092 Master Personal Marketing: How Machines Decide Your Success with Jason Barnard
What if the key to digital marketing success has nothing to do with SEO tricks or technical hacks?
In this mind-shifting episode, Jason Barnard—the world authority on digital brand intelligence—reveals why personal brands drive 80% of business growth even after years in operation. Discover the three-stage implementation process for controlling what Google and AI say about you and learn why traditional SEO is dead, replaced by a systematic approach to machine education. Jason shares his proven “Machine Education Model” focusing on understandability, credibility, and deliverability that transforms how algorithms perceive and recommend you to potential clients. His journey from punk folk bassist to blue cartoon dog on Playhouse Disney to digital marketing innovator will change how you approach your online presence forever.
Keywords: digital brand intelligence, Jason Barnard, personal branding, machine learning algorithms, founder marketing, SEO myths, digital identity, niche domination, brand narrative, AI recommendations
Listen here: 092 Master Personal Marketing: How Machines Decide Your Success with Jason Barnard
Published by: How to Founder. April 24, 2025. Host: Chris Franks & Anthony Franco. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube.
Dad Joke Drought Meets Feathered Alarm Clocks
[00:00:00] Anthony Franco: Good morning, Chris.
[00:00:22] Chris Franks: Good morning, Anthony. How are you this fine Thursday morning?
[00:00:27] Anthony Franco: I have no dad jokes. I’ve got nothing. So I’m a little low because I have nothing to provide that would make you laugh and nobody else laugh, so I apologize.
[00:00:39] Chris Franks: Well, I’m a little bit tired this morning.
[00:00:41] Anthony Franco: You are?
[00:00:42] Chris Franks: Yeah. Thank you for asking. Because I don’t know if you knew, but my rooster died. The rooster used to wake me up every morning. He died a while back. It was a bummer. It’s like, because he woke me up every morning and I replaced it with a duck. And now I wake up at the quack of Dawn. Oh, that was so.
Why Winning Online Means Owning Your Space
[00:01:06] Chris Franks: Anthony, do you ever wonder why some businesses seem to effortlessly attract customers online while others throw money at digital ads with nothing to show?
[00:01:20] Anthony Franco: Chris, I have noticed that. I have noticed the exact thing.
[00:01:25] Chris Franks: Thank you for engaging.
[00:01:26] Anthony Franco: So funny you brought that up. Alright, I can’t wait to hear about this.
[00:01:29] Chris Franks: In 1980, television was dominated by just three networks.
[00:01:34] Chris Franks: This is funny because kids don’t know that. ABC, CBS and NBC, who control 90% of what Americans watch. The arrival of cable TV shattered this model. Introducing dozens of special channels like MTV, ESPN, and CNN. Industry experts failed claiming viewers wouldn’t pay for content they previously got for free.
[00:01:56] Chris Franks: They were spectacularly wrong. By 1989, cable reached 53 million American homes as viewers flocked content that spoke directly to their specific interests. Rather than mass market programming, the network executives who dismissed Ted Turner as a crazy Atlanta billboard owner when he launched CNN, watched in horror as their audience share steadily eroded to channels serving niche communities with deeper, more relevant content.
[00:02:25] Chris Franks: Today’s Digital Marketing landscape mirrors this exact revolution, Anthony. The death of mass marketing and the rise of focused authority within specific domains. The businesses winning online aren’t trying to appeal to everyone. They’re becoming undisputed experts in their particular niche. Did you watch MTV, Anthony?
[00:02:47] Chris Franks: I watched a lot of MTV.
[00:02:51] Anthony Franco: I watched it for road rules. That’s all. That’s really the only time I ever watched MTV was road rules, which is an embarrassing admission.
Jason Barnard on Digital Marketing, Dad Jokes, and Duck Therapy
[00:03:00] Chris Franks: You’re such a nerd. Today on How to Founder Anthony, we’re going to be talking about master Digital Marketing.
[00:03:06] Chris Franks: I’m Chris Franks. With me today is my well-haircutted, well-coft, Anthony Franco, and we are joined by, I want to say he’s a pretty good looking guy, just based on his haircut, mr. Jason Barnard. He isn’t your typical marketing guru, from a punk folk bassist playing 660 European concerts to starring as a blue cartoon dog in a TV series that generated a billion page views.
[00:03:34] Chris Franks: He’s built three profitable companies spanning 66 years combined. Now he’s solving Digital Marketing with The Kalicube Process™. No bs. Just results. Jason, what do you think about our dad jokes? I mean, you think they’re 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10? Which one?
[00:03:53] Jason Barnard: I giggled at the ducks, the plaque, and it reminded me of a story from a few years ago because I lived on the river and there were ducks outside.
[00:04:01] Chris Franks: There were ducks. Did they wake you up every morning?
[00:04:04] Jason Barnard: Oh no. In fact, I was trying to install a server. I’m a bit geeky and I was trying to set up a server and I completely messed it up and it fell apart and I’d spent all day and I got very frustrated. And then I opened the window and the ducks were going, quack, quack, quack, quack.
[00:04:19] Jason Barnard: And it felt like they were laughing at me and it was just all the pressure off me. And I got back and finished it off. And it was lovely because the ducks were laughing at my frustration.
[00:04:28] Chris Franks: I was going to say, they actually were laughing at you. Ducks are very technical and judgmental.
[00:04:36] Anthony Franco: Did you hear about the duck that walked into a bar? He says, give me a beer and put it on my bill.
[00:04:41] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:04:45] Anthony Franco: Sorry. Sorry. I should have just kept that one to myself.
[00:04:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I was going to say 9 out 10. You’ve just made a 10 out 10.
