The Five Finger Framework: 75 Content Ideas You Already Have

**[00:00:00]** Hello everyone, my name is Armando Perez-Carreno and welcome to the Web Talk Show. Today with us is Jimi Gibson from Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. How are you Jimi? I'm good Armando. Looking forward to our conversation. I'm looking forward to it as well. I know the audience is going to really love a few of the items at least that you're going to be talking about, but I expect there's going to be quite a few surprises from your background as well. Speaking of, could you give us a little bit of background of how you got to be in a marketing agency and what you did before that? Uh, well, it's probably maybe one of the most unconventional paths, but it all makes sense in the end. At least it does to me. So, um, I was digging through some boxes a couple of years ago, Armando, and I found this little card, and it was a membership card to Merlin's Mailorder Magic Club. and I flipped over the card and I started doing the math and I was like, "Wow, I was four years old. That's kind of early to get involved in something like that." But I don't know what it was about magic. You know, they I guess they mailed me a different trick every month or, you know, something. And then I ended up getting another kit when I was 6 years old. And I started, you know, if my parents had a garage sale, I would sell tickets for 25 cents and, you know, gather everybody around. And then in middle school, my friends parents would hire me to do magic shows for my friends, which was kind of interesting because I probably would have been invited to go to that birthday party anyway. But they were paying me like 25 bucks in middle school. And I thought I was like a mogul at that point for sure. And then in high school, I met a gentleman who was the account manager for a large Fortune 100 company. um he worked at the ad agency that handled the account and they were looking for a promotional entertainer and yeah for the next 16 years I worked for that company and got a chance to hang out at the ad agency got a chance to perform I would say hundreds of thousands of not **[00:02:00]** hundreds of thousands but thousands of shows over those 16 years and really learned what it took to keep an audience's attention to have them sort of go through the process of be presenting these tricks and illusions and then the payoff of the climax of the trick. And you know, I really loved performing magic, but at the more I hung out at the ad agency, I got fascinated with the world of marketing and advertising and I thought, you know what, it's kind of like magic anyway, right? You got to capture somebody's attention. you got to, you know, poke them with a little bit of curiosity to keep their attention going and then there's some call to action or pay off at the end. And I guess that's the way I see marketing. And so, yeah, I started working at advertising agencies. Um, actually, I kind of um loved the design aspect of it. So, I started out as a designer and then worked my way up to creative director and then I ran an agency for quite a while. But I came to Thrive Agency about five and a half years ago to head up their strategy department. Uh, you know, I'm kind of this leftrain, right brain. You can't do the creative stuff until you know why you're doing the creative stuff, right? And so I always thought if you didn't have a good strategy, and maybe that comes from planning a magic show, but if you don't have a great great strategy, you're going to end up somewhere you probably don't want to be, and it's probably going to cost you a lot of money. And so um I did that for about a year until an executive position opened up and then I was running all the teams that did all the work. Uh and then this is probably something that we'll talk about because I think it's an opportunity for business owners today. Business owner came to me about a year and a half ago and we were seeing the tide turning on AI visibility and the fact that AI really likes people instead **[00:04:00]** of logos. our founder Matt, he's great, but he doesn't want to be out doing all the in front of the audience things that I'm doing. And he said that, "Hey, Jimi, we'd like for you to be the face of the company." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I spent about a year doing a variety of things and sort of cataloging what worked, what didn't work. And then I've actually just finished a research report. We studied over 400 companies and looked at the visibility of the company and also the business owner. And I think there are some surprising things that would be great takeaways for folks that are listening, whether they're running the marketing, whether they're the business owner, whatever the case may be, a subject matter expert within an organization. So, that's a long journey from a four-year-old having a membership card to Merlin's Magic Club to where I am today. But maybe that'll give us some things to chat about. For sure. You know, it's interesting. I was just listening to a podcast where the lady who helped grow one of the largest podcasts out there right now was talking about this precisely. So, she was a guest at a show and they were asking her, "Does the owner always have to be the face of the brand now that we're talking about it?" so important for someone to be the face of the brand like you just said because it's better a lot better than just logos. You want to have a face and so she was saying exactly that like it's a it's good ideally if you can uh and maybe even not ideally but she explained it in this way. She said that if the owner is wants to do it and feels comfortable doing it or even slightly uncomfortable, it's great. But if the owner is the type of person who's completely averse of being in front stage, then no. But have your staff do it. Have someone on the team, have an employee, have even a **[00:06:00]** third party, have someone representing it. Yeah. And because you play to the strengths, which is what you just said. And then that's brilliant because at the end of the day we're humans, right? Yeah. And everybody wants to know who are the people behind the business. Yes. And again, I have some hard data that supports it. But the other thing is from a soft perspective, you want to do business with people you like and you trust and you believe they have your best interest at heart. And so if you can express that, then it gives you a leg up from some of these faceless businesses that, yeah, okay, I'll give them my business because they have a track record, but I'd prefer to know somebody. And I think the more we get into the world that we're in now where you can do business with anybody around the world, that human touch is vital. Um, and there are also some algorithmic things that come into play that benefit you as well. And so I think there's multiple reasons why we're seeing a shift. That's very interesting. I found myself when looking for products, software in particular. Let's say I'm looking for, I don't know, a plugin for a WordPress site or something simple that many business owners might run into. And I find myself, this just happened this week, looking at them, you don't know who, maybe you don't know who the developer is in this case, etc. But then on their homepage, they have social proof. They have reviews. But one of the big reviews there is from someone that I trust, from another development company, for which the owner in this case is very active