Episode 752: $80K a Month Lost Overnight – What Bloggers Must Know About SEO in the Age of AI With Jamie I.F.

EBT752 – Jamie I.F.

[00:00:00]  Supercut 

You are going to want to download our bonus Supercut that gives you all the information you need to master Pinterest. Head to eatblogtalk.com/masterpinterest to download today. 

[00:00:14] Megan Porta

In today’s episode, Jamie I.F. shares his wild journey from making $80,000 a month in affiliate SEO to losing it all and how that led him to build Answer Socrates, a keyword research tool now used by over a hundred thousand creators. We dig into next generation keyword research getting featured in AI Tools, Reddit’s rising power for SEO. He called it the golden child of SEO and why making people feel something is more important than ever. If you create content, which I assume you do, this episode is full of golden gems and you need to listen. I hope you love the episode.

[00:01:00]   Intro

Hi food bloggers, I’m Megan Porta and this is Eat BlogTalk. Your space for support, inspiration and strategies to grow your blog and your freedom. Whether that’s personal, professional or financial. You are not alone on this journey. 

[00:01:16]

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[00:01:45]   

Jamie, hello. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

[00:01:45]  Jamie I.F. 

I’m very good, thank you, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

[00:01:49]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, super excited to chat with you. We are going to talk about all kinds of fun things today. So Answer Socrates is a tool that you’ve made. We’re going to talk about that also just AI SEO and some tips that you have for my listeners. Before we get to all of that though, do you have a fun fact to share with us?

[00:02:09]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, I, I guess I, I don’t go by my real name and that came about because I used to run a soup company and it was, we called it Integrity Foods which is where the if came from and unfortunately it costed a lot of money to do properly because for every soup we sell we’d give one to like either a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter.

[00:02:30]   

So we tried to make this self sustaining thing where by selling and creating the soup we’d be able to like do, do some good. And it was like, we called it a social enterprise in the UK. Unfortunately it costs a lot of money and it’s like the worst business model in the world because the raw materials spoil extremely quickly in like a day.

[00:02:49]   

So the packaging’s expensive and it’s just tough to make work. And it can work, but it costs millions and billions of dollars to be able to build the factories, to get the economies of scale to be able to do that. And so when I ran out of money and eventually settled in like online business, like here we are, like a few years later, when I did decide to like, use or start doing a personal brand and going public with this stuff, I decided I was going to keep the if of my name as a way sort of tattooing it on my brain so that when I do get there, I won’t have the Lord of the Rings ring moment where you don’t let go of it.

[00:03:17]   

If you’ve made enough money, I will actually go back someday do it. So that’s me holding myself to account on, on that.

[00:03:23]  Megan Porta 

Wow, I love that. That’s such a cool story. I. Yeah, that’s so unique and interesting to learn about your previous business too. And do you think that that business stopping is what got you into the online space?

[00:03:40]  Jamie I.F. 

Well, like just before that I’d done it. So I did. That’s what I did when I graduated from uni. I was 22 just before COVID And before that I’d had an internship where you do like a year in industry. And I went to Paris for like a, like a seven month, like they call in internship a stage over there.

[00:03:55]   

And so discovered what SEO was there because everyone at the company had access to the Google Analytics. It was a French publisher. They were looking for someone to go and translate the stuff into English. And I remember just thinking, like, why does this random page have more traffic than the homepage on Google Analytics?

[00:04:11]   

Because surely you go homepage, then subpage. And I couldn’t believe that there was actually a direct entry angle into Google content directly. And that kind of like just got me excited because now I was like, okay, I can create content. I can get free traffic into an inner page that does what I want and then monetize it.

[00:04:27]   

And so I’d already like found that interesting. And then when that business didn’t work out and Covid was just hitting, we’re all locked inside for a long time. And then that became the sort of when, when, when SEO became a more interesting business model. And I got really, really lucky with that. And then really, really unlucky because, like, at 23, 24 years old, I’ve made more money than ever I ever expected.

[00:04:48]   

And we were about to exit for many millions of dollars like for all of these affiliate sites we’ve done. And as we were exiting we had the letter of intent from, we were selling through FE International. It was a bunch of like a package deal of a lot of websites in, in like machinery and tech, like 3D printing and things.

[00:05:06]   

And as we were going through that process, helpful content update here and it completely destroyed the whole thing. And so I got so lucky to do way better than I should have for my lack of talent at the beginning. And then it all came down but it was fine like it’s. And I’m happy to talk about like any of this stuff and how to you know, adjust for the post apocalypse version of Google now because it has changed a lot in the last few years.

[00:05:31]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So you were heavily focused on affiliates. Correct. And that’s, I mean that’s the business you’re talking about that tanked.

