cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, best those are the big five. And here's the thing: if you want to dominate your market, and if you want to say what others aren't willing to say, if you want to show

what others aren't willing to show, you need to really start with those five fundamental subjects that buyers want to know about, but again, most folks won't talk about that. Perfect case in point, you know, in the case of an attorney. Let's say, let's just let me use the divorce attorney subject here. So I learned a long time ago that whenever somebody has a problem, the first thing they think and they know they need to make a purchase or they need to make a hire. First question is roughly, what's this going to cost? That's what everybody wants to know. Roughly, what's this going to cost?

Now most businesses don't want to address that question. The reason why they don't want to address that question is threefold. Number one, they say I don't want to scare the customer, the prospect away. Well, what we know for a fact, and I've done enough research, probably more than anybody in the world on this. The thing that actually scares people away is when they can't find the thing. It's not when they find it. Tell me what's scarier when you're looking for the when you're looking at the lobster on the menu and it says market price with no price, or it gives you an actual price, which

is scarier. Obviously, market price scares you more because it's the unknown. The fear of the unknown creates friction in the mind, and so therefore that's one of the first reasons. Second reason, and when they're

just on your website, scare them away is just the back button. They're gone.

Yeah, they're gone. And the problem is, if most people listening to this knew how many clients they've lost because they refuse to address the fundamental questions that the potential client had. They would be sick, like literally, truly sick. Second reason why we tend to not talk about cost and price online is because we say every job or every case is different. Oh, there's lots of factors. There's lots of variables. But if I went to any attorney that had any experience and any knowledge whatsoever, if I said to them, "Can you help me understand the factors that would drive

the cost up?" They'd say, "Sure, I could." Can you help me understand the factors that would drive the cost down? Yeah, sure, I could. Can you help me understand why some divorce attorneys are so much more than other divorce attorneys? Yes. So once again, what you really want to do when you're talking about cost is you need to explain value for an industry. So if I'm in a divorce, if I'm a divorce attorney, again I'm just going to use that because it's a simple example. Say, okay, if you're looking to hire a divorce attorney, let's look at all the factors that you want to consider. Here are the

factors that are going to drive the cost of your case up. Here are the factors that are going to drive it down. Here's the factors that are going to make some attorneys more expensive. Here's the factors that are going to make some attorneys or firms less expensive. Now, so those are the four primary questions that you should address. Now, the fifth one is roughly where you fall. Where do you fall? And you don't have to give exact prices. You don't have to give exact prices, but you do need to give the the individual at least a sense for what you could expect, and listen. A lot of folks

right now, even hearing that, they're saying, "Well, that's true, but no, no, no, no." It's funny to me. I love talking to businesses, and I say all the time, "Do you believe in the golden rule?" Most people say, "Yes, I believe in the golden rule." Doesn't matter if you're a Christian or not. You believe in the golden rule? Yes, I believe in the gold rule. Okay, well then, would you appreciate it if they at least helped you understand roughly how much it costs? Yes, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Can't use the but because you said yes, I would appreciate that. So once you know that, hey, this

is something that you would appreciate that would drive more trust for you. That becomes a question of, all right, well, how do I address this thing without putting myself in the corner, right? So that was the second reason. Is every case is different, and the third reason we say we can't talk about it is because I don't want my competitors to see it, which is really ridiculous. Because if you talk to any firm and you say, you know, do you have a general sense how these other firms charge or how they get compensated, et cetera, et cetera, they're like, oh yeah, we have a pretty good sense

for what they charge or how they charge or any of those numbers. So it's a big secret, non-secret. Everybody acts like nobody's charging. When in reality, everybody's got at least a pretty decent sense to this. So those are the three reasons why companies don't address these things. Now, I was the first swimming pool company, install company in the world that addressed how much a swimming pool costs to install online. Literally, it was the first one in the world. It was ridiculous to even say that. It is 100% true, even though every single person within the first five minutes of talking.