on social media and I know her thought process and I know what she shares. And so when I see Katie's there, then I say, "Oh, if Katie trusts them, then fine." I forget about everything else, right? It just it's it's such a **[00:08:00]** big leap from just seeing, "Oh, they've worked with IBM and Google or whatever versus this person says they're okay and I trust that person because of their personal brand." Yeah. I mean, we do that for recommending a book or a movie or a restaurant or, you know, if you're going to have somebody come fix something at your home. You're going to ask uh your local Facebook group in your neighborhood or you're going to ring up somebody that you saw a truck in front of their house and you might go walk up to their door and go, "Hey, I saw that so- and so." Yeah. It's just a natural behavior that sometimes we don't put two and two together and we go, "Oh, well, I trust going through that process. Why am I hiding in my own business when that could actually be a competitive advantage? So, you know, what do you think a business owner, maybe they run a small business, and they're afraid, shy, maybe they've never been on stage, they've never done a magic show, never performed in a theater, they've never um I don't know, maybe they they weren't the glee club gang of school or of sports athletes and and just haven't been in that spot. What do you think they should hear in terms of why it's so important? But then also, is there a way to overcome that illogical fear? Yeah. So, I can give some monetary reasons why it's smart for them or to name someone within the organization. I gave the example of why I'm in the position that I'm in. there may be somebody in that organization that or multiple people within the organization that could represent that company. Um I can talk a little bit about my path, but let's get to the monetary um part of it. Why why why **[00:10:00]** would you want to be visible? Okay, so we just talked about the reasons from a humanto human connection point. We talked about that an audience is really wants to know who's behind the company, whether it's the owner or whomever. The the thing that's going on in the background is we are seeing a different way that people search for companies. um they're you know Gartner has put out a research report that says by the end of this year 25% of organic traffic to Google will move to large language models. So people are asking chat GBT and Gemini and Claude and Grock and Copilot and you know these other systems for answers and you know I would say it's minimal now depending on uh the industry or the business it's anywhere between 7 to 40% um of the traffic associated with a particular brand but projections are that by 2028 50% of that traffic will go away. And so we work with about a thousand clients. We have seen their organic traffic to their website depending on the client drop considerably. And so where's that traffic going? Well, that traffic is going to AI mode for Google. It's going to, you know, 60% of searches these days don't end up with a click. Like that should just scare you right there, right? Okay. So what's being presented on that um results page? Well, there's all sorts of summaries. There's knowledge panels. There's AI mode as an answer. But independent of that, there's also people asking chat GPT about a product or service. And so that's one reason you want to be ahead of the curve. The other reason is **[00:12:00]** when somebody comes to your business through one of these large language models, the conversion rate is four and a half times the conversion rate that you would typically see coming to your website because those folks have done their research. They're already pre-sold and they're ready to buy. They already have all the information. It's not tell me about your business. It's how do I get this shipped to me or how do I sign up for an appointment or whatever the case may be. So that's a monetary thing. When a business owner shows up or somebody recognizable from the business, not only do your referral traffic increase, the deal size is larger and the speed at which that deal closes is faster. And so that becomes the owner multiplier when you layer that on top of the visibility for the company. And so um if you have a competitor who has a very visible person within that organization, they are going to receive more of that conversation or answers because it is looking for a variety of things. Um, the audience may have heard of this acronym called EAT, which Google actually started in 2016 as EAT, but they expanded that in the early 2020s to EAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. And so these AI models are desperately trying to figure out out of those four things, who are the businesses or who are the people that represent those businesses that demonstrate these types of things. And I'll keep going and then I'll let you interject because the the last part of it is an opportunity that I think is staring people in the face, but they're maybe they're not aware of how important that is. over the last 18 to 24 months. And I'll **[00:14:00]** just use chat GBT because that's probably the most used at this point. I know Claude is getting a lot of press these days for how great it is, which you know, I use Claude. But people believe that putting content into one of these models and then putting that information on their product or service page or putting that on a blog is the answer. And I'll say that's not the answer because if it's if your competitor is doing the same, then everybody's content is going to sound exactly the same, right? It's just going to be very boring and vanilla. And if you can put some of your own experience, expertise, authority, a point of view, um some customer reviews like you had just talked about, you are going to jump ahead of the people that are creating this content that really says nothing. And so I would say in my career I've never seen the convergence of so many opportunities for people who are willing to take a little more effort in the process because everybody is being satisfied with just the status quo. Um you know I have some other thoughts about how folks can get started. I have a framework that is easy for them to follow. we can talk about where they should be putting content, but I think that probably answers your question. Um, it does. And I see you nodding your head, but I just want to give people permission to to be themselves and to speak from that point of view as opposed to just going, "Oh, I got to put some stuff on on a website." Yes. I think a lot of people see the lowhanging fruit of oh these tools help me generate things fast and so they might and like you said everyone else can do the same thing just tell it generate content on this topic and put something on there and if it's an underserved industry **[00:16:00]** regarding search then like a client told me just yesterday I used claude to help me a little bit with SEO just very basic and now they're ranked, right? Yeah. That but the problem is yes, you can be a step of ahead of the curve if nobody else is doing it. Once everyone does it, then the the the angle is gone. So what you're saying makes a lot of sense because we all have an expertise regardless of where you are in life. You have experience in something whatever it is, you have experience. And so storytelling, and I think we can talk a lot about storytelling, but if you can consider the chat like someone you're talking to for real and