[00:05:38]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah. So like, but we had never that much traffic. We just converted really well. So we do like 20,000 from like ads and that was like more money than I’ve seen in my life. But compared to the affiliate revenue it could be 60, 70K. It just wasn’t. It’s just like we turned ads off on a lot of pages just because I didn’t want to ruin or like affect the user experience on the page when like you could do $3 a page view for some of these offers because they were so high ticket and paid so well if you could negotiate the right deals with the suppliers.

[00:06:06]   

It was very useful because now a lot of what we do is like building deals with affiliates like and running and scaling brands with programs. And so having been on like one side as an affiliate marketer and now working with affiliates, I think it does help on that other side. And having been on like both sides of the table.So it was definitely good like learning experience.

[00:06:25]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So I do have a fair amount of friends who were heavily focused on that. The affiliate strategy I guess you could say. And then HCU also tanked their sites. Is there any hope for that coming back or is that long gone?

[00:06:41]  Jamie I.F. 

I actually got an email like you know the monthly AHS emails where they go, this is what’s happened to each of your websites you’ve plugged in in the last month and loads of them have come back to life after being like the titles still say 2023. Like they were just left to die.

[00:06:56]   

Right. Like they, they were gone and they randomly come back to life. And if only that had happened two years earlier it would have been much easier because now it’s just like annoying because it’s like I don’t want to spend my own time. Like I’m resentful of it now. I mean like I don’t want to go back and do it.

[00:07:09]   

It’s annoying work like they took that from me but they’ve just come back. But like even though the AHS traffic will say 5000 traffic nowadays with how the click through rates are, it’s just not the same. And so the one thing I tell everyone now is never build a business that’s focused on information.

[00:07:27]   

Even you could build a product business if you send information you can do so as long as you have a traffic source that is not Google. Because you’re just going to get your content stolen and scraped and used in an AI overview and then used to power the next generation of LLMs. Yeah, but if you can drive traffic from a Pinterest or Facebook then fair play like you still have a traffic source for ad, display ads or affiliate.

[00:07:47]   

But apart from that, like I do, like I have to be realistic and say like I, I only want to grow a product business now. And so if you are a blogger or you create content, repackage that in a way that means that you can sell it as a product and then you can survive better.

[00:08:01]   

Because now for the other traffic driving things that AI overviews come up for. When someone types in what’s the best course or the best mastermind or the best digital products or the best software for this thing, if you own that product rather than an informational piece ranking other people, the AI will push you forward because the AI is looking to answer queries and those could lead to like very difficult to attribute but very valuable top of funnel brand awareness.

[00:08:24]   

And so yeah, like it’s just not coming back. But if you run a product you can take advantage of all of these things.

[00:08:30]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, it’s a different world. The world has changed a lot and we’re still in it. Right? Like it’s still kind of playing out some of it. We don’t know how, how it’s going to play out. But I love your perspective. I want to hear more about Answer Socrates because this is a tool that you created recently. Tell us a little bit about it.

[00:08:51]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, so we used to use it when it was just like a keyword generation tool like three years ago. It was pretty heavily in our like SOPS that we had for creating content and then optimizing content because we discover, you know, different long tail questions, particularly for the FAQ section or use it as kind of like an extra check for content gap analysis where like, oh, this is a question that we hadn’t thought of that could meet an intent on this blog post that can make it more informative.

[00:09:17]   

And we just liked it because it was this free tool that was just there. And then about a year ago, a friend of mine, Sasha, who is in the Bali Hackagu chat where all of these developers go meet up on a Thursday and they go and just work together and grow businesses over in Bali.

[00:09:33]   

And he was like, Jamie, you know that thing you talk about the guys doesn’t want to run it anymore. And I was like, I love that tool. And it had broken, it had gone offline towards the end of that year. And so it took a while to put the deal together but we ended up buying it and remaking it and fixing it.

[00:09:53]   

And now hopefully it’s useful to enough other people because it was just cool and it had so many people that like you could look up the branded traffic on Ahrefs and it had like at one point like I can’t remember what it was but maybe 20,000 searches. And just for the brand people wanted it and loved it.

[00:10:08]   

So it should have still existed. And it was a lot of keyword research tools, they’re good for like search volume and like telling you things and just give you a list of like if you type in a certain recipe, you’ll get all the ones that have that word and recipe in it, but it won’t give you like what are the things that people are searching that then go and think about afterwards.

[00:10:27]   

And like that’s part of like how you meet all of the intents and micro intents of an article and create the best, most valuable, fulfilling content that people love. And no one, like no one else really cracked that except the free tool when I was using Answer Socrates. And so that was a motivation to like rebuild it.