From Musician to Digital Marketing Expert
[00:04:56] Chris Franks: Jason, I typically don’t do this because usually when I ask guests, we’ll spend 15 minutes on this conversation but you have a very interesting backstory. Give me a very brief, consolidated version of your backstory, which brought you to becoming not your typical Digital Marketing guru.
[00:05:15] Jason Barnard: Ooh, right. Okay. I’ll tell you a really short version, and if you want the long version, ask ChatGPT or Gemini. They will tell you the long version. So I went to a university in Liverpool, played the Cabin Club where the Beatles famously played a lot, and I was a singer. Then I moved to Paris for love. My heart was broken because the love didn’t work out.
[00:05:36] Chris Franks: She was French, I’m assuming. So of course she was going to break your heart.
[00:05:40] Jason Barnard: Of course. A friend of mine knew a band. They said, if you want to join our band, you can join the band. I said, I sing. They said, we don’t want a singer. I said, I played the guitar.
[00:05:48] Jason Barnard: They said, we don’t want a guitar player. If you want to be in the band, you have to play the double bass. So I learned to play the double bass in 30 days, joined the band, and played 660 gigs. Then the band split up and I was on my own and I thought, what shall I do next? I thought, oh, I’ll write songs for children.
[00:06:03] Jason Barnard: So I wrote some songs for children. Created a production company, made a cartoon, built the website to a billion paid views. The cartoon was in the Playhouse, Disney. Then I pivoted again when I exited that company to become a digital marketer. But when you searched on Google, it said, Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog.
[00:06:22] Jason Barnard: So I had to figure out myself because that lost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in deals because you don’t take a cartoon blue dog to be your digital marketer. I changed that result and created Kalicube®, collected 3 billion data points, so I can now do it for anybody. Make Google and AI say exactly what you want about you when somebody’s searching your name.
Building Your Personal Brand First as a Key Strategy for Founders
[00:06:47] Chris Franks: Anthony, this is our opportunity to have Google and AI not call us assets.
[00:06:54] Anthony Franco: Well, it has to be true, right, Chris? That’s our problem.
[00:06:57] Chris Franks: Dang it. Ah man. That’s a problem. Can’t truth check that one. Alright Jason. Very interesting backstory. I also love the fact because you have that founder mentality as a musician, you’re just like, I don’t know how hard could learning to play the double bass be like, I’ll just go figure out how to do it.
[00:07:15] Chris Franks: It’s going to be great. Alright, so just start us off. We talk mainly about founders, particularly early stage founders. Why does this stuff matter? Why is it important for me as a founder to keep this in the back of my mind as I’m starting to build my company? And I think your expertise is super interesting in this kind of new world of SEO, but just broadly for Digital Marketing. What are the concepts that we need to be thinking about as we start to grow our company?
[00:07:46] Jason Barnard: Well, I think the first thing is that it’s easier to build a Personal Brand than it is to build a Corporate Brand. So if you want your company to take off quickly, I would advise you to kick off with your Personal Brand, push that, get people on board with you as a person, and then you can slowly pivot towards the Corporate Brand, which takes more time to develop.
[00:08:06] Jason Barnard: So from my perspective at Kalicube®, we’ve been in business for 10 years now. But my Personal Brand still drives 80% of the business. People come onto sales calls and they say. I know what I want. I know what you do. I know you’re the guy because I see that red shirt and I see the Kalicube® logo everywhere.
[00:08:28] Jason Barnard: How much does it cost? How long does it take? And that is dominating a niche. And you were talking about that writer at the start. My Personal Brand dominates the niche of controlling and amplifying Personal Brands in Search and AI.
Why Founders Should Embrace Being the Face of Their Company
[00:08:43] Chris Franks: I think you said two really important things in there and I want to unpack both of them.
[00:08:47] Chris Franks: And Anthony, I’ll give you a chance to react, which is the first one is I think that this is something we as founders get wrong all the time, which is lovingly, nobody cares about your brand. You care about your brand. You know, you have the t-shirt that you get made for your startup brand, but people will care about you and your story.
[00:09:07] Chris Franks: Anthony, why do we as founders sometimes not embrace, allowing ourselves to be the centerpiece of the brand.
[00:09:18] Anthony Franco: I think it’s, sorry, Chris, was that to me?
[00:09:21] Chris Franks: Yeah, go ahead Anthony. And then Jason let you react.
[00:09:23] Anthony Franco: Real quick. So I think, I’ll talk about my hesitation. I actually am reminded of a Bill Cosby quote from his old. I’m standup where he talk, he was talking about.
[00:09:36] Chris Franks: We can’t, he’s like Voldemort. You can’t even say his name.
[00:09:39] Anthony Franco: I’m saying it. So he was talking about cocaine in his special himself, and he was asking somebody why is cocaine such a big deal? And the person said, it intensifies your personality.
[00:09:55] Anthony Franco: And Bill said, well, what if you’re an asshole? And the reason why that reminds me of it is like, well, we don’t want to intensify our own Personal Brand because of, I think fear of being called out an asshole, right? So there is some personal like hesitancy because when you start to amplify your Personal Brand, if you’re not authentic, that’s called out.
[00:10:23] Anthony Franco: If you are authentic, what if people don’t like you? So there’s some scariness to it.
[00:10:29] Chris Franks: I also like the fact that we haven’t cussed in like 60 episodes and we just busted through that wall.
[00:10:34] Anthony Franco: Well, so ass is not a cuss word. We’re okay. It’s on the edge.
[00:10:41] Chris Franks: I don’t know. Jason, do you think asshole is a cuss word first?
[00:10:47] Jason Barnard: Yes, I do.