just have a conversation, that might open up a lot of things. I think like you're saying, maybe just ask the other, "Hey, I do this. can you please interview me so that we can extract some of my expertise for you to then help me draft content? And then the LLM will start asking questions and prying that information out of us. And then you're like, whoa, that's true. I do have experience with this. Oh, I helped this person with this other thing. And now you have material that then you can either directly write or get assistance to write, but now it's not going to be so bland. Yeah. Is that Yeah. And you know, I love the part about using these tools to interview you. Um, I would say there's a starting point that will I'm going to go through something now and it'll give you probably 50 or 60 ideas that will not sound like a large language model output. And this is something you carry around with you every day. and it's going to really be direct about how you engage or what kind of content you put out there. And so I'm holding up my left hand and for those of you listening, we'll just kind of walk **[00:18:00]** through the fingers. Um I'm going to start with my pinky. And so we may remember the pinky promise you made on the playground as a kid. And so you said, "I pinky swear to do this." And you didn't break that promise. And so as a business, what promise are you making to your customers? What guarantee? What risk reversal? What are the things that you will stand behind? What will you not budge on because you believe that's the right thing to do from an internal culture perspective? What are you promising the people that work with you? What about the vendors that you work with? Um these are things that you should publish and talk about and be passionate about because they're different for every organization. Um you know some things that uh maybe have nothing to do with your particular industry but it's the reason why you do what you do and the way in which you do it. And so it could go into customer service, it could go into the products um or the raw materials that you use. It could be the way you service your clients, the speed in which you do it. So, I mean, that's one finger, and I think I've probably given you 15 different things that you could talk about. Um, the next one is the ring finger, and I call it the ring finger because there most in western society, that's where you wear your wedding band. There actually was a um I guess a folklore that there was a vein that ran from that finger all the way to the heart called the Venus amorous. Um, later disproven, but it's still a cool story, right? Um, and so you might think that's about a promise, but it's actually about the passion that you had to start this business. Why did you start this business? Why are you in it? Why do you live where you live? Why do you serve the customers that you serve? Um, and then it's also about relationship. Um, you know, my wife and I just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. Um, yeah. So, are you in it for the long haul? Um, your potential clients can smell if you're just in it for the quick **[00:20:00]** win, right? uh how are you going to stick with your clients through thick and thin. Do you want repeat business from them? You know, thinking about a long-term mindset is a different way of speaking to your customers than if you're just looking for a single sale. So, again, another 10 or 12 things you could talk about. Um the next one is the middle finger. And no, I'm not giving Armando the finger here. I have all my fingers up. Um, you know, a lot of people consider that a vulgar um gesture, but it's actually a gesture of defiance. And so, who is the enemy or the villain to your brand? Um, are you willing to call them out? If you truly believe that your product or service is the best solution, then it's your responsibility to name that villain. That could be a person, that could be a company, that could be an ideology. Um, I mean there's ways to do it where you're not rude and you're not calling out somebody by name, but your customers are researching, right? We just talked about that. You should identify why some of these alternatives to your product or service is not the right path for your ideal client, right? So again, another 10 or 12 things you could talk about. The pointy finger is next. And I call it the pointy finger because you got to know exactly who your ideal client is. If you don't know who you're talking to, the previous three fingers are not going to make much sense, right? You got to know what keeps them up at night. Are they are they going after something? Do they want something? Or are they trying to avoid pain about something? You got to know what that is, right? Um and then it's also a symbol for number one. And I use the number one for clarity. So, any kind of message you put out there, whether it's on a product page, a um a blog post, um an email communication, uh you know, uh a one-to-one interaction, you should be talking about one problem with one solution and one call to action or you're going to confuse your **[00:22:00]** audience, right? That there's a cognitive load if they're in a problem that they can't sort through all this stuff. So, the clearer you are, the better. Um, and then the last one is the thumb. And the thumb is the universal symbol for thumbs up, things are going well, or thumbs down, things are not going so well. And so, what is going well for your client? What's not going so well? How are you going to speak into that? Um, the KPIs that you use to measure your business. I if your whole KPI dashboard was a thumb up or a thumb down, you would know what that is, right? No wishy-washy in the middle. And then it's also about the thumb print. What thumbrint are you leaving on the world with the product or service, your community, your neighborhood, your clients that do business with you? What about the, you know, your staff? Um, the vendors, we talked about that before. Your industry, um, are you making it a better place to be? Um, you know, I have three sets of twins as nieces and nephews, and they Yeah, they can actually open each other's phone with their face ID, but they can't open it with their thumb. And that's unique to you. So, what is it unique about your business or the way that you do things? And so, I probably went up to maybe 75 different things you could talk about just on your hand. And so if you're stuck for things to say, when you really dig in to the meaning behind each one of those fingers, you should have enough content to last you for a year. And it would not be something that uh chat GPT or clog could generate because it doesn't know what that burning opinion or point of view you have deep inside you. That is the best summary of how to generate ideas that I've ever heard. It is so simple. **[00:24:00]** I don't know if it's your artistic storytelling magical background or or the way you expressed it. But as you were saying it, I was just thinking of ideas and ideas and ideas. And I think everyone should just have a chart with this next to them to to get rid of all the post-its. Just use that. Do you have something like that? Uh where where people can like I don't know, download a sheet or something. I know you're in marketing, so Yeah, I should. Um, I've actually got a book that I'm almost ready to release um that will probably be out in April and I talk about this principle in the book. So, um, you know, we can stay in touch and if folks