[00:10:45]   

And then from there like things for especially for the AI age now where like topical authority is like so important and happy to go into this but like a Turkish AI SEO specialist like published one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read in my life recently which basically uncovers how ChatGPT are ranking things with reciprocal rank fusion and is a fantastic piece and everyone should read it for like how to create content for ChatGPT now and what the beautiful thing was that it kind of confirmed my thoughts on Socrates and like creating all these similar question focused things that cover a topic really well and then using that to, to win in ChatGPT because if you ask a question to ChatGPT.

[00:11:26]   

Now it doesn’t just search that one query. It will be 10 or 15 similar questions. Things like review 20, 25, like if you type in coffee, if you ask it about coffee makers, it’s probably going to say best coffee makers, coffee maker reviews and all these other tangentially related keywords. Find all of the website’s ranking and if they’re saying websites ranking fifth on five of those keywords is more likely to recommend that website’s content at the top than if one is number one only for one keyword.

[00:11:53]   

And so it helps with like trying to get a broad set of content for like a topical authority focused thing to win based on the algorithm that ChatGPT is currently using to prioritize which websites it promotes the content of.

[00:12:06]  Megan Porta 

So you were kind of talking through how it’s unique. I know a lot of the keyword research tools food bloggers use are Ahrefs keysearch. Those are two, the top two that come to mind. How can you just kind of explain how it’s different from those tools?

[00:12:24]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, so like I’m a paid Ahrefs user as well and I think it’s a great tool. So I wouldn’t even say that like they complement each other for different things. I think, I think that like I would never go and say, yeah, cancel your, yeah, $200 a month Ahrefs subscription and use our $9 a month tool.

[00:12:41]   

Because I think there’s actually a lot in there that we have not done nearly as well enough to be a replacement for. But what we do focus on is giving you lots and lots of content ideas and doing so with a way that like again most of them follow that like if you type in a keyword you’ll get lots of long tail versions of that same keyword which is useful for, you know, creating full content as long as those keywords hit the same intent or if they don’t hit the same intent, creating different long tail keyword like focused articles to get that traffic but they all based on the same topic.

[00:13:16]   

And so when we, what we were interested in when we like were rebuilding Answer Socrates especially is like what are the main like sub intents that like people are then going to search for after and so use that to build what we call the recursive keyword tool. And what it does is it.

[00:13:32]   

And we didn’t invent this. Steve Toth was made the first YouTube video on this. He gets all the credit, but it basically appends searches, scrapes the Google result for that in the auto suggest, then removes it. And then if you type in something else, like what is it? Will use whatever people are searching after they put based on that.

[00:13:50]   

And so you’ll get completely different like things. For example, if you type in like SEO tools on there, you might get how much does SEO cost? Because as to how much like prefix appended onto the rest. And so it will find keywords that don’t have the same words in them but are very relevant as like other like topics that as far as I know, no other tool has been able to do.

[00:14:09]   

And so it’s useful for building like a broader like, content strategy based on like, interesting ideas that you might not have seen from a standard keyword research tool. Which just gives you, if you type in SEO tools, it’ll be SEO tools for digital marketing, for bloggers or things, rather than like how much does SEO cost?

[00:14:25]   

What is SEO strategy like in 2025? Or you know, any of these related things that are direct questions people are asking on Google once they’ve searched your initial topic. So I think that’s unique and I use it myself and I find it useful. So hopefully other people do as well.

[00:14:42]  Megan Porta 

How is that different from an optimizer? So just like putting a blog post in an optimizer and having some of those similar themed topics come up, does that make sense?

[00:14:55]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, so the main reason I would, I would use it like a surfer SEO or another like optimization tool is for like, entities and semantics. And even though it’s like they’re getting better now and I’m a paid surfer user, we use it all the time, but they’re mostly for like semantic relevance in certain places.

[00:15:12]   

But it’s also very, very difficult and very expensive for an AI to do that and get it right. Because, like, there’s a, there’s a difference between having an entity and an entity in the right place where it makes sense. Like if you have a blog review of something and there’s a cost section at the bottom.

[00:15:28]   

These AI, like NLP Focus optimizers might put the pricing entity in the intro, but that doesn’t make sense unless it’s in the pricing section to back up the strength of that, like the semantics of that H2. And so they’re great for quick optimization. But what I would say is like the human driven optimization is still a lot better.

[00:15:49]   

And I think that people outsource a lot of these things to AI too quickly. And the real value in content now is can you make people feel something? Because if you can’t then Google’s going to take your traffic and give it to the next person who’s willing to write something that’s semantically perfect but doesn’t make them feel anything.