[00:10:48] Chris Franks: Okay, thank you. Alright, so what is it about being a founder, Jason that makes me sometimes being unwilling to be wanting to be the face of the company. And some people are just shy. They just don’t want to do that job.
[00:11:00] Jason Barnard: I think, yeah. I mean part of it is some people simply don’t realize that it’s an advantage that it’s easier than building a Corporate Brand. As you said, other people just think my Corporate Brand is what I care about, so that’s what I should push, and it’s what I love. And then as Anthony says, some people are scared of putting themselves out there because they don’t want to have their head shot off as they put it up above the parapet. But I think generally speaking, it’s really that people don’t understand the value of their Personal Brand and the idea that people do business with people and that people, when they come to my sales calls say, I feel like I already know you.
[00:11:45] Jason Barnard: I’ve read your articles, I’ve seen your videos, and that’s really important as well. I turn up at conferences and people talk to me as though they’ve known me for years and I’ve never met them. And it was a bit like that in the music group as well. So the idea that somebody comes to me or my company or talks to somebody in my company and they feel like they already know me as a person breaks down a lot of barriers very, very, very quickly and makes doing business much, much easier.
Building Your Personal Brand Narrative to Connect with People and Machines
[00:12:13] Chris Franks: It’s funny, the same thing happens to Anthony and I with this podcast. When we show up in person, people ignore us. Just like, because they’re like, we don’t want it. You know that people, that’s a great point. Okay. So how do I start to think about this? So if I know it’s important and I know that I want to lead probably with myself, I want to try to be the face of the brand early on, even if I want to build a scalable company, right?
[00:12:38] Chris Franks: Even it’s easier to connect with a person and their story than it is some company story.
[00:12:45] Chris Franks: So how do I do it? What are the steps that you would walk me through to start thinking about this?
[00:12:52] Jason Barnard: Well, the first thing is to know what you’re trying to say. Who are you? And as Anthony said, you want to be authentic.
[00:12:59] Jason Barnard: But being authentic, I could be multiple versions of myself and they would all be authentic. I could push the musician, I could push the cartoon Blue Dog, I could push the serious entrepreneur, I could push the geeky data person. So you need to define what your narrative is and then start to make sure that brand narrative is consistent across all the platforms where you’re present, including your own website. And that does two things. Number one, it means that you are presenting, a clear and consistent message to your audience on LinkedIn, on your website, on YouTube, on forbes, on entrepreneur.com, wherever that might be, and you’re presenting a clear and consistent message to the machines.
[00:13:46] Jason Barnard: And those machines, Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity will amplify you. So that’s the big kicker for me is not only will they represent you well to people who already know you because they’re searching their your name. But their influences, people will use them to solve problems. Google Search, Google, Gemini, ChatGPT.
[00:14:09] Jason Barnard: They use them because they trust these machines and these machines give recommendations and you want them to recommend you. And if they understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve, and that you’re credible, they will recommend you to the billions of users that they have , in the trillions of conversations they’re having.
[00:14:26] Jason Barnard: And as you said earlier on, trillions of very niche conversations. So if you are the niche expert and your brand narrative demonstrates that you are the niche expert across your entire Digital Footprint, you have a huge chance of being included in that conversation and being recommended by ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft Bing, Perplexity.
[00:14:47] Jason Barnard: Was that too long?
[00:14:48] Chris Franks: No, I think it’s perfect. I think that the niche piece was also an important piece, which is.
[00:14:54] Jason Barnard: But that was you.
[00:14:55] Chris Franks: Yeah. But of course I thought it was brilliant.
[00:14:59] Jason Barnard: Of course. Sorry. Excuse me.
The Struggle of Founders to Tell Their Own Stories
[00:15:01] Chris Franks: Yeah. I think that one of the other things that we fall into is founders, is we oftentimes be like, okay, what does your company do?
[00:15:09] Chris Franks: Well, I’m a service company. I solve every problem you could possibly have ever. And if you need me to get you coffee, I’ll get you coffee, et cetera. When the reality is that’s kind of a poor strategy for exactly what you’re saying. Anthony, I want to ask you a different question, which is, why is it so hard for us as founders to tell our own stories?
[00:15:33] Chris Franks: Why is it when I come in and say, Anthony, I’m struggling with this thing, you can tell me my story in a way that is so clear and concise and makes sense, but I struggle to be able to tell my own story and I can do the same thing with you. Why is that?
[00:15:50] Anthony Franco: Two things. Do you know too much about yourself? So you don’t know what they’re asking, like first you don’t know exactly what they’re asking.
[00:15:58] Anthony Franco: It’s like, tell me about yourself. Are they asking about your career? Are they asking what your hobbies are? Are they asking what you like to eat? So you want to make sure that you’re covering the question and you know so much about yourself that you can, I mean, let’s face it. All of us can talk about ourselves forever because , we know there’s no nothing else in the world that we know better than us.
[00:16:18] Anthony Franco: But the problem is that summarizing that into an elevator pitch, is it therefore exceptionally hard. So I think it’s the way our brains are worked. I don’t think it’s narcissism, not for most of us anyway, but I think it’s just our inability.
[00:16:36] Chris Franks: Were you looking at me when you said that Anthony? Narcissism for most.
[00:16:40] Anthony Franco: I’m not looking at anybody, Chris. I think it’s just literally the fact that we’re not sure. So when somebody asks me, tell me about yourself. I actually before I start answering it, I asked them like, do you want to know about like my career? Do you want to know about what I like?
[00:16:59] Anthony Franco: Like I asked them what they’re looking for. Unless the context is obvious. I really like what Jason said, where you have to have almost practiced your who am I elevator pitch online. You need to have that in your head too.