When we explained all those factors: what drives it up, what drives it down, why some companies are expensive, why some companies are cheap. Roughly, where do we fall? That's generated over $35 million in sales that we were able to attain. And had we not addressed it, we probably wouldn't have sold any of those or very few of those because they wouldn't have found us. But they did find us because we were not the ostrich with our head in the sand. Now, if I could fast forward to today, something very interesting is happening. You know, for gosh, 15 years, I've been teaching people the

power of addressing this subject of pricing, not giving a price list, but addressing the subject and teaching value. And I always thought that eventually the human would just force the business to do this, but I was partially wrong because now what's going to force all businesses and all firms to address this subject is AI. Because here's where we're going. What we're finding, and I and I know this because I've got a couple different AI companies. I've got a AI visibility company. It's called AI Trust Signals. And if you're listening to this right now, if you go to AI Trust Signals, you can

put in your your URL. You can get some just extraordinary like detail report of where you're falling short in terms of how much AI trusts you, and it gives you action items that you need to take, so as to make sure that you're recommended as one of the best firms in your area, or what that is, whatever it might be. And I can tell you this, Jay, that more and more every single day, the factor that AI is using to decide whether or not you get recommended is just how much are you willing to talk about cost, pricing, rates, etc. And so here's how it's going to look in like let's say I'm going to

predict two years, Jay. In two years, all firms are going to have pricing information on their website. Why? Because if AI, especially an AI agent, and a lot of people may or may not be familiar with agents, but in the future, many of your clients are going to be using agents. Most of your clients are going to be using agents to get their information. They're going to say to the agent, "Hey, I need an X, Y, Z attorney. I want you to go do the research. I want you to come back and give me your recommendations." In the future, an agent is not going to recommend you if it sees that you are

solely saying call for quote or call to talk about your case. If you're not talking anything about compensation, about rates, about numbers, it's not going to rate you as one of the top in your space, and that's going to be a shock and awe moment for the industry, Jay. But mark my words, it's coming.

It's probably here for the leading edge because, and

oh, it's absolutely here for the leading edge. Most of us are using

agents, but I guess that's still only like 1% or 3% of early adopters.

Yeah, but it's going to change fast. But for the

most part, like a ChatGPT query is you know it's it's self creating agents like it's going

out that's right

it's almost like even the most straightforward ChatGPT question now it's turning it into a really good prompt and it's it's thinking of the questions you should be asking or it's suggesting you at the end of the the answer do you want me to go and ask this question, like how much is it going to cost? So that's right. It's we're almost there.

Yeah, and so I've always felt like okay, I am the one that's going to set the rules of my space. I'm not going to be sub. I'm not going to submit myself to the rules that everybody else creates, because the rule breakers become the rule makers, and everybody else becomes the rule followers. And so there's going to be some that do this. They're going to be on the front end of this. And let me give you another example of of this. If you're an attorney, and this applies to you, listen well. And that is this: every attorney right now that's not, let's say, a defense attorney,

should have a what is my case worth tool on their website. Now, immediately I say that Jay, and there's people in your audience that said there's no way I could talk about that, and they would say, and there's two reasons why I can't talk about that. One, legally I can't necessarily say what somebody's case is worth, and B, it's impossible for me to know, and that's just not seeing the forest through the trees. If you thought like that in in like in your legal practice, you would probably never win a case because you have to see pass like the first tree to see the forest, right? So in this

context. Could you have a tool that says that says okay so you know what is which of these issues did you experience okay and what was the impact of you know the issues that you experienced okay and then you could say although I can't tell you what your case is worth I can tell you what similar cases have been worth. See, that's 100% kosher. That's legal, and and when somebody thinks like that, now all of a sudden, if you have an interactive tool on your site that is addressing that, guess what? Now you're getting way more leads than you would have gotten before because in order for this

person to see what their case is worth, well, they have to put in their email address, and it gets emailed to them. So now you capture way more leads, and so now you're able to follow up with more people, way more opportunities. But instead of doing that, what are so many in the legal space doing? They're still bidding on PPC. Look, if you think that Google Ads is going to be a big thing for your business in two or three years. You're sorely mistaken, because the amount of people that are moving away from Google every single day, that are moving to ChatGPT, is profound. And those

listening to this might say, "Well, I think that I'm going to be able to run those ads, same ads on ChatGPT." Because Marcus, look, they've come out with ads recently, yeah. I never see those ads. You don't see those ads, Jay. You and I have never seen an ad unless we're on some fake account because we pay money so that we don't see ads. And there's a heck of a lot of people that are never going to see those ads because they're going to be paying some type of subscription fee because they don't want to see the ads and they're using AI differently, and so moral of the story is you can't bank on

something that doesn't necessarily exist or won't even be there for people. If I said to a lot of attorneys like listening to this right now, if we just just took away all the leads you get from Google Ads, what percentage revenue would you lose tomorrow? That's a scary number for a lot of firms, dude. A scary, stinking number. So what that means is you better be recommended by AI. Full stop. If AI isn't recommending you, you're in trouble. Again, that's why I've got AITrustSignals.com. That's why we do a ton with AI visibility, constantly testing, working this out. You know, I've got

three calls today with different clients, big brands. I'm talking not small. I mainly work with just really large brands on AI visibility, and there are some clear things that every brand should be doing in order to be recommended by AI. Is it cool if I talk about some of them, Jay?