[00:16:07]   

And so yes, you can do technical optimization. I still don’t think that AI is that good at it yet. It’s very good for writing like the first 80% of something and then you add your personality to it. And Socrates can help to an extent by finding topics, but it won’t do it as effectively as an auto AI optimizer thing.

[00:16:27]   

Yeah, we use it for optimized before we bought it, we used it for finding FAQs, topics and content gaps. But I would still say they’re pretty different from an actual on page optimization tool. And my recommendation for people is still yes, use these as guidelines, but don’t just shoehorn entities into everything because it’s also about the UX and like, not just the personality.

[00:16:47]   

But are those entities just going to make it sound robotic in the wrong place? And is it actually harmful? Because these entities in the wrong place don’t actually help the semantic relevance of your post because they are in the wrong place.

[00:16:59]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, okay, that helps explain things a little bit. So you recommend if somebody’s using Ahrefs, let’s say that they could potentially use that in tandem with Answer Socrates and create a really robust post that kind of covers all the bases.

[00:17:16]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah. And like, I mean I find it useful for what we’re trying to do on, on those topics. It really depends on like what your content flow is because it might just not work for you because it does give you hundreds and hundreds of questions. But that can be an annoyance and some people can see that as getting like, oh, you’ve given me more work.

[00:17:31]   

So that’s really depends on your content flow. Like what I do find as well, very useful is that we built clustering into it so that you can cluster all of the different like 500 disparate keywords into 60 topics, which then gives you the cost per click data for how valuable roughly based on the ad pay per click data it is, as well as the search volume of the entire cluster.

[00:17:54]   

So if you’ve clustered 10, 15 keywords into one topic, you now know that that cluster is worth 6,000 search volume because that’s the total value which would be useful. And so like, and that’s still not a replacement for like proper topical clustering and creating a topical map, but it gets you like 70% of the way there and then it still saves time versus doing it all Manually.

[00:18:18]   

And so I find it useful for that as well when you’re creating like, the base, like first hundred posts of a website and doing it from there. But yeah, it really depends on a workflow. Like, this won’t work for a lot of people. And it really depends what, like, how you like to work and how you like to do your keyword research and create a content plan.

[00:18:34]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, it is such a unique thing for each person. I. You’re right. It’s like somebody already has a process, maybe that’s working. Maybe you can incorporate some of this in. So Answer Socrates, you said it’s $9 a month. Is that the investment?

[00:18:51]  Jamie I.F. 

There’s a very. There’s a very generous free plan. And as a result, like, most people are free people, you get three. You get three searches per day for free. And each search gives you about 500 keywords and you can cluster 1500 keywords for free every month. So there’s like, if, you know, if you’re just getting started, then don’t upgrade.

[00:19:10]   

Like, you get more stuff a day, but you don’t have to, like, use it as much as you want for free. Then the lowest paid plan, which gets you more clustering credits, more access to the recursive keyword research tool, which we just had to. Because it’s just really expensive to run. Like, it’s like a lot of, like, AI resources on the back end.And. Yeah, and then there are other plans based on, like, how much access you need to different things.

[00:19:30]  Megan Porta 

Why did you decide to go the free route?

[00:19:32]  Jamie I.F. 

It was free before, and so, like.

[00:19:35]  Megan Porta 

That’s what people are expecting.

[00:19:36]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, we would have lost all the people if we made it not free. Right. It was known as a free tool. And we ran the numbers and it was like, not cheap, but it wasn’t like, as expensive as some software that we’ve run are. Like, is like, it can pay itself off if people do want to go and upgrade.

[00:19:53]   

And so, yeah, like, I’m proud that we have like the most generous free plan. Any, like, clustering tool. Especially, like, most people charge like $10, $11 per thousand cluster keywords. And we’ll give you like 1,500 for free every month. And then even if you upgrade, it’s way cheaper than that. And it’s like, good as well.

[00:20:09]   

Like, a lot, a lot of these people that are using, like, giving away, like, free clustering tools are just like AI prompts on the back end. And that’s just not as accurate as, like, actual machine learning. Like Python libraries that are designed to like do things based on very precise semantic relevance. And so like these like AI clustering grouping tools like that people are being sold to are just not accurate.

[00:20:30]   

Like they’re really inaccurate for a lot of the part. And so like I’m proud that we gave that away for free, even though it is using like the proper algorithms on the back end to, to make that more useful and save people more time creating content.

[00:20:43]  Megan Porta 

That’s great. So it’s as easy as that people can go to Answer Socrates, create a free, free account and just start experimenting and see how it fits into their workflow.

[00:20:54]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:20:55]  Megan Porta 

Great. Okay, cool. Easy. So the keyword clustering that you’re talking about, that answer Socrates can help with is that how to get more AI overview features and get the attention of ChatGPT.