[00:17:18] Chris Franks: So Jason, I want to get your reaction there because it is just an epidemic.
Creating a Personal Brand in a New Digital Niche and Building Authority in Search and AI
[00:17:22] Chris Franks: If I told you my story, I could go on and I would, it would be jumbled mess and you could clear, like you could create a concise story elevator pitch for me in moments. How would you approach that same problem if I was trying to say, what is my elevator pitch?
[00:17:40] Jason Barnard: People come to us when they already know what they’re trying to present, but we can help them.
[00:17:45] Jason Barnard: But we made the same mistake that you were saying earlier on, is saying, I can do everything for everybody as a company. And now we don’t. We serve entrepreneurs who are time poor, cash rich who want us to take the weight off their shoulders and manage their Personal Brand in Search and AI done by the professionals.
[00:18:01] Jason Barnard: Simple. I describe myself professionally as the World Authority on Digital Brand Intelligence. Which kind of says everything and nothing at the same time.
[00:18:12] Chris Franks: I had to be like Digital Brand Intelligence. That’s a new category. You designed a category. Jason, good job.
[00:18:19] Jason Barnard: Well, and that’s it. Oh, that’s a really interesting point when we’re talking about niche is I’ve invented a niche because nobody was controlling Brand Representation in Search and AI.
[00:18:31] Jason Barnard: And what I found really interesting is I’ve created the niche and the more I communicate about that niche, the machines are learning from me and they’re very keen to visit my website and get more information from me. So I’m creating an entire new category within Digital Marketing, of which I am the only representative and therefore the top representative.
[00:18:56] Jason Barnard: That’s going to be forever because we are creating the memory and the knowledge of these machines today. Google, ChatGPT, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, they’re all building these AI machines that have a memory, have knowledge, and it’s being built today. And so whatever happens in the future, I created this niche.
[00:19:17] Jason Barnard: I will always be the leader of this niche. And that’s huge because it’s in there and it’s unbreakable. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:19:25] Chris Franks: I just think there’s one more fear I want to address before we get into how we do this. As the founder, I’m on project six or seven, and with each of those projects, I know I’m going to fail on some of them.
Reinventing Yourself and Overcoming the Fear of Pivoting in Your Digital Identity
[00:19:41] Chris Franks: Some of them I want to reinvent myself because we as founders, that’s the joy of doing this job. You don’t stuck in one job for the rest of your life. There’s a fear associated, which is I come out and start to say, I’m the world’s expert in, what’s your niche? Digital Brand Authority?
[00:19:59] Jason Barnard: Digital Brand Intelligence.
[00:20:01] Chris Franks: Digital Brand Intelligence. I’m the world’s authority in that. And two years later you decide you want to go back and play bass in a punk band again. Can you adjust along the way? I think that it’s totally possible to do that, but we fall under the fallacy being like once I say this is what I do, I can do this forever.
[00:20:21] Jason Barnard: That’s true. It’s very difficult to do, at least with Google and AI, but that was where I came from. I was the voice of a blue dog in a cartoon that was on Playhouse Disney released records. My name was associated with the blue dog on IMDB, Wikipedia and Wikidata, on Spotify, on Visa, on all of these sources, which are very powerful in terms of how Google understands the world and how now AI understands the world.
[00:20:48] Jason Barnard: And I then said, I want to pivot. To becoming a digital marketer and entrepreneur and I could do it. And that’s what we’ve invented at Kalicube® is how do you pivot across the entire internet in a heartbeat. And so it’s a legitimate fear because it’s hard to do, because you have to change the message across your entire Digital Footprint and whatever you think, your Digital Footprint is big.
[00:21:12] Jason Barnard: So that pivot, you are right to be afraid of that pivot, but the solution is actually very simple and we can talk about that next.
Finding Your Entrepreneurial Sweet Spot
[00:21:20] Chris Franks: So Anthony, I just want to get your reaction because you’ve done this three or four times yourself, like you were the Shark Tank guy, and then now you’re a person that helps other companies scale and exit businesses.
[00:21:32] Chris Franks: What do you think about that?
[00:21:39] Anthony Franco: There’s so many things going in my head. I’m not sure if I’ve done it right. I want to go back to somebody that we had on our podcast earlier. The thing that pops out is Matthew Lusco. The question mark guy. We knew that guy. We’ve known that guy in our head for 25 years. The moment we thought of him and his question mark jacket, we knew instantly what he was going to talk about. And we knew instantly what he was the expert on. He spent a lifetime in a niche. I think he has an advantage and also a disadvantage because it’s hard for him to break out of that.
[00:22:15] Anthony Franco: So if he were to talk about AI right now, people would be like, really? You’re going to be an AI expert? You’re the question mark guy. So I do think you need a positive thing to niche into something, but keep it broad enough to where you can pivot within that niche.
[00:22:35] Anthony Franco: And that’s almost an oxymoron, right? You want to niche down, but not so far that you can’t pivot around it. So for you and I, Chris, both our niche is entrepreneurship. It’s small enough to where we can navigate around it. My hobby is entrepreneurship, so it’s credible and I have experience there and it’s what I talk about.
[00:23:01] Chris Franks: We are at the intersection.
[00:23:02] Anthony Franco: When I talk about Shark Tank, it really shows how entrepreneurs are featured on the show. So, in that way, they connect with the audience. I’m not sure if I’m making sense.
[00:23:14] Chris Franks: You’re at the intersection of dad jokes and entrepreneurship.
[00:23:16] Anthony Franco: Yes, exactly right. We’re known for bad dad jokes and entrepreneurship.