connect with me, uh, be happy to let them know when the book is is out because it goes into a lot of detail related to exactly what we just talked about. Yeah, for sure. They have so many questions. Starting with niche. This is what I hear the most when talking with business owners that are thinking of building their website, their lead pages, their landing pages, their even physical items like brochures, signs, etc. They say they do many things and it's very hard to portray the importance of a niche and to portray the importance of a one problem. Um it just they don't want to narrow their potential reach and I always like the analogy of the needle and how it's much more powerful because of the amount of force that you can get in that small point. But still, what do you say to someone that has maybe two or three different services and are just not willing to **[00:26:00]** focus on one first before showing the rest? Yeah, that's the eternal fear of missing out or FOMO that we all experience because we don't want to miss the opportunity that may come if we just focus on one thing. And so there's a couple of ways to look at this. I would say because we're in a global economy and you know again depending on your product or service you may be local regional um within a country or you may not have any borders associated with what you can deliver and so I think that would play into it certainly the other thing you have to look at is what is your um audience that could be a potential customer. Are there enough of them? And are they visible enough for you to be able to reach them? And so, uh, I would say most industries, uh, you have to go through a little bit of thinking and there are many many tools out there that would allow you to see your total address, total addressable market or TAM. And then you want to make sure you have enough. And then it also goes into how much is someone going to pay you for this. And so if you have a small total addressable market and the cost or the the price of your product or service is low, then it may not be viable for you to niche down. So that's one thing. The other thing that we typically get into uh with clients and we do this um is what is the most profitable and what is the thing you enjoy selling the most and what do your customers always ask about. So you may have a portfolio of five different things that you do or 25 **[00:28:00]** different products. If you spend the time to put the effort and energy in communicating your most profitable best product, that does not mean that once those people become a customer, you cannot transfer them to other products and services within your portfolio. And so if you try to be all things to all people, you're gonna be nothing because you're going to be trying to talk about this and talk about that. we, you know, there's no clarity in the messaging. You're also going to run out of time to talk about them all. You're going to run out of budget if you're paying to get in front of an audience. Um, and so those are all things that uh we've seen and you know there's an SEO strategy that we've adopted and we call it the priority page strategy where we do exactly that. we focus on making that page and of course the world of SEO is different and so I'm just using that in traditional sense of page rank but once you have success in that now you can choose another one now you can choose another one and so you can do this in phases you don't have to commit to saying I'll never talk about anything else but why not make the best part of your company the most visible to begin with and then leverage that to move to something else. And then the other advantage that we have now is you can AB test things and you can say, "Okay, I'm going to put a campaign out, whether it's an email campaign to part of your email list, whether it's a paid media campaign, whether um you get on a certain venue to talk about this particular product or service in a different venue and there won't be any bleed over and then just see, let the numbers tell the story." So, I think I've probably given enough angles that would agree with what you're saying, but give people the comfort to know that **[00:30:00]** uh it's probably a good idea to to go in the direction of a smaller conversation with a smaller product or service set. uh for all the reasons we just went over. That makes a lot of sense and I see it very clearly when you're talking about advertising because you have a landing page, right? You have an ad, you put keywords for it, you're focused on a specific target and then they go there. And another question that comes up a lot is, yeah, okay, maybe they understood that part, but then they say, but what about my homepage? I want everything on the homepage, right? And it's like, yes, I understand because you don't want to miss out, but if you think about it, people hardly ever are going to reach your homepage. They're going to reach individual pages based on the search result. Because by you appearing in search, it doesn't mean your homepage appears in search necessarily, unless they're looking for your brand. Your specific product or service page might be the one that appears. So what does one do with the homepage where maybe they serve B2B but then also B TOC or they serve individuals but they also serve corporate is the homepage meant to just be a like blanket thing under the kitchen think s think s think s think s think s think s think s think s think s think s think sink kind of thing or do you think that's a place where you tell more about the brand itself? Yeah. And so have we got about three or four more hours for our conversation? Um, so I have an opinion about the homepage. And I believe the purpose of the homepage is to get people off the homepage into where they need to go, right? And so you don't want people camping out. And the homepage, and we'll use the term above the fold. Many people probably are familiar with that. It actually came from the newspaper days when they put the newspapers in the box and you could only see what was above **[00:32:00]** the fold and the way that people put their quarter in the machine was to go, "Oh, I want to read that story." So that was the point of like the call to action, you know, and it has to be about your audience. It can't the above the fold can't be we've been in business for 20 years. We're a family-owned company. like that is not helping me solve my problem or get me what I need. It has to be based on your ideal client's thing that keeps them up at night or drives them to want to solve this problem or get this thing. And so, yeah, you mentioned is it B2B or B TOC? You're literally your above the fold could be a fork in the road. are you this person or are you this person? And then they go off in their direction and then you get to have a more focused conversation about that. Um you also want to make sure that you have social proof that there's some sort of review. Um there is some sort of perhaps a guarantee for risk reversal. You know there are components to the brain. You have to answer the questions that are already in their head. How much does it cost? How long is it going to take? Can I trust these people? Are they going to steal my money? You know, blah blah blah blah blah. Like, that's what people are worried about. Those are the questions you should be answering. And it's prime real estate. So, you have to make decisions based on, okay, if I can only say three or four things and only one call to action, what's it