[00:21:10]  Jamie I.F. 

So there’s a number of like subcomponents that I may be wrong on, but this is what I’m focusing on is if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong for myself, not just for everyone else. I will say this confidently because I do think I’m right. So firstly, the ChatGPT actual recommendation for one website are based on what it seems based on the what Metahan, the Turkish SEO found in the dev console of ChatGPT was that they were using a term called RRF, which is basically a normalization of a lot of documents into one with a different like ranking level.

[00:21:48]   

And what it does is it effectively main. It basically confirms that topical authority is very important. And so the like, it’s not just about having one number one ranking thing for your main keyword, which it was before, like when it was winner takes all for that keyword. Now if you can predict the types of searches that ChatGPT will do on the back end and it’s usually 10 to 15 keywords around the topic.

[00:22:12]   

Like if you ask it about coffee makers, it might be best coffee makers, coffee maker comparison sites, like, things like that. If you are in enough of the top 5ish places, rather than just being number one, that is worth more than being number one for one keyword, but not being present for the others.

[00:22:28]   

And so it does reinforce the sort of merits in making sure that your website is being featured for a lot of those different target keywords that it’s searching on Bing and Google to be able to put like a merged fused list of recommendations and sources together.

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[00:23:55]  Jamie I.F. 

The second thing is if you are a product business is recruiting affiliates and influencers or buying sponsorships to get on all the other listicles so that more, more of the sources are recommending you because when they’re doing this like information retrieval process via chat GPT. Yes. If your website is there a lot, great.

[00:24:16]   

But that’s only one website and I’d rather own like all 10 of the top 10 results and if I can, if it’s valuable enough for my product, more difficult again like if you send information because you can only create one blog post for yourself. But if you, if you do become a product business and sell a course or a digital product or anything like that on top of the website, then you can encourage other people to talk about your products and your brand which is like the, like the first level of the AI retrieval process which is like what it’s searching for on the fly helps you with that because it’s more likely to recommend your products if you are one of the sources being fed into the research process.

[00:24:54]   

About 87% of the, I think it’s 87% of the recommendations in search GBT come from the top 20 of Bing and so it’s very heavily concentrated on that right now and most of them are in the top 10. So it’s basically like an amalgamation, Frankenstein’s monster of what the serps are. But just summarize it.

[00:25:11]   

If you want to be featured then got to get on there. And the second version of that is that there’s the retriever which they do on the fly which is based on search engines and then all the data that was used to train an LLM and that is like a lot of that is YouTube, a lot of that is podcast, a lot of that is TikTok.

[00:25:30]   

A lot of that is like PDFs that they stole off the Internet that were available as academic papers and other like white papers and things like that. And so if you can get your brand in as much of that training data as possible, then that as that grows in the future it’s much more long term.

[00:25:46]   

Whereas you can get an AI overview in 10 minutes now if you buy the right sentence on the right article. This more of a longer term play for a brand building. But if you can get as many influencers and affiliates to talk about your brand as possible in the long term across big like transcription sources like podcasts, LinkedIn, TikTok especially Reddit is a huge huge one as well.

[00:26:07]   

That’s like all feeds into the trading time on the like the content that they’re scraping and it makes your entity like your brand more recognizable. And so it’s more likely because these are just next token prediction systems to have a better knowledge of your brand. And it’s more like to output yours for recommendations if you took up more training time when they were building the LLMs weights and so easiest one, sorry for the rabbit hole but like the the easiest one is just buy your way onto all the listicles that are used as sources.

[00:26:39]   

There’s also for a lot of these as well they have a sources from about the web section where it has like 4 by 4 of like the top brands for certain things. Like there’s one that we’re not actually on yet for best keyword clustering tools but and if you click those and look at the brands that are featured, it will show you every single article that is featuring it that led to it being cited.

[00:26:59]   

All you have to do is outreach all of those brands and ask how much it is to get yourself featured. If you want to get into the sources from around the web thing because they’re telling you where to look. And then for the AI overviews if you can get enough sources on the top 10 that obviously helps but if you write the like, another way to do it is just from semantics and using other third parties to do that.

[00:27:22]   

So for example, if you want to have the AI overview for best blogging podcast, the easiest way to do it is get someone else to say your podcast is the best blogging podcast because. And then in the because section for the semantics, say because based on third party reviews as being highlighted as one of the best award winning things in this.

[00:27:44]   

And then you have someone else with a known knowledge panel, a known trust by Google who has like social proof in that talking about you as the best that is more likely to get put into an AI overview and deal with that. And so if you want Google to be forced to say nice things about whatever you want the world to think nice things of that you can brute force it with some of those things.