Managing Your Digital Footprint Through Radical Career Changes
[00:23:20] Chris Franks: Alright, Jason,
[00:23:22] Jason Barnard: To come back to that, what I’ve managed to do is invent a process with Kalicube®. I’ve moved from being a punk pop musician and singer to a children’s cartoon creator, then to a digital marketer, and finally to an entrepreneur. So that transition, they’re very, very, very different things.
[00:23:45] Jason Barnard: And in terms of how I manage my Digital Footprint, people get on board because that’s what they see consistently. And I think people are more adaptive in their minds as to who you are than we imagine. But that’s just my experience.
[00:24:02] Anthony Franco: I totally agree. I think you’re doing it the right way.
[00:24:06] Anthony Franco: I was just talking about Matthew Lusco’s niching too far down and not having him the ability to pivot a little bit.
[00:24:15] Chris Franks: I think that people don’t actually give a crap about you as much as you think that people
[00:24:22] Chris Franks: about you. And if you came out tomorrow and be like, look, I’m now an interpretive dancer.
[00:24:26] Chris Franks: People will be like, oh yeah, the guy’s an interpretive dancer.
[00:24:30] Anthony Franco: I think you’re cured of that the moment you get married, Chris.
Why Consistency, Authenticity, and a Personal Website Build Understanding and Trust
[00:24:35] Chris Franks: That’s probably true. Alright, Jason, let’s talk about how’s, so I get the fact that I need to create my unique narrative. I need to be consistent with that narrative across all platforms. I need to own and be authentic, which is, again, it’s one of those things that’s easy to say.
[00:24:51] Chris Franks: It’s harder to do. Usually will require you to get some sort of help along the way. Now, what do I do? Do I just start creating blogs? Or change my meta tags in my website. H1 tags, things like that.
[00:25:09] Jason Barnard: Not quite. If you’re thinking about SEO, which a lot of people do when they first talk to me, don’t.
[00:25:23] Chris Franks: I want to do a slow, dramatic clap. It says he is the most bullshit thing on the planet. Continue, sorry.
[00:25:30] Jason Barnard: If you look at these machines as children who are trying to learn, they want to learn everything about everybody. All you need to do is educate them. That’s number one. Number two is look at them as children who are trying to please the user as much as they possibly can by giving the best solution to the problem that the user has expressed. Also look at them from the perspective of they are trying to replicate what they see in the real online world. So what you need to do is walk the walk.
[00:26:08] Jason Barnard: Be the best solution for the specific problem where you can truly help and make sure that you’ve communicated that you’re walking the walk and that you are the best solution. And communicating that is having the narrative that expresses that, replicating that narrative across every platform where you’re present.
[00:26:28] Jason Barnard: From YouTube to Facebook, to Twitter, to forbes.com, to entrepreneur.com, to your company website. And then this is the big part, create your own personal website where you tell your version of the story and your narrative and you say this to the machine, this is what I want you to understand about me.
[00:26:48] Jason Barnard: Then what happens is if you link from the website to your personal website to all of these resources that you’ve now updated to tell the narrative that you want the machines to understand and if possible, back from those different sources to your personal website, you are not linking from an SEO perspective, you’re linking to give the machine an infinite loops of self confirmation where it comes to your website, sees a message, goes out to LinkedIn, sees the same message, comes back, then goes out to an article on the BBC.co.uk, sees the same message, comes back, and so on and so forth. And by repetition, it will understand not only that your brand narrative on your website is true. It will understand that your reliable source of information about you, that you’re trustworthy and then you get control.
Leveraging First, Second, and Third-Party Sources
[00:27:41] Chris Franks: That is the best description of what we used to call Jason a backlink strategy, right? You got to have backlinks. You don’t need backlinks. What you need is other places that say the same thing that you’re trying to say. Which is, that’s a really, really great way to describe it. But let’s just take the next step here, which is you’ve got to be brave enough to go out and try to publish on Forbes and all this other stuff.
[00:28:08] Chris Franks: Tactically, how do I do that? Do I just go on forbes.com and try to be a contributor? What are the ways that you found?
[00:28:15] Anthony Franco: Note on forbes.com, you can pay $4,000 a year to be a contributor on Forbes.
[00:28:22] Chris Franks: It’s the best hack in the world. You could put that on LinkedIn.
[00:28:27] Anthony Franco: Which makes me not want to read Forbes ever again.
[00:28:31] Chris Franks: It’s like you guys just on an aside, do you guys know what Newsweek is right now?
[00:28:37] Anthony Franco: What?
[00:28:37] Chris Franks: It’s nothing. Newsweek is nothing there. A URL that does backlinking and does some college and university stuff. Right. But there’s still Newsweek, so if you’re like, oh yeah, it was published on Newsweek.
[00:28:50] Chris Franks: Newsweek is not even in existence. It’s just a url. Anyway, sorry Jason. Go. How do we do this?
[00:28:55] Jason Barnard: Alright. If you divide the different resources into first, second, and third party. First party is my own website. Second party would be my company website. Technically, even though I’m the boss, I don’t control the content on the website.
[00:29:11] Jason Barnard: LinkedIn is second party because I control my page, but I don’t control what LinkedIn then does. Twitter’s second party, so on and so forth. So first party is my own website. That’s the only one. Second party is everything where I have some level of control, either over a page or over the organization in the case of my company.
[00:29:32] Jason Barnard: Then third party is all of the stuff where theoretically I don’t have control, and Forbes is a great example. Theoretically, that’s third party. I pay my $2,500 a year. I can write for Forbes and it’s third party. It’s clear that I’m a contributor who pays, but technically it’s still third party. If I can get an article in the BBC, that’s really third party, that’s completely independent and that’s the gold standard.
