Latest / Content, Briefly / Your Employees Are Your AI Search Strategy with Kaleigh Moore

Transcript

Your Employees Are Your AI Search Strategy with Kaleigh Moore · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. Let me tell you about Userp. That's U-S-E-R-P.io.
• 0:13
  If you're a growth stage or public company and SEO isn't driving enough pipeline for you yet, or maybe you've hit a growth bottleneck, you need to talk to this crew.
• 0:22
  Userp has spent 10 years helping some of the biggest SaaS, fintech, and healthcare brands in the world turn organic search into a legitimate customer acquisition engine, and now they're doing the same for AI search.
• 0:32
  We're talking companies like monday.com, Robinhood, CrowdStrike, Wiz, Binance, and dozens more that you've heard of, from Series A all the way to publicly traded. And the results speak for themselves.
• 0:43
  They helped monday.com go from 600,000 to 1.2 million organic visits leading into their IPO.
• 0:49
  They built hundreds of high-authority links and content assets for EarlyBird, a fintech app, driving over 20,000 acquired users before EarlyBird was acquired by Acorns.
• 0:58
  And they've helped Onboard rank for 13,000 more keywords in their space, tripling their organic pipeline value in a single year. What makes Userp different is they don't just publish content and hope for the best.
• 1:08
  They engineer content assets that rank and convert, backed by links on sites like HubSpot, Gartner, and G2. Here's the deal for Superpath.
• 1:16
  Mention Superpath when you book your strategy call at U-S-E-R-P.io and they'll add five bonus high-authority link placements to your first month on top of your package. That's userp.io.
• 1:27
  Hey everyone, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. I'm Eric, here today solo, chatting with Kaylee Moore.
• 1:36
  If you're even vaguely online in the B2B content marketing world, you've likely seen Kaylee Moore around for many years now. She's a very prolific content marketer, I'd say.
• 1:46
  She's always straddled the boundaries between journalism, content, and SEO, and had a really successful freelance career, which has actually set her up really well for this new world of AEO that we find ourselves in.
• 1:57
  I wanted to chat with Kaylee because she wrote a really great article that's called Your Employees Are Your Untapped AI Search Potential.
• 2:04
  She's basically arguing that employee LinkedIn content hits this, like, really sweet spot of non-brand-owned channels that you still have some ownership over on a website that LLMs cite really often, which is LinkedIn.
• 2:17
  And so I got Kaylee on the show to talk through-- It's, like, a very well-researched piece, so you should definitely check it out.
• 2:24
  And also, I wanted to talk to Kaylee because she's doing a AMA in the Superpath Pro Slack community on May 28th. So after you listen to this episode, you can join Superpath Pro, and you can get 30 days for free.
• 2:37
  Come into our Slack channel, and you'll be able to ask Kaylee anything about her article or this episode. So enjoy our conversation. Kaylee, thank you so much for joining us today.
• 2:48
  I've, you know, I think I've wanted to have you on the show for a while. So can you just start by telling us about your background? Like, you were a journalist. I saw you wrote for Forbes, Vogue Business, Adweek.
• 2:58
  Like, I'd love to hear about your journalism background and then how you ended up in content marketing. Yeah. I really randomly fell into the world of content marketing about 12 years ago through a Twitter conversation.
• 3:10
  I had a friend who was the content lead at a software company called Grasshopper. They were a phone company, if anyone remembers that. I remember them. Um, and she was look- Yeah.
• 3:19
  She was working for them and needed freelance writers, so she brought me on board. And so I started doing content marketing work. It's been 12 years, fast-forward.
• 3:28
  But in the mix with that, I have also built out my own content agency. I have a small team.
• 3:34
  I have been working with brands like Stripe, Shopify Plus, Amazon Business, kind of the, like, really large enterprise software companies for the last, I would say, eight-ish years.
• 3:43
  And also along with that, I have been doing some reporting work. I wrote for Forbes for seven years. I had a column there.
• 3:50
  I have contributed to Vogue Business, Adweek, Inc, Entrepreneur, pretty much all of the major business publications.
• 3:56
  A lot of that came, again, through networking on Twitter, so I'm always very grateful to have had a nice run on Twitter. And I'm still there. It's different, but it [chuckles] I'm still there.
• 4:06
  And also, I'm currently going to school. So I'm back in school. I am on the philosophy and ethics track at Harvard for the graduate program there with a focus on AI ethics, but also LLM information r- retrieval.
• 4:18
  So coming at AI search from many different angles. Yeah, that's super cool. I mean, there's so much you said there that resonates with me. I'm, like, a Twitter person too. I got into content marketing through Twitter.