Yeah, absolutely. But I want to put that aside for two seconds and just talk about a couple realities that I see,

please.

And one is that people are getting really sidetracked with trying to figure out Chat GPT SEO, and I think that right now, you know, and and maybe it'll change in a couple years, but I don't think it will. I think Google defended their turf, and I think the partners, you know, Sergei got back in the lab and started coding and unretired, and Google's revenue was like 4 trillion last year, and Google and YouTube combined is like 19 point 7 billion searches a day, or trillion searches a day, and Chat GPT is up to 1.1 trillion, but it's still only 5% of the search market, or 5% of

what Google and YouTube is. My prediction is that Google is going to start embedding paid results, pay per click, in those s in those AI answers. So now at the top of Google, you see an AI answer. They've kept it clean. There's no pay per click. They're putting it right at the top of Google. They're sacrificing some click revenue because they're defending themselves against Chat GPT and Claude, Perplexity, and everyone else. But the consumer is learning, and I'm learning that Google gives great answers. Google Gemini or Bard or whatever they're calling it, the Google AI is really good and

it's free and it's right at the top of search results. I my theory is that they'll start the the way sometimes in Google Maps there's three map results and there's one that says sponsored. We'll start seeing that in the AI answers. So the Google will still maintain some revenue in the age of AI, or a lot of revenue. There's trillions of dollars at stake; they have to. But that aside, I agree with you. We've got to figure out how to rank in the Google AI, the Chat GPT AI, and the Claude AI. It's very real, and it's a very significant business opportunity.

Yeah, and I and I think we have to be careful though, because just because Google's loaded and they have every reason in the world financially to win this game, currently they're losing the game when it comes to at least AI models. They, I mean, like DeepMind was the AI factory for. Decade, ChatGPT comes out of nowhere, and you know with Open OpenAI comes out of nowhere with ChatGPT, and of course we got Anthropic, Claude, and now we've got all these other Chinese models that are coming out, and Google continues to say, and so it's one of those things where they're going

to be probably focused more on the you know there's a great phrase which is if you can't compete, compute, which is you know they're they're probably going to get more into the you know like you know storage chips you know all that you know market and there's no question right now that Claude and ChatGPT are much better tools. They're not necessarily better for searching per se, but they are much better tools to use on an everyday basis for AI. That could change tomorrow, but it doesn't look like it because for whatever reason Gemini can't get its act together. Again, that could change. That

could change,

or you could argue that Google's just saying, hey, our most important AI.

No way. No, they're not saying

our AI result.

They're not saying that. They're definitely not saying that. They've they that that's not what they have wanted to be. And if, but if they were like as smart as I'd like to think they are, what they're going to do is they're going to create the perfect agentic experience for the consumer, and this is the part that I wish they would just go all in on, because we know, you know, I know that agents are the future, and so if agents are the future, and if each one of us eventually is going to have one agent that we just talk to on the daily, or might be more than that, but let's

say, and we just immediately just say, "Hey, I want you to go do this agent," and it does it. Like Google should be in that game, and the fact that they're not like leaning into that as hard as they could or should blows my ever-loving mind. It doesn't make any sense to me, because every day I'm looking at new like Grok. Freaking Grok came out with Grokbot two weeks ago, and it is a great agent. It is already 10x better than any agent Google has produced. How is that possible? It doesn't make any sense. They've got $450 billion lying around, and just in like sheer profit, and yet they can't

even can't even make an agent. It doesn't make any sense to me. But this is how it works when you have massive companies and these little AI labs are just running circles around the Goliaths, and Google is quickly becoming the ultimate modern day Goliath story, in my opinion. That doesn't mean they're not going to win. I'm not saying they're going to lose, but they're on a trajectory that isn't incredibly positive right now, and although SEO traditional legacy SEO matters still today, and legacy blue links still matter today, man, they're going to matter less and less every single day

that passes by. That much I am sure as the day is long, because our future is not clicking a ridiculous blue link that may or may not be sponsored, that may or may not have the answer behind it like we did for 20 plus years. The future is one where we go to a platform. The platform knows us, and then it does the search for us. It gives us specific answers. It justifies its answer, which, by the way, for over two decades, Google never justified to any single person why it gave them the answer that it gave them. And today, you can get a justification every time you search for something on AI.