[00:28:04]   

And then it’s similar just semantics for information things as well. Like very good semantic triples in the way you talk about things. This is because like this thing leads to this. That’s a bad explanation. But there are better ones on the Internet for that.

[00:28:18]  Megan Porta 

So how would you use that for a recipe? If you’re trying to get a recipe to rank, how would you translate that?

[00:28:26]  Jamie I.F. 

Sure. So the easiest way to do it is just to have a H2 near the top and a very clearly written answer that’s plain English like very similar to featured snippets, but now it’s just the AI amalgamation version. Also have your FAQs and clear like H3s within a H2 and a really clear answer in the block and answer all the related questions.

[00:28:47]   

You also get a disproportionately high amount of AI overviews if you disagree with what the current one is like, but not so much that it’s like wrong. It has to still be within consensus. But if you disagree in like this other alternative source with a lot of trust thinks this, it’s almost like having the left wing versus the right wing political opinion.

[00:29:10]   

They’re trying to show a balance of both. So it’s like not biased, we’re leading one way so you can disagree in a soft way with whatever the consensus like answer to the question was and get those as well. But beyond that, if it is just what is the best recipe like and just a very well written one in the least weird like HTML like avoid any like elementors and things that are filling it with divs and like crazy stuff in there.

[00:29:35]   

Like just have it in like Gutenberg if possible. Really clear clean HTML h2 paragraph really plainly written answer to the sentences if you would do a feature snippet and then however you want to format like a recipe style thing for the recipe answers. Just saying really clear HTML, like within a lot of the patents that Google has, they talk about like the like cost of information and it costs them information like time and money to try and understand something that’s difficult to understand.

[00:30:05]   

And that is like one of the main things in SEO is how cheap is your website to understand what it is and serve as an answer. And as soon as they have a high enough like confidence that your answer answers that question, they’ll put it in there. And so all you have to do is make it really, really easy to understand what this means.

[00:30:23]   

And one way to do that is to minimize the complexity of the sentence. Every time a sentence is too long and a bit relates to five other parts of the sentence that just became a thousand times more expensive for a machine to understand what that sentence said because they don’t read like humans.

[00:30:41]   

So you have to write very plainly, very simply, don’t have too many parts of a sentence that relate to different ones. And yeah, it’s just like the semantics and things like that. You can actually use Google’s NLP API and plug your sentences and it will tell you what it thinks your sentence is about.

[00:30:58]   

And this is a more modern version now this is an old one before like AI got good. But like a lot of people, me included, were horrified when I realized that my difficult to understand weird sentences actually didn’t like Google didn’t know what it was about. And so how can it give it an AI overview if, yeah, like it doesn’t even understand because robots don’t read humans increasingly they do now with like GPTs and things.

[00:31:19]   

But a GPT is not being actively used to read your content because it’s extremely expensive. And so they like, you have to make it so easy that even like a three year old child level intelligent robot can understand it. And if you’re writing 50 word sentences that have 8,000 different connecting paths, they’re not going to be given as an AI overview because it cannot understand that that has a high confidence of answering that question.

[00:31:47]  Megan Porta 

That is super helpful because I think myself included, a lot of food bloggers like to speak just prolifically about their chili or their grandmother’s recipe or whatever and we forget that it’s, it benefits us to simplify our sentences. I mean it’s really a very simple concept and such a good reminder.

[00:32:11]  Jamie I.F. 

There’s no reason to like remove the amount of personality though, because, like, that’s like, like AI can take everything away from you, but it can’t take your character. And so I would like, I would still say absolutely include as much like, of you as possible, but just make sure the first paragraph is just a really clear answer.

[00:32:29]   

And then like personality, after you’ve still got that in there, you still like. Because, like, the difference between like, the value of a page view where someone like, doesn’t care, it’s robotic and like, then someone like loves your content is so big. But like the difference in like an engaged page view, like an impression that like loves your content, loves, wants to then go and subscribe to a newsletter, buy your like, digital products.

[00:32:51]   

It’s like a thousand times difference. And so it’s not a reason to like, dumb the content down. Like, it’s like, that’s a shame. And that’s a shame if AI is encouraged us to do that. And I don’t think as humans we should be encouraged to do that. We should always evoke emotion in everything we do because it’s just an art form.

[00:33:05]   

But you can do both. You can do simple semantics to get the top part and then add the personality.

[00:33:12]  Megan Porta 

Okay, yeah, that’s, that’s music to my ears. I want you to talk a little bit about Reddit because I know you believe Reddit can be a really great traffic driver. Can you give us your thoughts on that?