[00:29:58] Jason Barnard: So you need to build up a mix of first, second, and third party corroboration with if possible links. But the BBC won’t link to me, but it doesn’t matter because if I link from my personal website and say that article over there on the BBC is indeed me, then I’ve already told the machine that it’s me and it doesn’t need to link back because it mentions my name.
[00:30:21] Jason Barnard: It’s the same context. It’s the same narrative, hopefully, and we’ll from there. So that’s what you would want to do. Start with first party, move to second party, then move to third party.
Why Trust and Relevance Trump Traditional Link-Based Authority
[00:30:32] Chris Franks: I want to ask a question because it’s actually really interesting and I don’t really know the approach, which is what we used to call public relations has been dead for a bunch of years now, right? It’s because we used to do outreach and I’ll use Denver as an example. There were probably about 12 reporters in Denver who covered business for different publications.
[00:31:01] Chris Franks: Now there’s like two, right? So I mean, just the people that do this has shrank to the degree. But yet you still need to do this. It’s not really PR. How do you do it, Jason? Like how do you go start to get covered?
[00:31:18] Jason Barnard: It’s actually relationships more than anything else. I’m very little in the traditional news. For example, Wordlift, they’re a company in my industry, more or less.
[00:31:31] Jason Barnard: I’m friends with them and I can say, can you write an article about me? Can we do an interview? I send you the information. Authoritas, another company in my industry, and I can reach out to these people who I know very well who I would consider colleague friends. And those are third party and their authoritative within my niche.
[00:31:53] Jason Barnard: So you now need to start thinking about who is there in my niche who can basically vouch for me? And that’s the best process to use.
[00:32:03] Chris Franks: It’s interesting because my brain immediately goes to, and again, this is my old school approach, which is you need high authority domains, meaning I want to get.
[00:32:13] Jason Barnard: But you don’t. Sorry to interrupt, but you don’t.
[00:32:16] Chris Franks: No, that’s exactly right. I think that’s old school thinking.
[00:32:19] Jason Barnard: Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, I was getting rude. I’m, I apologize.
[00:32:24] Anthony Franco: Chris is usually wrong, so he is used to that. That’s good.
[00:32:27] Chris Franks: Exactly. My wife just walked down behind me.
[00:32:33] Jason Barnard: The whole high authority domain thing, which is mores than Semrush and all of those traditional SEO companies, and I say traditional SEO with a bit of a dismissive voice because it’s traditional, it’s not modern, it’s not up to date.
[00:32:47] Jason Barnard: And even when they were doing it, they were trying to measure what Google we’re calling page rank. And page rank is based on links from one website to another. And the underlying logic is the more probable it is that a random person will navigate to this site by clicking on random links, the higher that probability, the higher the page rank.
[00:33:08] Jason Barnard: So it’s probability. And that probability, if you think about it, is popularity. It’s not authority, it’s popularity. So a terrible junk newspaper like The Sun in the UK will have gazillions of links to it. Would you trust it? Does it have authority? Absolutely not. And so obviously Google have moved a long way away from that.
[00:33:32] Jason Barnard: All of these machines have moved a long way away from that, and they’re looking for authority of knowledge. And there is Xin Luna Dong who created Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is an encyclopedia for machines. So it’s like Wikipedia, but tens of thousands of times bigger with 54 billion things in it.
[00:33:55] Jason Barnard: And something like a thousand billion facts in it. So it’s massive. And she talks a lot about that idea of popularity versus authority. So they don’t measure using pure links anymore. Links is part of it. They measure with how trustworthy has this source proven to be over the years. And in my example, The Sun in the UK, absolutely not trustworthy. They’re pushing the influence of that down. So any authority based on links, purely links is junk.
[00:34:33] Chris Franks: It’s a really important concept and it’s one that I’m still just getting my head wrapped around a little bit. I’m just going to ask whether or not I’ve got it right, Jason. If Anthony and I we want to grow as founders and our personal profiles, it’s more important that we find people, even if they’re not big, even if they’re not the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but people that are also talking about how early stage founders can thrive, survive, and grow.
[00:35:05] Jason Barnard: Exactly. The nicheness is actually quite extreme. So for my cartoon characters who are owned by another. I exited, so I don’t own the company anymore, and my ex-business partner owns the domain name that those characters have lived on since 1998. Then you’ve got Wikipedia, you’ve got IMDB, you’ve got MusicBrainz, you’ve got Crunchbase, all of these resources that should be the authoritative reference for the characters in that cartoon but they’re not. My website is the authoritative source with no links. My website doesn’t have particularly any links because Google understands that I’m the creator of the characters. And when I talk about them, I talk sense. And the guy who owns the company now, who owns the characters has not made that effort.
[00:36:06] Jason Barnard: So he’s lost control of the truth about these cartoon characters, even though he owns them and I don’t.
[00:36:12] Chris Franks: I would ask you to use the voices, but I’m pretty sure that’s copyrighted as well. I’m pretty sure you would probably get in trouble for that.
[00:36:17] Jason Barnard: I could talk like Daddy Koala if you want because I did the voices. Then I could talk like Boowa and I could talk like Grandpa Koala and say hello. How are you today? I’m little old man.
Building a Solid Digital Foundation for Early-Stage Founders
[00:36:32] Chris Franks: I desperately talk for an hour and a half about you, but I’m not good. So before we go into the speed round, just give us some practical advice and let’s use early stage founder. I’m starting a company that’s selling cartoons to the world. What should I start doing?
[00:36:56] Chris Franks: I create that narrative. I get the point. But for this outreach, for the niche outreach, give us the tactical steps. You just email people and say, Hey, I’m in your industry and we’d love to collaborate.
[00:37:07] Jason Barnard: You should already have relationships with people in your industry and people who are relevant to you.