And not only do you get the justification for it, but it'll do an action for you. It will take the next steps for you, and that's the all-in-one experience. And the way you know that our future is agentic is this: humans will always lean into what I call the three Fs of innovation. It's the, it is the full stop as to why we always. It's like how you know. Three Fs of innovation are as follows. Number one, if it makes our life faster, we're going to use it. We'll sacrifice privacy for speed all day, every day. Number two, which aligns with number one, if it reduces friction, we're going to

use it. And then number three, if it reduces fear, we're going to use it. So faster, less friction, less fear. That's what people want. And so, if you ever see to yourself, "Well, where's the world headed? Where's my customer headed? Where are these platforms headed?" It matches the three Fs every single time. That is your guarantee. It's going to be the three Fs.

You know we can agree to disagree. I think Google's done a great job protecting their consumer search base with an AI product that's consumer facing, and I'll agree that certainly the game is being played out between OpenAI and Anthropic right now in the high end AI success for things like AI coding and enterprise AI, but I don't think the average person, like the average immigrant in a car accident, is the AI user that you and American

certainly not currently.

Yeah,

and most of those people are still using some form of Google today.

Yeah,

certainly to find their terms. And I

agree with you. Google does a really shitty job bringing their AI product to market. They've already changed the name four times. They're terrible at branding. They had a

branding there. I it is unbelievable to me. Their launches are terrible. The names of the products are terrible. I just don't even understand it, man. It just shows you that money can't buy you common sense sometimes,

and they've got agents in in Google Enterprise and Google Cloud or in the marketplace where we manage the backend, and I don't know they they just don't get the consumer like messaging and getting it out and making it easy. So I'll agree on that for sure. But let's talk about your insight. I have some too. How do you solve the AI search problem for law firms and other businesses?

Foundationally, to understand this, what you have to realize is AI really doesn't want to be wrong. I'm sure everybody's experienced AI being wrong before, but AI certainly the platforms, these these frontier labs, they don't want to give bad answers, and so the obsession that they have is how do we make sure we give a good answer, an accurate answer, and they want to prove the things that they're showing you, and so so much of your success now comes down to proof. Can you prove what you're saying is true, and can you show what you're saying? Can you validate what you're

saying is true? And so there's certain types of pages. Let me give you an example that do really, really well when it comes to impacting AI search results. One of them we've already discussed to a degree, which is a pricing page. Full stop. If you want to get more AI recommendations, you want to have a pricing page that really goes in detail about the industry, what drives costs up and down. Why some, you know, some are more, some are less expensive. Roughly, what do you charge? Okay, so that's number one. Number two, number two most influential page that we have seen that you can create

is a very robust review page. And when I say review page, what I mean by that is not just a page where you throw a couple of Google reviews and call it a day. What you want to do, let's say in this case as an attorney, is you want to take every platform where you have reviews listed, like about you, about your firm, and you want to show how many reviews you've gotten from that platform, what your average number of reviews is, and you want to show at least in a perfect world at least six to 10 reviews from each one of those platforms, and you want to do this all on one page, not on

multiple pages. One page, it it becomes the ultimate page for AI to quickly go to and parse and get information about what your clients are saying about you now. The reason, though, why this is important is because, like, I know certain firms. A lot of firms have tried really, really hard over the years to get Google reviews. Good for you. But guess what? ChatGPT doesn't read any Google reviews. In fact, if you go to a ChatGPT search result right now and you search anything to do with any attorneys or law firms, you're not going to see it reference anything about Google reviews. The

reason is because it doesn't have access to the Google API. So right now, it doesn't read any of those 400 reviews you got, which kind of sucks for you if that's been your whole game. Is like I want to make sure I get lots of reviews on Google, and I don't fault you for having done that because that was our world in many ways, because we had to dominate when it came to Google, and we knew that getting reviews was part of that. But yet, you've got nothing on Yelp, you've got nothing on you know some of these other whatever you know. And I don't know all the legal platforms,

