Hi Reader,

Have you noticed I play with the greeting each week?

I like personalisation, but don’t have everyone’s first name in my list because you’ve arrived in different ways.

Sometimes I just like calling you all fam - this isn’t a large list, and I just love that there’s a humble cohort of people that welcome and read this email most weeks.

Fun quote from a friend other day:

“I knew we had this catch-up booked - so I binge read your newsletter in advance”

Thanks Ross 🤣

For those of you who are new - I like to cover what’s going on with growth, AI, automation, and its impact on the world and do this in a pretty consistent format of 3 stories and some personal storytelling welcome!

This week I look at:

• Optimising your website for LLMs
• Pattern recognition and how it's working for me
• Can I get your help with community building?

Lots to tuck into this week, so let’s make like a diver and pike on with it 🏊🏾‍♀️

-Marshy

Optimising your website for LLMs

If you’re an SEO practitioner, you’re very used to adapting to change.

The rise of Google, the golden era, adapting to algorithm changes, the introduction of Bing and local market competitors, and bouncing between white hat, grey hat, and black hat worlds.

Even with this in mind - SEO right now is having a time.

I’ve never subscribed to the school of thought (probably to my detriment) that gaming an algorithm for “free” traffic is a long-term and viable strategy for growth.

Having said that - I know plenty of businesses that have built empires from following theses patterns (HotelsCombined was a client back in the day), and plenty more that were reliant on this channel and got deleted into obscurity over night.

My old adage was: just focus on being useful and usable to your customers and the rest follows.

Regardless of where you stand - there’s something happening for fast-moving companies that are optimising their web presence for picking up by LLMs.

The reason why it works is obvious - people are flocking to the search experiences within a ChatGPT or Perplexity, and enjoy the fact they can back-and-forth, probe more deeply, and actively investigate a topic with nuance and their own lines of questioning.

So far - people are willing to make the trade-offs with a bit of random hallucination, in return for this search power.

Also so far - there are companies noticing SUPERIOR conversion rates from online enquiries that come from:

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?utm_source=chatGPT
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^ that’s just nerd speak (and what you see in Google Analytics) for the traffic source

We’ve also seen this with a startup we’re advising - Appacca - while small numbers for now, there is no question its “better” traffic.

So why is that happening?

Two reasons spring forward in mind:

1. Your conversational search history in an LLM seems more “private” and bespoke to what you’re looking for. So when you’re asking a series of 5, 10, or 20 questions looking for a recommendation (and then receive one). I think there’s a natural trust element that you no longer award to Google.
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2. I was working at a startup called UseVerb, and one of their (indirect) competitors was SEEK (Australia’s largest job board).We were investigating a small football club that had advertised a job on SEEK.A search for their company profile on SEEK got weird when I searched “seek mackay football club”.The company didn’t only serve up the company page.It served up every single spelling and misspelled variant of that company and led it back to SEEK.This sounds stupid.

​

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But if you’ve got the time, willingness, resources, tech, and budget to throw the kitchen sink at everything - why wouldn’t you do it?

(Sidebar: a rough guesstimate on SEEK’s SEO team (ie. containing search/seo in their job title - nets out at about 70+ different people).

So back to LLM search - the appearance of being free of bias isn’t the same as being free of it.

Enter LLM optimisation / AEO / etc.

Companies are emerging that are solely focused on producing content that will be picked up and indexed by LLMs in order to appear more frequently and (in turn) be recommended to people searching for their particular service, skill, or talent.

A detailed deep-dive on it can be found here.

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One company that is doing it is my friend Jackie - who I met many moons ago at a BNI.

She’s now in the US and has started a business called Probably Genius.

They’re helping businesses game this and appear to their advantage - if you’re curious and want me to introduce you just let me know and I’ll introduce you.

I’ll get a commission for doing so, but will also help you get the most out of the service if you’re looking for extra hand holding and marketing advice.

Pattern recognition

One of the things my coach emphasises over and over is pattern recognition.

He thinks its the most important thing you can cultivate in business.

One thing I’ve picked up on recently is that I have no problem finding opportunities.

But I’m seeing lag on “feedback” on the opportunities.

There are many ways I can attack this, and because the article on how I’m Claude Projects and self-reflection was popular, I wanted to share some ways I can use this information (both AI and non-AI).

So on the non-AI front, I journaled, talked it through with my coach, and amended my CRM to include the question “what feedback do I have so far?” - all easy enough changes and nothing ground breaking there.

I also punched it into my self-reflection tool.

It gave me some suggestions about what I can do with this information (some good, some ehhh) - but one of the “contrarian takes” it suggested was just embracing the hunter identity and gamifying the way I collect feedback.

There was enough of a kernel of an idea in that (and what I’ve done playing with AI and ADHD concepts before) to test something.

So I asked Claude to give me a prompt for building a Lovable.dev (marketed as a no-coding way to build full-stack apps - the reality is it is better for proof of concepts) way of coding up an interface that could go over the top a CRM.

I don’t have the time or energy to pursue building something like this right now, but one very real reality I see unfolding in the future is this sort of ability presenting to everyone.

1. I’m trying to solve this tricky problem
2. Spin up an on-demand software that solves it
3. The end

What do you think?

Community building ask

So I’ve started my Skool for professionals, startups, and scale-ups who want to grow their automation, AI, and marketing knowledge.

And this is where I’m at:

So my ask is this - have you got any good resources, links, suggestions of how to go about building this out?

I’d love any responses that share what you’ve liked about other communities, what you’ve seen done well, or anything else that springs to mind.

Thanking you in advance!

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That’s it for this week and later than usual because I had a very big day on Thursday alongside my client work.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and stay tuned for next time.

-Marshy

p.s. It's Father's Day as I send this (boys now napping). We celebrated last night as a family and because G works on Sundays, but took the boys to the pool this morning because the weather is weird today - how good!