[00:37:14] Jason Barnard: So you can reach out to the ones you know first, but then within your industry, you are going to be making connections in order to build your business. And if you are not, I don’t really see how you’re going to be building your business. So as you go through naturally, you’re going to be able to build those relationships and have them talk about you on their website or their websites, or their personal websites, or even their personal social media channels.
[00:37:41] Jason Barnard: So all of that, but that’s further down the line. The first thing you have to do is create your personal website. Figure out what your narrative is. Figure out which photos you want to be prioritized by these machines, by Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and so on and so forth. Put that on your website. Then go to your company website. Do the same thing. Repeat that message in the photos, then go to all your social media profiles. Repeat that message, put the photos on. Whatever other platforms you’re on, you are already on. That will take you at least three months. So you’re not even thinking about outreach in the first three months.
[00:38:17] Jason Barnard: You’re thinking about sorting out your Digital Footprint today to have a clear and consistent narrative that you control. Then you start outreaching. So the first three months of what we do for our clients at Kalicube® is that it’s optimize your Digital Footprint to have a clear, consistent, repeated narrative that makes sense to the machines and join all the dots together.
Why Educating the Algorithm Beats Outdated SEO Tactics
[00:38:41] Chris Franks: I’m just going to recap before we go into the speed round. So we’re going to start by truly trying to own our own story. We’re going to create a consistent narrative around that story. We’re going to then make sure that we manage and own our own digital presence around that. And then we can start to try to find the one thing, and Jason, just last piece before I keep saying this, but it’s just so critically important and I still think that there’s a narrative here that was a 10 to 15-year-old narrative that you can hack Google. And that’s what SEO people, traditional SEO people, and they still get paid to do this. And it drives me nuts. The people are getting paid to change meta tax. Just for the record, clear this up for us.
[00:39:31] Chris Franks: You’re not going to hack Google, right?
[00:39:34] Jason Barnard: No. And that’s the thing is meta tags, meta keywords, meta descriptions don’t matter. A lot of the stuff. Site speed doesn’t matter. What SEO companies and consultants tend to do is focus on things that they can point to and say, we’ve done that, we’ve done that, we’ve done that, we’ve done that.
[00:39:55] Jason Barnard: The site speed, page speed score goes up. So we’ve achieved something. But none of it matters. So you’ve got to figure out what you need to focus on to actually educate the algorithms. It’s all about educating the algorithms. Educating the algorithms to prioritize you over your competition by proving to them, by walking the walk that you are the best solution to the user’s problem and if you can do that, you’ve won the game. At Kalicube®, the The Kalicube Process™, and you can download it for free here. Kalicube®.com/guides. We talk about understandability, credibility, deliverability. Do they understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve? Do they believe you to be the most credible, trustworthy solution to the user’s problem?
[00:40:45] Jason Barnard: And do they have the content from you to be able to deliver you to their users? When the users express that problem, that’s the solution. It isn’t SEO. It’s great brand-focused Digital Marketing that the machines can digest, understand, and use.
When Should You Shift Focus from Personal Brand to Company Brand?
[00:41:03] Chris Franks: The next book you need to write, Jason, I know you’ve already written two, is the keystroke that killed a billion dollar industry because I can’t even remember, I can’t remember the name of the new Search model that when Google is tired of technical SEO people hacking them.
[00:41:20] Chris Franks: They changed their Search model and it killed a billion dollar industry with one stroke. Now pressing enter. Alright, let’s go to the speed round, Jason.
[00:41:40] Chris Franks: Jason, should founders prioritize social media engagement or Search Engine Optimization. In this case, Brand Optimization.
[00:41:50] Jason Barnard: You need to focus on machine understanding of your credibility and your niche and the fact that you can solve the problem for their users better than anybody else.
[00:42:04] Jason Barnard: That is definitely not Search Engine Optimization as we would traditionally understand it. That industry is dead.
[00:42:11] Chris Franks: Yeah, for sure. Are paid ads helpful in this scenario, or should you just focus on your own website and outreach
[00:42:20] Jason Barnard: For a Personal Brand now, paid ads are generally going to be pointless. For a Corporate Brand they may well be useful but it isn’t the first thing I’ll be doing.
[00:42:29] Chris Franks: This is a layout. Can you outsource this or is this something you have to do yourself?
[00:42:34] Jason Barnard: You have to define what your brand narrative is yourself. You have to know what you’re communicating. You can do it yourself using the Kalicube® guide on Kalicube®.com/guides. We actually share a 60 page guide that tells you exactly what to do. So you can DIY, but if you are time poor, money rich, and you’ve got better things to do, like run your business and make money for your business, you can outsource it. Ooh, tick Kalicube®, for example.
[00:43:00] Chris Franks: At what point in time can I start focusing more on my Company Brand versus my Personal Brand?
[00:43:07] Jason Barnard: That’s a great question because it will depend on the cases and some people will continue with their Personal Brand anyway. For example, me. But generally speaking, I would suggest that for the first four years, your Personal Brand is going to be driving a lot of the business if you follow the strategy that I’m suggesting. And that at year two, you’ll be starting to pivot towards the Corporate Brand and by year five or six, the Corporate Brand could have taken over if you’ve done it right.
[00:43:38] Chris Franks: Yeah. You can start to slide that up.
[00:43:40] Jason Barnard: Yeah. It’s a sliding kind of exchange system.
[00:43:45] Chris Franks: Jason, you’ve done it. You have saved my faith in our guests talking about marketing. Anthony, what have you learned today? I learned a bunch.
[00:43:58] Anthony Franco: Jason, this was a phenomenal conversation on marketing with a lot of great tactics. I wrote a bunch of stuff down to try to get through it quickly.