going to be? Um, so that's my stump speech on homepages. That's I think it hits the nail. Well, of course it does because you're an expert in this, but but just just from from what I'm seeing um in a conversation from a few days ago, we were looking at a site, a competitor of a client, and you know, a lot of people do that. They compare and they say, "Oh, I I'll just follow what they're doing." But in many cases, it might be misaligned because you don't know how well they're doing, how well their their **[00:34:00]** homepage performs versus maybe they just run ads. But looking at a competitor that does billions of dollars a year, you look at it and it looks old school. It's not the fanciest site or anything, but I'm looking at it right now and just as you said, they have an example of the products little slider. No, some people don't like sliders, but whatever for that purpose, it's okay. But it's it's a little thing that it's cut in boxes. So, it reminds me of the newspaper. So, there's like the deals, there's a special service like engraving in this case that applies to the market. And then they has the free shipping thing. It's got the 400,000 customer reviews thing, and it's got the over 14 billion sold, right? So, it's got exactly what you're saying and you can get to all the different places around the site, right? So, to the point, not fancy, not beautiful in the design sense, but I mean, it's doing its job. It's functional, right? Y very good. I like that. I think that and the fork in the road idea that you said, I've seen it used before as well. It's not very common to see, but it makes perfect sense. If you already got there, you got there because of something. Maybe something you searched, you found. You get to it and right there you see which one are you and you just go that path and now everything will make sense to you because otherwise it'll just be sort of I don't know you selfidentify and you go through a door and then the door you go through is a party of all people just like you. And then the other thing that we have to mix in Armando is the fact that 60% of searches um end up with zero click. And so how it doesn't mean that people aren't going to come to your website eventually, but how is AI able to parse what's on your site so that you can be part of that zeroclick conversation? That's another component that I think people are having a hard time getting their heads around. For sure. I do want to talk about that. The LLM search is very interesting **[00:36:00]** because whether you found it by accident because you searched on Google and Google gave you an AI result or you deliberately went on chat GPT and asked, what I found in my experience is if I search for something and the chat gives me the response, I just immediately sort of feel since it has more background and it already digested the information for me, it just feels a little more believable. than just looking at whatever the person said in their website. And I don't know if the stats back that that's like from a human feeling. You see, oh, this is this person. They have these awards. They've done this, this, this. These are what people say about them. You're like, well, that that makes sense. And you sort of save a lot of steps and maybe make decisions faster. Is that is that accurate? Well, I think you're going back to the conversion rate of 4.4 times the conversion rate of the website, right? Um, and so the there's another interesting thing that happens with these LLM conversations that go on right now and you know it's changing weekly monthly. There typically is not a link to the website in the results that come back. So chat GPT will most often not have a link. Claude may or may not. Gemini it's sporadic. Uh, Perplexity probably has more links. And so what happens? You see the name of the company and then you go do a Google search to get the address of that company to then go to that website. And so what's happening is the attribution to that traffic now comes in as branded search. Um, or it comes in as referral traffic. And so you have to sort of look through your analytics a little bit differently and understand that your organic search may be a little bit off. Your referral traffic may be a little bit different. That's what's **[00:38:00]** going on because the direct link is not showing up in these large language models. And so attribution is now um a problem, but it's something that folks need to be aware of. There's something happening in that space as well, right? That things or companies like Chachi PT are starting to integrate horizontally to then say, "Oh, here's the result. Do you want to buy it now?" And then it sort of handles a transaction with that provider directly. That's I' I've started to see it. I've me I've seen it mentioned, but I haven't actually interacted with the purchasing process. Have you seen that? Um, yeah, there's a lot of discussion about that and so I would be curious to know how quickly that advances because you just mentioned that you trust the answer. Are you going to trust the LLM to handle your transaction? And so there's a couple things going on, especially from an e-commerce perspective. Um, how is that model going to account for the variations of size and color if it's a product? um if it's a service, is it going to schedule um a service call? You know, those types of things. There's a lot of complexity involved in that and it's pulling that from the website. And so, how set up is your website to cater to all those variations that are potentially going to need to happen in that large language model. Um so, I would say that's one thing that we have to watch out for. The other thing and people have probably heard about the agentic or agent process through these large language models. Um there will be agents and bots going to your website doing things to gather information. So let's say you wanted to take a trip or make a reservation at a **[00:40:00]** restaurant. this bot is going to go and interact with your website in a way to then create an itinerary, purchase a flight, purchase a hotel. And so now you have to go, okay, how do I open up my website for this to happen? Is the information happening? Um, how do I look at inventory updates so that it doesn't cause a problem that I run out of inventory or it doesn't show up the right way? And so that opens up a whole other uh can of worms as they say that uh needs to be thought through. But yeah, I don't think we're too far away from all of that. It's a very interesting topic because the there's a technical side of yeah well maybe I can make my site uh MCP enabled or just be make it easier with like cloudflare created this new service where it can have an additional layer that LLMs can just ingest your site as markdown so they don't have to try to parse the HTML and then like the MCP side of things maybe you make your site accessible so that an LLM can understand how transactions happen. But then like you said, do you trust it? So will there later be a layer where you have credentials on your chat or claude or Gemini flavor of choice where you can then have it go to a site and then just securely interchange without actually sending data over but just pay for it, right? Tokenized payments via Stripe or some other provider that's that's heavily uh introduced in the market. That's that's going to be super interesting. But for the agentic side, like you said, I'm finding myself doing a lot of that with our own things where we connect the agent