[00:33:24]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah. So Reddit, there’s a lot of different things about it and it is just to set the scene. Like they have a deal with Google and with OpenAI, so they don’t even index the way that every other website indexes on the web anymore. And the level of preference is so ridiculous that I’ve never seen anything like it before.

[00:33:40]   

Reddit is the golden child of like SEO, and there’s a way to take advantage of that. Even though it’s unfortunate they rank everything. You, if you can get the top comment on that thread, can drive traffic to yourself. If you put a link in, you also, if you just want to put a brand mention in and you don’t want to put the entire link in, you can get branded search from it as well.

[00:34:03]   

One of the best things that you can also do. So there’s like a few different strategies. You can get top comments on things the brand can drive traffic to your posts. You can just put a brand mention in and do it for brand as such. Or you can do what’s like the new growing field of Reddit pr, where if you have like a viral PR story With like a stats LED thing.

[00:34:21]   

We have a brand at the moment that we’re building some of this out for because it’s an AI based like finance budgeting app and it’s all about like the cost of living crisis in the UK and using that as like to build stats and show like this is getting difficult now in the uk.

[00:34:35]   

But like if you can, like in the same way that people are doing digital PR with those stats driven things for like big links in major publishers, you can also do the same thing with Reddit to drive PR and then get major journalists to write about you and get incredible links that no one else can get.

[00:34:50]   

And so not only does that drive you 100,000 clicks if you go viral for a day, but then it leads to all of the results and PR and media appearances and things that you can do on there as well. But that is like very difficult and like you have to find the perfect angle and how it relates to your niche.

[00:35:06]   

Like we did one did quite well back when we ran the affiliate site. So just to give an example where we found every single Pokemon on is this Marketplace for like 3D files that you can 3D print use that scraped them all and then did the data study on what is the most loved Pokemon based on how many likes they had on this like marketplace for 3D files.

[00:35:27]   

And that ended up by reposting that to Reddit and onto just emailing journalists became like a like a thing that everyone was talking about, which drove a lot of temporary traffic and a lot of like big links from like DR 91 websites as well. And so Reddit is underrated as a traffic driving source from PR, like big like news story stuff and not just like the typical thing that a lot of people talk about, which is just like get the top comment on the Reddit thread with a lot of traffic and see if you can like get 3% of it to click the link.

[00:35:56]   

So there’s a lot of opportunities there. It also does lead to a lot of AI overviews and is a big source of like ChatGPT’s data as well.

[00:36:04]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, yeah. How do you think that translates to food? I know, I mean recipes, recipe posts are what we’re mainly talking about here. So is it spammy to go into Reddit and just do that with our own content or do you have to establish a connection or. I don’t know how that works.I’m not a Reddit user.

[00:36:26]  Jamie I.F. 

I wish I could say is the content good equals yes equals do it. The world deserves to know about it unfortunately the average Reddit person is very skeptical and very, like, negative. And so if you. And it’s also just horrible to get flamed on Reddit. Like, I’d get upset if that would mean I’d be like, oh, that’s stressful.

[00:36:40]   

I don’t want to get like, attacked.

[00:36:42]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:36:42]  Jamie I.F. 

Trying to show the world my content. And so you do have to be tactical. It is why, like, we did like the PR stuff to disguise that it’s just our article we’re trying to promote around something so interesting and so valuable that you get past the initial scare to see. So what you can do is talk about, like, use it as almost like a case study.

[00:37:00]   

Here’s how I solve my problem. And as long as there’s a story in it, for example, like, it could have been a like. And I wouldn’t make these up. I’d do it if it actually happened. But like, if like a family tradition was lost and you recreated it through a recipe that was passed down through generations, there’s a beautiful, like, storytelling element to that that then sends traffic to the recipe, which is the, you know, the end point of that is a beautiful story and also has great, like, traffic potential because everyone wants to read that story.

[00:37:28]   

So it’s like. And I think a lot of when recipe sites were like the best ones I ever read were all story based. Like, yes, the content was like a useful table of ingredients, but everyone came from the story. They wanted to be part of the journey, understand where that came from and why it was unique and what like, culture was built into that.

[00:37:45]   

That same, like, real emotion like it was will work on Reddit because it’s a story rather than just like a SEO focused keyword piece. So anything you can do to tell a story that also then shows the result of that and takes them elsewhere, I think can do really well as well. And it does feed it a little bit into the, the PR element. If it does just have mainstream, like story potential.

[00:38:05]  Megan Porta 

that’s good news for us because a lot of us do like talking about our food. That’s why we’re food bloggers. So yeah, that’s great. I don’t know what else to explore. What else do we need to know with keyword research? AI SEO? Anything that you think would be helpful for food bloggers?