[00:44:09] Anthony Franco: The first thing I wrote down, it’s easier to build a Personal Brand versus a Corporate Brand. Decide who you are and stick to it. I wrote down like a politician. This helps machines understand who you are, being a niche expert, think of a niche as what you want Google and the machine to know about you.
[00:44:27] Anthony Franco: Then I wrote down somehow. So first of all, you have to walk the walk. It has to be true. Then you have to communicate that you walk the walk by building your own personal website, using second party resources like LinkedIn, YouTube, and potentially paid placements.
[00:44:48] Anthony Franco: Third party like true earned media where people write about you. And then make sure you tie them all together, you link them all together. I know that is way oversimplifying it and I’m actually going to download your guides and start doing it for myself.
[00:45:09] Anthony Franco: This was just phenomenal, Jason. Thank you so much.
[00:45:14] Jason Barnard: And make a comment. Yes, thank you very much. But you’re saying no, that’s oversimplifying and absolutely not. You’ve just nailed it. And the fact that I can explain it to you in a conversation over 30 minutes and you can repeat it back to me in a pragmatic, usable way that you can understand and that you could implement yourself, is proof that this is truth.
[00:45:34] Jason Barnard: And what I’ve found in life is the more you work on something and you figure out what the heart and soul of that problem is, and you simplify it down to the very, very simplest possible way. And you can explain it to somebody in five minutes or two minutes and they can understand it and repeat it back to you, then you know you’ve found a universal truth.
[00:45:57] Jason Barnard: And that’s what we’ve got at Kalicube®, a universal truth. I explained this to the baker downstairs. And in two minutes she said, I get it. I understand what you’re saying, and she could repeat it back to me. And she’s not in the internet. Obviously, she uses Facebook and so on and so forth. But that for me means that I have found a fundamental truth, that I am incredibly confident.
[00:46:22] Jason Barnard: I’m absolutely certain works for everybody. If you want to do it.
Why Clear Communication and Smart Resources Matter
[00:46:26] Chris Franks: It’s also one of the truisms about this age of Digital Marketing, if you don’t understand what people are talking about, don’t pay them. It doesn’t make common sense.
[00:46:38] Jason Barnard: Can I quote you on that?
[00:46:39] Chris Franks: Yeah, please. It’s funny because I hear so many buzzwords of people being like, dude, know the CTR right now on meta, bro. If you don’t understand what they’re saying, don’t pay them to do your marketing. A couple deep dive recommendations and really, I’m going to push people towards your book, Jason. They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan and Building a StoryBrand. We talk about this one a bunch, Anthony. It’s a great one, Jason. I think to start to frame your own story.
[00:47:11] Chris Franks: And think about your experiences as your own story. Digital Relevance by Art Albi and you have two books, Jason. The Fundamentals of Brand SERP. Did I say it right?
[00:47:23] Jason Barnard: Yep.
[00:47:24] Chris Franks: Okay. And your second book, oh, I just clicked on this one, so I got to go back to find your second book. Well, you just say it.
[00:47:31] Jason Barnard: Your instruction manual for the Google Knowledge Panel.
[00:47:34] Jason Barnard: So if you want a Google Knowledge Panel, which is this thing you see behind me, that’s the instruction manual that you can build it yourself. You don’t need to pay Kalicube® to do it for you. The Fundamentals of Brand SERP for Business is all about how to build a corporate Digital Marketing strategy that will work just by looking at the Google Search results for your brand. So it’s using Google Search results for your brand to analyze what’s right and wrong about your Digital Marketing strategy and what you should be doing. What you should focus on. So it’s a really practical book that explains to you how to use the Google Search results to build your Digital Marketing strategy.
[00:48:11] Jason Barnard: And the instruction manual for Google Knowledge Panel is a practical book about how to get Google to give you a Knowledge Panel, which makes you look like a superstar. And we’ve just written a book, which is going to be out in a couple of weeks, which is your Personal Brand is what Google and AI say it is.
[00:48:29] Jason Barnard: And it’s aimed at entrepreneurs to understand how important your Personal Brand is on Search and AI. So it’s your Personal Brand is what Google and AI say it is. Why Google and ChatGPT decide if you close the deal and how to make them say yes.
[00:48:47] Chris Franks: Jason, we’re going to have to have you back because I really want to continue the conversation around the AI and that’s a really fascinating world.
[00:48:57] Chris Franks: I think that AI is an existential threat for Search. It’s the first thing that I’ve seen that I think could disrupt Search. So I’d love to talk about that as well.
[00:49:05] Jason Barnard: Absolutely.
Final Reflections and Next Steps from the Episode
[00:49:05] Chris Franks: Jason, thank you so much for joining us. You’ve restored my faith in marketers, Anthony. What do we have coming up?
[00:49:13] Anthony Franco: Sorry, I got lost in the conversation. We’re talking about how the inner critic affects your performance with Scott Gray. So I’m looking forward to that. Everybody, thank you for tuning in. I hope you got as much out of this episode as Chris and I did.
[00:49:29] Anthony Franco: Where basically what Jason did is give Chris and I a whole bunch of homework that we’re now going to go off and do. This was an amazing episode. Jason, thank you so much. For everybody that wants to get more content like this, just go to howtofounder.com and soon to anthonyfranco.net and chrisfranks.net.
[00:49:52] Anthony Franco: I’m going to be working on that this weekend, so I will have my own personal website and follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and LinkedIn. Jason, thank you again. Everybody, we’ll talk to you in a couple of days. All right. Take care.
[00:50:11] Jason Barnard: Thank you. That was brilliant, Anthony, Chris.
[00:50:13] Anthony Franco: Thank you guys. Thank you.