the personal because we're building things our our own not client products but like our own and it's a lot easier to like we have a directory site for moms and it's it's a lot easier to be at the place and see a **[00:42:00]** mistake or see there's an event that wasn't captured because it was third party event and just tell it via message. Oh, there's there's this information missing or can you add this event? And then it will know to go to the site, scrape it, bring the information in, push it up instead of me having to go to the back end and manually add it. So, so it like makes it so much simpler, but at the same time, there's a lot of risks involved if if not done properly. Yeah. It's exciting, scary all at the same time. Yes. Yes. What about I I don't want to miss out on this point because I I made a note to myself about the middle finger villain part of it. I just had this conversation last week with a co-orker and we we're talking about maybe launching, let's say you're launching a platform and there's a competitor, a big competitor in the space, but you know what you're going to do will just address so many pain points that people have with that one because it's one of those platforms that just grew too much and doesn't really treat their the people that are using it as they deserve. And so there's a long Yes. Yes. And and so there's a big need. So the conversation we were having or discussion we were having was he was saying but we don't want to name them if we're doing let's say you're doing a build in public should we or should we not name them in the sense that you are talking about it you're you're building something and should you call out and say xplatform has this or are you having troubles with this thing because it's I don't know payments take a long time to get to you or things like that. So you have this decision to make of should I call it out so that people who are listening like you said can identify and say yes that's that's exactly the problem that I'm having with them. I want to see what I want to hear what you're saying or do you have to be nice in the way that you just generally say this is what we have but don't mention the actual pain point that people are **[00:44:00]** having. And so we were we're sort of I was I was trying to explain that you don't have to be mean about the other company. You just have to say the facts. But in I don't know what's what's your thought on on that. Well, I would say one thing that you want to um be introspective about is what is the voice of your brand? Are you contrarian? Are you polite? Are you no fluff? Tell it like it is. Um and then you can figure out the voice that's appropriate. Um, you know, personally, I'm not a big fan of uh calling out or trashing another company. I think that can come back and bite you. But I would say if you have an educated customer or consumer, they are familiar with probably the things that are going on that you can speak into. um especially if they're on that particular platform or they have experience using that platform, you're basically going to be poking them in the side and they're going to be going, I know, I know, I know. And so perhaps part of your marketing approach would be to buy out their and you know, you see this all the time with cell phone companies, right? we'll buy out your contract so that you can come over because you know we know that that's the fear that you have that you you're locked in and you can't escape but we believe that if you escape your life is going to be much better and you know whatever metaphor you want to use um you know as we're talking about magicians people are probably familiar with Pen and Teller um and they have a show called Fool Us and obviously they're in Las Vegas when they first started out they wanted to separate themselves from sort of the cheesy magic magician vibe. And so they basically manufactured a rumor that all magicians hated them. And so they would talk about that all the time. Well, in fact, magicians envied them because they were bold enough to be **[00:46:00]** themselves. And they do good magic, right? But they wanted in the public's mind to separate themselves from the run-of-the-mill magician which then endeared them to the public and that was a play that they did. Now obviously you know their personality and they can pull that off. Now they didn't name a specific magician. They didn't say David Copperfield or David Blaine or you know anybody like that. They just said magicians in general. Here's the problem with them and this is why they hate us. You could do a blanket statement or a generalization about when a company gets real big, here's what happens. And so those are some other approaches that people may think about. That's a great way of putting it because you see both sides, right? Even in you made a perfect example with the phone companies. Some of them will say, "We'll just buy out your contract." And they're just stating the obvious and and uh but they don't say who. But some of them are like, "This other network is terrible. they have so many complaints, right? And so there's there's both sides and they're both might work, but yeah, it makes perfect sense to use whatever your brand voice is and then go with that. Just magicianship I think is an interesting topic because I find a parallel between software engineering and when you can create something out of thin air right so I always give this example of the alchemist right so so I like software engineering because it's like alchemy you can sort of just pluck something out of thin air just code it into life. Now, even easier. You just tell the LLM and it'll right. So, I like the example that you gave about advertising or marketing with with magicians. I I had never seen it that way. So, can you can you tell a little bit more about how you see marketing not from a salesy **[00:48:00]** point of view, but for what it actually is in both for the company and the the client to the consumer? Yeah. Uh, well, I think the best way for me to explain it, Armando, is to try a little something. So, I want you to think about a relative that maybe is no longer with us, but you really had a connection to that relative. You don't have to tell me who that person is. For me, it was my grandfather. Um, you know, he was my hero and, you know, I would just love hearing all the stories um about him. Do you have somebody in mind? Um, where did this person grow up? in uh multiple places. Okay, let's say United States. The United States. Okay, great. And I want you to just imagine that a package arrives on your porch. And this package is a box that you look at it and you're going, "How in the world did this box get to me? There's no return address. It looks kind of old, like it's been in a storage unit for a while or an attic or something." Have you got that picture in your mind? Okay. I want you to pick up that box and take it inside. And you're going to open up this box. And when you open the box, you see four packets. And they look like letters. And they're all tied with ribbons. Each packet of these four are tied with ribbons. And you pick up the first packet of letters. And the ribbon is not too tight, so you're able to sort of flick through them. And they're addressed to this person who's no longer with us that you had a very fond memory of. And the return address, each one is a little bit different, but they all point to some secret club or organization. Like, and you think, whoa, that's kind of wild. What