Marketing Speak®

A website was ranking #1 for every single keyword it cared about — and still lost 46% of its traffic. What happened? That's the kind of contradiction my guest Nathan Gotch deals with constantly. Nathan is an SEO entrepreneur, educator, and founder of Rankability, and just published his new book, AI SEO for Dummies (Wiley). He got his start in 2011 with tactics that would make any modern SEO cringe...

A song doesn't exist in physical form. So what actually is it? That's a question my guest this episode, music publisher Benjamin Groff, once got asked point-blank by a tech CEO — and it changed how he thinks about his entire industry. Benjamin built Kobalt's first U.S. office from the ground up, has signed artists like Ryan Tedder, Tiësto, and Kid Cudi, and now runs his own boutique publishing com...

"You're not going to be replaced by an AI; you're going to be replaced by someone using AI." But there's a layer above that too: what happens when AI is using AI? In this episode of Marketing Speak, I welcomed back serial entrepreneur David Henzel, of MaxCDN, LTVPlus, and now Context Engine, to talk about what it actually looks like to run an "AI-first" company from the inside. This isn't a theory...

Sustainable growth doesn't come from chasing attention. It comes from becoming something people can't help but talk about. My guest on today's show is Scott Martin , founder of Groundswell Origins and author of Groundswell: The Unseen Wave of Business Growth. He has spent over twenty-five years building brands as an agency owner and strategist for national companies. He now hosts the Groundswell O...

The things that used to work just stopped working. If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. In this episode of Marketing Speak, I sat down with Nick Musica, a longtime SEO veteran turned executive coach, to talk about what happens when the habits and go-to moves that built your career suddenly lose their power in the AI era. What we got into: ➡️ Why the patterns that got you here will not get y...

AI is reshaping podcasting faster than most creators can keep up with, and not all of it is good news. In this episode of Marketing Speak, I welcomed back Rob Walch, longtime podcasting veteran and now part of the team at Captivate, to talk through what AI actually means for creators, what still matters after fifteen years of change, and whether it is too late to start a show at all. What we got i...

Why do so many great companies get bought, then deliberately ruined in the name of profit? That mystery is what drove Eric Ries, author of the mega-bestseller The Lean Startup, to write his new book, Incorruptible. Eric has spent 15 years helping founders build companies, and he has watched the best of the industry alongside its dark side: beloved brands acquired and gutted, founders pushed out of...

Your LinkedIn inbox is full of spam. So is everyone else's. And the old outreach playbook is the reason why. Jason Osborn has spent eight years helping companies generate leads on LinkedIn, and he noticed something: the more people leaned on automation and pitch-first messaging, the worse their results got. So he flipped the entire model. In this episode of Marketing Speak, Jason walks through the...

AI is forming judgments about your brand right now. Most organizations have no system to manage it. Every earnings call you publish, every case study your vendor posts, every complaint about your return process, AI is reading all of it and building a case for or against recommending your brand to buyers. And the most damaging narratives are often ones brands unknowingly wrote themselves. In this e...

Most marketers are obsessed with reach. Jay Acunzo thinks that's the wrong game entirely. In this episode of Marketing Speak, I sat down with Jay Acunzo,  keynote speaker, author of Break the Wheel, and host of How Stories Happen,  who built a thriving speaking business from scratch, lost it all in five days when the pandemic hit, and came back with a sharper mission: helping experts stop being co...

Stop pitching from the stage. Start storytelling. Majeed Mogharreban shares how he engineers speeches so audiences imagine working with him—and hate imagining a future without him. Watch this @mktg_speak episode

The businesses that thrive won't be the ones that let AI replace human creativity. They'll be the ones who use AI to amplify it. That distinction is everything — and it's at the heart of how we operate at Net Concepts. I've been in the SEO game for 30 years. I co-authored The Art of SEO (now in its 4th edition). And I can tell you that what we're living through with AI is one of the most significa...

The most important marketing question isn't "What works?" According to Billy Broas, it's "What are human beings?" Sounds philosophical? It is—and that's exactly the point. On Marketing Speak, Billy (creator of the Five Light Bulbs framework and marketing strategist for Tiago Forte, Ryan Deiss, and major science-focused companies) makes the case for argument-driven marketing over psychology-driven...