super lawyers, and

yeah. But like, you actually need those as well. And so, if you have one page that really talks about this, and you know, in the future, you like, eventually, is ChatGPT going to have access to Google reviews? Probably yes. I would certainly think that is the case. But again, today that's not the case, which is why it's constantly referencing. Dumb sites like Yelp, right? And that's just the game that you need to play. So that's one example of a page that works really, really well. Let me give you another one that is incredibly effective, which is an awards and recognition

page. You'll notice that if you do searches in ChatGPT, Claude, it always likes to justify why it said. Let's say you know somebody goes on says, you know who are the top five defense attorneys in Los Angeles? Almost always, what it's going to do, it's going to say something about their like experience, like a general thing about the company. But then it's going to say if they are known for something, if they've won something, if they receive some type of recognition, it wants to do that. And so, what you want to do is you want to create one page that lists every award and recognition

you've ever received. And even if you want to put best dressed in high school, that's fine, whatever. And then, what you want to do is you want to explain what that award means to the to the potential client, and you want to link back to the award if you can. So, again, list the award or the recognition, what it means to the client, and then a link back to it if you can. Doing that alone, man, I've done that with so many different companies at this point, Jay, and it's like, oftentimes immediately you start seeing a lot more references of specific awards that they weren't getting referenced for

before. You know, a lot of time, a lot of people think right now that when AI goes out and does its search, that it like searches the whole internet. Newsflash: it does not search the whole internet.

It's nowhere near as deep as Google, right? Oh

gosh, it's nowhere near deep as Google, and it doesn't get a ton of crap. It misses lots of pertinent information that you think it would have found, but it doesn't. It doesn't do that. So because of that, you have to make ChatGPT's job easier, and the way you do that is create these hub pages. So a pricing hub, reviews hub, awards hub. See, let me give you one last one that everybody should do if you're listening this. There's actually a lot more, but let me give you. I'll give you two more. How about that? I'll give you two more. Another one that you should do. Listen,

if ChatGPT is shown two pieces of content, and let's say both content was equal in value, it's going to choose the one that was written by an expert. And so now, when you produce content on your site, generally speaking, you always want to have a byline. So, a byline is that little link that has an author's name, and that link takes it to the author's let's call it expert page. And so, for any author slash subject matter expert that is behind any piece of content you have on your site, be it a video, be it an article, whatever it is, it should link to their credentials, their expertise

page. And so, on that page, you want to give a bio of the subject matter expert. You want to talk about their years of experience. You want to talk about things like cases they've won. You want to talk about the education. You want to talk about their credentials. You want to talk about certifications. Anything of that nature that proves this person really is an expert in their field. Once again, you might say that sounds cheesy. I don't care if it sounds cheesy or not. It's just what matters today, and this is absolutely something that yeah matters to a degree with humans, but it

matters to AI a lot. And so now you produce content with a byline. That byline goes to the credentials expert page. One last one for you that we've done really well, and this is one of the ones that's like I've been talking about this one for years. So when you create best of content and you give out awards for the best in your space, so how would you do that? Well, let's say you're a divorce attorney in Jacksonville, Florida. So you would want to produce an article, and that article is: Who are the seven best divorce attorneys in Jacksonville, Florida? Now, on that article, what you want

to do, and we've produced a bunch of these, and even after Google updates, we've had tons of success because Google's onto this, and so are the other AI platforms. They know that sometimes people create best of lists and they put themselves on there. So how do you how do you like how do you prevent them saying no that doesn't count? Well, the way you do it is you actually do a really good job of it. And so here's how we teach clients to do it. Number one is what you want to do is you want to create a a criteria for what defines the best. Divorce attorney in your space. So criteria could

be, let's say, reviews, number of reviews or average star reviews. It could be number of of years experience. Could be number of clients had or cases ran. Whatever it. I mean, it could be all types of all types of things. Whatever you could think of that would make really define. This is what helps make some of the best, in this case, divorce attorneys. Now, once you come up with that criteria, then you create a chart, an actual readable HTML chart that shows the criteria and how each one of the major competing firms do the other ones that you would probably consider the best firms in that

market. So yes, on your website you would list your competitors. That's exactly right, and you would you would show your numbers versus their numbers. Now these should be inarguable. These should be lots of just public stuff, right? I don't want you get sued, right? You're not going to get sued if you do this the right way.