in the world? And so you put that packet down and then you reach in the box and you pull out another one. **[00:50:00]** And now you're just like, "Oh my gosh, you said that this person was from multiple different areas, right? And these are love letters." And you're like, "Oh, I don't know if I should be looking at these. These are, wow, okay, let me put those down." The next one you pick up is kind of strange. They're actually from a private investigator and they have like the world's cheesiest logo. It says, "We we dig up dirt on anybody." and there's like a little shovel or a spade in the logo and you're like, "Okay, I don't know what that's about, but and you put that down." The last packet is actually from a South African diamond mind. And you're like, "Oh, my day has come. I am cashing in. I've got diamonds." And so, I've just given you four different packets of letters that you know, you're going to get to open one of these letters. Is it from the secret club or the organization, a love letter? Is it from the private investigator? Or is it from the diamond mine? Which one? Secret club. Oo, the secret club. Nice. So, I want you to undo the ribbon on those letters and you turn them over and you realize they're numbered from 1 to 13. And so, you get to choose any one of those. Which one do you want to open? What number? Four. Number four. Wow. Okay. Very interesting. Well, as I was going through those, the first was the club or the organization. The next one was love letters or a heart. The next one was private investigator. And I said that there was a shovel or a spade in the logo. And then the last one was from the diamond mind. So that is in effect the four suits in a deck of cards, right? Mhm. and you went for the clubs. And then I said there were 13 1 through 13 numbers on the back and you **[00:52:00]** chose four. Well, if you count aces low and king high, that's 13 cards. So, in effect, you've chosen what? The four of clubs. Well, behind me the whole time has been a deck of cards. Now, if I grab this deck of cards and keep it in view of the camera, I just pull these out. And I go through these cards one at a time. There's actually one card, Around, that's reversed in the deck. I see that. one card and one card only. And if that were the four of clubs, that would be pretty crazy. That's amazing. That's so cool. It is, by the way, for those who are not watching the video. And so what's happening there? You asked me to talk about how does magic relate to marketing? Not a sales conversation, but a natural process. Mhm. I can't really lay it out unless I do something like that to explain it. And so there's three phases that go on through that that you can layer on top of any communication. If you're missing one of those, that's not going to land the way you want. And so the first thing that I did was I did what I said, think about a family member that you were close to that is no longer with us, right? And it's a happy memory. I shared the fact that I was close to my grandfather. And so what am I doing? It's all about you, right? You get to think about somebody that was meaningful in your life. Um I didn't say let me tell you about my grandfather. I just said that there was somebody in my life that was important to me. Do you have one? Yes. Right. Where did they grow up? You said **[00:54:00]** multiple places. Oh, okay. I'm digging a little bit deeper. And then you said United States. So that's a point of connection. We're having a conversation. I know we've been talking now for quite a while. we've built up some rapport. What's actually happening when I start focusing the conversation on you is there's a release of oxytocin, which is a neurotransmitter in the brain, which basically said, "Oh, okay. This is going well. Let's see where this goes." I've basically been given permission to move to the next stage, which is curiosity. And so, curiosity is the release of dopamine. And we've heard about this with social media addiction, but it's actually the expectation of a reward, right? Because when you post on social media, you want somebody to like it. You want somebody to share it. You want somebody to comment on it, right? Mhm. And so this is where you're like, "Okay, this is interesting. I'm not sure where this is going, but these packets of letters are like, tell me what was going through your mind as you were pulling these out. Were you able to visualize this box and the letter?" Yeah. Well, I'm I'm very visual, so I was I was Yeah, I thought of a box, a similar box that I may have found before, interestingly enough. And it was funny the examples you gave because I actually did find some letters from like a secret club at some point. So, so that was why it was really funny when you said it. So, these are sort of universal things that would elicit curiosity, right? Right. Um, and I'm triggering different emotions in you. And then I asked you to take the ribbon off and spread them out 1 through 13. At what point did you start to connect the dots that we were talking about a playing card? I think probably when you said 13 was I should have caught it before because of the claws and the and the symbol, but but yeah, when you said 13, that was when I was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that's where we're going." But I don't have to tell you, right? you came to that conclusion on your own **[00:56:00]** because your brain is wanting to close this curiosity, right? And so then I'm stretching out the turnover of the card and then when it is the four of clubs, that's a release of serotonin where it's like, oh wow, everything is right with the world. It all makes sense now. And I'm sure for some of the listeners, they were like going, who is this crazy person talking about this box of stuff? When Armando asked about, you know, how does this work in marketing? And so I think the curiosity point is what folks are missing now because we all want to establish connection whether it's authentic or whether it's fake and then we want to go straight to the close or the conversion, right? And we're losing the opportunity to elicit that curiosity and that intrigue and allowing the customer or the person on the other side to come to the conclusion on their own because you've given them enough information as you've worked through this process. And I would say think about that when you are in some sort of interaction and make sure you're not skipping that. Now, I know, you know, we're probably coming to the end of our conversation. I couldn't have 15 different scenarios or you'd be like, "Oh my gosh, hurry up, Jimi. Get on with it." So, you have to know your crowd. And then you have to sort of walk with them through each one of these. And um you know it can work for a social media post, it can work for a blog, it can work for leading a team, it can work for um a sales presentation, but none of that felt icky, right? No, not at all. That wasn't what I was going to say. So I've I that immediately brings to mind the you know the sales videos that people use on landing pages and things like that that were the VSSLs and stuff that that were very popular a while back. They're still popular, but now they become shorter. So I remember **[00:58:00]** when they were younger they would force you to watch it. Right? So they were trying to get this curiosity factor in but I think they were missing a big part of it because at sometimes you're like oh but I just want to I want to see right so they're they were sort of