[00:38:24]  Jamie I.F. 

The only thing I’ll say is that, like, I do think information is going to get harder and harder, especially on Google. And so if you can take your information and build it into a product, you’ll be in a much better position, any, any of those recipes, if they can be turned into things that you can sell, you know, as a book, as a digital product, as a course, as a community.

[00:38:46]   

Those will be much easier to safeguard against AI stealing and also take advantage of recommendations. Because if you have a product, you can get other people to recommend you and then you can take those AI overviews by having multiple people on the top 10 results of Google talking about you instead. And so the real play is how many other people can you get to talk about you now rather than talking about the topic singularly yourself.

[00:39:11]   

And so anything, the main thing, I end up sounding like a broken record because I just say this all the time, but like it’s just the future of search is just products, not information. I wish it wasn’t because I think it’s so amazing that like when SEO was good, it was like this democratized thing that didn’t care where the information came from.

[00:39:29]   

You could be anyone and right. If as long as you had an opinion and as long as a hopefully not too biased algorithm liked it, you could get free traffic. And now it’s not that way. You have to be a huge brand and if even if you’re not, AI takes it from you and repurposes it as an AI overview.

[00:39:44]   

And now you don’t get traffic. And that’s really sad. And I think one of the best things about it was it was democratized. But the only way to try and get back at it and get ahead of it is one, have a traffic source that isn’t like, you know, Pinterest or Facebook that’s still sending traffic, or build a product that then you can take advantage of the same unfortunate rules that Google’s put in place.

[00:40:05]   

Build something that’s valuable enough that people will pay you for it and that promoters will take a cut of to promote for you and then use that to build your distribution so that you have like all of like if you want to gain from SEO, you can use like affiliate partners to then drive traffic for you, which helps you get that AI visibility so that you win post AI rather than like unfortunately getting your information stolen.

[00:40:29]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, so when you say product, I just want to clarify. So that would obviously be books, cookbooks, digital books of any sort, courses. What about videos, like a video series you put on YouTube. Would you include that as well or any other ideas?

[00:40:45]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, that’s a good question. So definitely anything like digital product related is like perfect for this. Any as high ticket as you can go, like coaching community, like masterminds like, the more that you can do with it, like, the more options you have for traffic, because it’s a lot easier to drive traffic to something that you sell for 10 grand than it is for $10 because you just have every single traffic option available to you and then no one can take that from you.

[00:41:11]   

But yeah, like a video series, it just. You need to have a way of driving traffic to get to it and like monetizing it. Because, like, the thing about YouTube is you can do money from the ads, but the ads aren’t super valuable. And so, yeah, like, when I say products, I mean more something you can put a price on because then you can get recommended forever.

[00:41:27]   

And you have. The more, the more money you can make from it, the more options you have for traffic. But any content’s great, like, and YouTube will age better than Google for sure for putting content out. And you can take a lot of, like Google serp real estate with YouTube videos now. So it’s just, it’s awesome when people do that as well.

[00:41:45]  Megan Porta 

Yep. All right. I am inspired and I have about a million more questions, but unfortunately I have to say goodbye for now. Maybe we’ll meet again. But yeah, this is great food for thought, I think, in so many ways. And everyone should go check out your tool Answer Socrates and just see if it’s a good fit for their business. Thank you for joining me, Jamie, and for giving us so much value to think about.

[00:42:10]  Jamie I.F. 

Thank you very much for having me and yeah, really lovely to chat and I appreciate your time.

[00:42:15]  Megan Porta 

And one last question. Where can people find you, obviously answersocrates.com anywhere else?

[00:42:20]  Jamie I.F. 

Yeah, my personal blog is on increasing.com. I’m not very active, but I should be. But I’m not. Because I’m not and I should be. I am. Yeah, like, it’s a cool name, right? Like, I had this really cool named blog and then I just wasted it, some of it. Like, that’s my fault.

[00:42:37]   

It’s all my fault. I’m jamieif on Twitter. Jamie_if on X whatever it is. I’m not really like that active there, but I was on there before and then the same jamieif on LinkedIn and increasing.com for my personal blog.

[00:42:52]  Megan Porta 

Amazing. And the talk about ChatGPT must have calmed the dogs because they were quiet. I didn’t even notice that they went quiet. But they. They haven’t been barking.

[00:43:01]  Jamie I.F. 

No, they have not.

[00:43:03]  Megan Porta 

Yes. All right, well, thank you again, Jamie, and thanks so much for listening food bloggers. I will see you next time. 

[00:43:03]  Outro

Thank you so much. For listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. Please share this episode with a friend who would benefit from tuning in. I will see you next time.