I'm not telling you to inject opinion. What I'm telling you is just to share the facts. That's public information, but you are creating a chart that compares these firms in a way that nobody's created the chart before. You do that, it's going to do really well. It's going to perform well. I've done a bunch of these. Like as of this very moment, I'm having tons of clients cited as best in their market, having done this,

that's awesome. Well, Marcus, like we said at the start, we could go for hours, but we only had one hour. So at this point, I'm going to go to the quick one-liners, and maybe we'll to be continued, and we will debate the merits of Google versus ChatGPT. Yeah, this would be a fun

conversation. Like two years, you could say, "Marcus, you were so wrong," and right, or I'll say, "Ha ha, Jay, I told you." We'll see, but at least you know we're brave enough to say what we think is going to happen, and I think that's what matters. A lot of people don't have an opinion. You know, by the way, you're putting on record what we think.

You mentioned one that I also want to go on record as predicting it'll be a three horse race because you got you can't bet against Elon, and quietly in the background

cannot bet against Elon. Rock AI

is you're full like you said against

Elon Musk

providing chips and storage and vertically integrated

to the max.

Yeah, I mean, you know, he's behind the scenes, like coaching the team up, and you know, we've got to catch up. We've got to create the better AI. All right. So, first question I've asked for over a dozen years on this podcast: What personal productivity hacks do you use, or any software, to be more productive, obviously you get a ton done.

I think one of the best ones that I actually wrote about this on LinkedIn this morning is WhisperFlow. I think it's a voice dictation tool that actually works. That's easy. That is not slow like some of the ones you had in the past. So highly recommend WhisperFlow. I've recommended to a lot of business folks, and they're like Marcus. I just passed a million words in dictation, which is amazing. So WhisperFlow is a great hack. So

you you use it to write content?

I use it for a myriad of things. I'll do it a lot for just email. I'll do it a lot for if I just want to just like do a brain dump. I'll do it like that. Just just like a like a litany of things. I still enjoy writing sometimes because I want to slow down. But then sometimes I want to dictate and I want to go fast. They both have their place, and for a lot of people, it's been a big unlock in their life. I've because I've recommended it to a lot of people.

Where does it live? In your computer or your cell phone or

both? Both. Yeah,

both. Awesome.

Yeah. All right. Let me give you. Let me give you one other thing. Sure. Go ahead. A life hack that I think everybody should do. Most don't do it. Is me and my kids. We everyone puts their phone at 930 at night at the end of the house that everybody does not sleep on, so I don't go to bed to my phone. I don't wake up to my phone, and this is all of us in the family. My wife's the only one that has a phone near at night in case an important call does come. This is you know my phone doesn't own me. I own my phone, and I think that's a really big deal and a very important way to

start your day is to not start your day on your phone. You dictate the terms of your day.

Love it. Next one's easy. Best business books.

I really think the best business book that I've ever read was Good to Great by Jim Collins. He's just really, really special, and and the the book that really changed the way I think about business more than any other was Good to Great.

So you're always sitting around on your phone, and maybe you're waiting for your family to get together, and you got five minutes. What do you subscribe to? Any blogs, YouTubes, or

there's one podcast that there's one podcast. That I do not miss, that I think every business leader should be listening to today, without question, which is the Moonshots podcast by Peter Diamantis. And Peter Diamandis, he is an AI optimist. Along with he usually has three three other people that are on there with him. They're all, for the most part, geniuses, but they speak at a level that you can actually understand it. They talk about the most important AI technology news of the week, and they really just explain it in such a way that I really adhere to. I think they're

honest, but at the same time, they're optimist, which to me is very important. I don't have any patience for just cancerous negative clouds in my life. I'm not interested in that. I do appreciate realism, but I don't want to be around Debbie and David Downer all the time. And so it's a great podcast. I would just strongly recommend it. It's Moonshots podcast, Peter Diamond. It was

great, thank you. And if folks are listening to Marcus and they think, man, this guy's smart because he is. What's a great introduction? Who should we introduce to Marcus Sheridan?

Yeah, any place that is a an event, a conference, a mastermind group. If you're looking for truly a world-class speaker presenter that'll come in, that'll engage your audience and make them think and leave them with a plan, and really challenge the way they think and get them agitated in the right way. I'm your guy.

Yeah, Marcus spoke at our mastermind recently, and he was awesome, and that's why we're here. And last question: Where do they get in touch with you?

Just email me directly, marcus@marcussherridin.com. My my website is marcussherridin.com.

Awesome, Marcus. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much. This was great.

Jay, my pleasure. You take care, brother.