forcing it in a way and it worked and they sold a lot and and okay but but at the same time but the word you just used sometimes it felt a little like too much and and now I've seen that they're becoming shorter. It's just like you do the loop but in a way where you can give them all the information. You don't have to lock them in and it feels more authentic but they still get the the the reward. What is that is that related? Um yeah, I would say so. And you know, we talked about the situation with the SAS product that um you were asking about how should this company present the fact that this larger company was not doing what the smaller company wants to do. I would say the two magic words that everybody should use are what if. And so one way to present that information if you know that the customer service, let's say the customer service is bad and it takes a week to get a response back. The what if for that smaller company would be what if we could guarantee that we will get back to you in two hours or less. And then all of a sudden their brain goes they're they're putting themselves in the future when they have a problem and they go what if they're like that means I could do my work. I wouldn't get frustrated. I could move on with my project. And then what is that 2 hours or less? That two hours or less is the pinky promise, right? We promise that we're going to get back to you in 2 hours or less. And so now they're thinking in their mind, how do I get that that I don't have? And now they're clamoring to go, how do **[01:00:00]** I sign up? What do I do? Which brings them to the conversion point of the conversation. Smart. What you did with the trick has many layers, right? you're you're setting it up, right? And I don't know magic, but there there's a setup, but then there's there's multiple layers to it where you are both doing the trick, but then also you're you're paying attention, right? You're listening to to do that interaction. It's not something that you do with an empty seat. So, does that also translate? Does the analogy translate as well when thinking about marketing and and who the audience is and how how you're interacting with them? Yeah. And I would say there are many points where you are going to have this dialogue whether it's across a screen or in person and you're asking for feedback along the way and that feels authentic like a relationship like we're sitting here having a cup of coffee or tea, right? And so you or you're taking cues from that person. And so in my brain, I know the path that I want to get to, but I'm also open to hearing what that person has to say. So it can guide how we get to that end result. The end result is the same, but it feels better because we have this interaction. If it is asynchronous communication where somebody is reading a blog post, right? You kind of have to do the same thing and you kind of have to almost um answer all those questions that you would be asking and they would be responding and you have to make that connection at the beginning. You have to raise that curiosity through the body of that to then bring them to the conversion or the call to action at the bottom, which feels very natural. But **[01:02:00]** the only way that you can do that is if you follow the pointy finger and you know exactly who you're talking to and you know what their pain is, right? And so it all sort of works together about everything that we've talked about today. Yes. Okay. Yes. because you might have the perfect solution for someone, but it might not be that someone or it might not be that someone at that stage. And so, while you might have everything rehearsed and and practiced and and it would work perfectly for the ideal target, if you don't focus on that pointing finger, then then yeah, even if it is the right client, it just maybe it wasn't the right time and you're you're going to get a totally different response. No. No, but also you're categorizing in your head, these are the four or five scenarios that are typically what goes on with my ideal client. I don't know where they are right now. So, I need to make sure I get some feedback points so I know where they are. Um, and if you're pitching something that's not landing, it may be a symptom of you're pitching the wrong thing at the wrong time. And so, is it going to require your sales process to have some sort of discovery call or something they fill out that allows them to express at what point they are in these four or five options that um are the potential path in this choose your own adventure magic trick that you're performing. Yes. Yeah. You know, it makes perfect sense. Uh Alex Ramosi, very very famous nowadays. um in the in the marketing space and business etc. his whole thing. He's just doing a lot of videos, right? Video, video, video, video of tons of content. He he's always uh for the do more than anyone else could possibly do. So, whatever they say, it's just noise. Um, insignificant, **[01:04:00]** right? And but his thing is, he briefly mentions it sometimes. You go to acquisition.com and there's a thing. Well, there it's precisely that. It fits you into buckets. So, you have to choose your adventure. Where are you in income? Where is your business? And so after that it shows you this whole plan and it's like this is where you are. This is what you already did. This is where and so you're you're identifying right and but for them it's gold because then they can now show you content or send you content that is specific. Oh yeah to that point. Nice. This is this has been great. Jimi, I I have so many more questions that Well, maybe there's a version two or a round two. For sure. There's going to be a round two. We're going to we're going to leave some more time. I I really thank you so much for coming on the show. There's this has been so valuable advice for anyone, not just business owners, just in general. I think these can translate to personal interactions just just humanto human interactions even human to machine interactions nowadays because you at the end of the day with all they'll do things but you have to be clear and I think your your way of of setting that up will actually help you get better results for anything you're doing regardless of of who you're talking to. If someone wants to reach out to you, Jimi, or learn more about Thrive Internet Marketing Agency or your your content in general, where should they look? Yeah. Well, interesting. Um, LinkedIn has now become like the number two cited source for LLMs uh to um hit all the triggers of the EAT that we went over. So, I post on LinkedIn every day, Monday through Friday with a lot of what we talked about today. So, people can continue to learn and would be happy for somebody to DM me if they have a question. Uh, would be happy to to answer that. And then, um, the agency is just thriveaggency.com. **[01:06:00]** Again, a lot of free information on there. If somebody has some marketing needs, we'll be happy to talk with them about what those are. Um, but yeah, I would say those are the two places that would be good follow-up points. Amazing. I'll put those in the show notes as well for anyone listening so that you can find him. But of course, if you sell you search for Jimi Gibson, I've done it myself. He appears in the search results as well. So, thanks Jimi again. And if anyone who's listening has not yet subscribed, please like and subscribe so that you learn when we rece um publish new episodes here on this show. Thanks everyone.