🚀 What if you could fix technical SEO issues with the push of a button? I just interviewed Patrick Stox, Product Advisor at Ahrefs, who's revolutionizing how we approach SEO in the AI era. Patrick shared how Ahrefs built edge SEO technology directly into their site audit tool—allowing users to automatically fix canonical tags, redirects, and internal links without ever touching their CMS. But her...

Growth doesn't slow because expertise disappears. It slows when trust erodes. In this episode of Marketing Speak, I sat down with Dov Gordon, founder of JV Grow, who has spent 15 years building a tightly curated community for established entrepreneurs who grow through joint ventures that actually work. Dov shares why broad messaging like "get more clients consistently" no longer works, and what na...

🚨 ChatGPT updates twice as fast as Google. Are you tracking the right metrics? Former Bing Webmaster Tools architect Duane Forrester just revealed a critical finding: Out of 50 queries tracked for one client, ChatGPT cited them ZERO times. Not mentioned, not paraphrased, not included at all. The old SEO playbook won't cut it in the AI era. In this week's Marketing Speak episode, Duane reveals the...

In a world where ChatGPT can write 50,000 words in 5 minutes, how do you create content that actually ranks and converts? In this week's Marketing Speak episode, I reveal my framework for the AI era—and it's not what you'd expect. Instead of fighting AI with more tactics, I advocate for plugging into "Universal Intelligence" for truly original insights, writing for the "linkerati" and not just you...

Is SEO dead in the age of AI? Not even close. Google's AI overviews are literally making up statistics, citing fake sources, and providing dangerous medical advice. People are actively searching "how to turn off AI overviews" because they can't trust the results. I had an incredible conversation with Samantha Riley on her podcast Influence By Design, where we broke down why SEO is more critical th...

🔬 What happens when you analyze leaked search engine source code and build an SEO tool from it? You discover the entire industry has been optimizing wrong for years. Ryan Jones (Head of SEO at Razorfish) joined me on Marketing Speak to share what he learned from the Yandex and Google leaks. The truth is uncomfortable: while SEOs count keywords and stack H2 tags, search engines are plotting docume...

What does a Rabbi know about selling jewelry online? Turns out, everything. Pinny Gniwisch made one of the most unusual career transitions: from leading a congregation to building ice.com into a $75M e-commerce success story. In our latest Marketing Speak episode, Pinny shares: Why influencer culture burns out (from someone who interviewed a 600K-follower influencer) How to use AI without losing y...

From family gig work to a national acquisition in 30 years. 🚀 Keith McMaster started helping his police officer dad serve legal papers as a side hustle. Three decades later, his company, Firefly Legal, was acquired as part of a major industry consolidation involving 6+ companies. When Keith volunteered to hot-seat his "old and dated" website during one of Jay Abraham's courses, he got brutally ho...

Your company brand can be sold. Your personal brand can't. That's why I've been investing in StephanSpencer.com alongside my agency for decades—and it's paying dividends in the age of AI. In this week's Marketing Speak episode, my longtime collaborator Greg Merrilees of Studio1 Design walks through the complete evolution of my personal brand website—from a simple WordPress blog in 2004 to a compre...

🚨 The AI hype cycle is colliding with reality—and most companies are quietly taking their "revolutionary" AI workflows offline. Mark Williams-Cook, founder of AlsoAsked and Director at Candour, just revealed what's really happening behind closed doors. In our latest Marketing Speak episode, Mark shares why:  ✅ Multi-site brand presence beats keyword rankings  ✅ Understanding base models matters...

"Link building is dead," they said. They were dead wrong. Dan Petrovic just explained why on Marketing Speak—and it's not what you think. Traditional link building? Evolving. Content seeding with brand associations? Essential. Digital PR for AI visibility? Critical. Here's why: Models need to be TRAINED on your brand associations. Even without backlinks, content seeding influences: Model training...

When your brand sounds like, "Yeah, we do that too," you disappear into the noise. In this episode of Marketing Speak, I talk with Dr. Gary Sanchez, creator of the WHY.os Discovery, a framework built from hundreds of thousands of assessments and millions of data points to decode why people do what they do. We unpack how to: Turn your WHY into a clear, compelling brand message Hire and promote base...