• 4:29
  I had, like, a hockey blog back in the day. Amazing. And crazy enough, I actually met my wife through Twitter too, which is a total [chuckles] yeah, a total side conversation for another day. But I think- Incredible...
• 4:40
  like, what I liked about Twitter, and maybe, hopefully, that will come back, is the, like, it actually fostered relationships better than other social media platforms.
• 4:48
  I find, like, it's more of a dialogue than just, like, publishing at each other. So I definitely see the, how you could end up in, like, a real working relationship because of that.
• 4:57
  I do wanna ask you, like, one more about the journalism side. Like, what does the journalism experience give you?
• 5:02
  Like, it sounds like it's more of, like, an in tandem thing than, like, you were in journalism and then got into content.
• 5:07
  But, like, what does the journalism work do to, like, improve your content work that maybe, like, pure marketing people like me don't have? Yeah.
• 5:15
  The journalism work is probably the thing that gives me an edge with the content marketing work because it got me very good at finding the juicy nugget that makes for a good story.
• 5:25
  It also made me a very good interviewer, so it got me really good at talking to experts, either internal at a company, so, like, a subject matter expert at an enterprise software company, or a company that is-- For Forbes, I wrote in the retail space, so a founder or a product manager or a CMO, and really finding the good nuggets from their experience and interesting things that they've learned through trial and error and building that out into a really compelling story.
• 5:50
  That's still what I'm doing today. So it's the most fun and it's the most useful.Yeah, for sure. Okay, let's talk about the Harvard thing for a second. So, like, can you, like, what is that program like?
• 6:01
  Is it, A, is it, like, all online? And, like, what are you actually learning? Like, what does the structure look like? I was in grad school, and it was a lot. So, [laughs] I, I- Yeah...
• 6:08
  it's amazing you're able to, like, do both at the same time. Yeah, so I'm doing the certificate program. So it is four semesters worth of focused study work.
• 6:17
  And like I said, I chose philosophy and ethics because that was my favorite class in undergrad, and I really wanted to dive deeper into that. I have been doing it at a slow pace, so one course at a time.
• 6:27
  But this last semester, the course that I took was focused on basically the systems thinking behind LLMs and how they retrieve information, which really put me in a great spot for the work that I'm doing now with AI search, which is essentially all about how do we understand, as much as we can, we're all reverse engineering, how these tools come up with the things that they cite.
• 6:47
  And it is still very black boxy, but the great thing about this class is I had-- it was co-taught by two teachers.
• 6:53
  I had one who was very experienced and one who was a little bit younger, and they were talking about it from the technicalities. Mm-hmm. And, like, what's a de- developer perspective on all of this?
• 7:04
  And so I got really in the weeds on how everything works and just how these mental models are essentially built the same way that the human mind is.
• 7:12
  But it gave some great insight into how, as a content marketer, we need to be thinking about developing citation-worthy content, and how do we reverse engineer and structure things for humans and for machines.
• 7:26
  Yeah, very cool. I actually, I went to school for cognitive science back in 2007 t- through '11 or whatever, and back then I was taking AI classes, and they were all-- they were pretty much all programming.
• 7:39
  It was like program a- Okay... player to play checkers. And that was, like, right around the same time that they started doing those, uh, like, desert races with self-driving cars for the first time.
• 7:50
  Like, I don't know if you ever heard about those. Like- Yeah... and I know this is a crazy aside, but...
• 7:54
  And at the time when I was studying AI in school and I would tell my friends and family, they'd be like, "What are you gonna do with that?" Like, like, who cares how, like, if you can make- Right...
• 8:02
  a really good, like, chess player on, with AI. And of course, 15 years later, had I stayed [chuckles] in that field, I'd probably be a- Oh my gosh... multimillionaire or billionaire by now.
• 8:12
  But I think, like, understanding the systems themselves rather than just, like, jumping straight to the content work, I think, like, that's allowed me, now that AI has sort of, like, crept into this job, I feel like I have a great basis for that.
• 8:24
  So I feel like it is, like, a worthy pursuit for kinda any content marketer to... Like, it sounds like you came from, like, the philosophy and ethics side, which is really cool.
• 8:33
  I know that, like, companies like Claude have, like, AI philosophers and ethicists on staff- Right... who are thinking about, like, yeah, what should the... Yeah. There's a job. There's your, there's your next job.
• 8:42
  I listened to a really good interview w- with, I forget her name, but she was, like, sort of the head of philosophy, and they're trying to figure out, like, you know, how should Claude think about itself and its own purpose in the world, and- Yeah...
• 8:53
  so I, I do think there's so much overlap there that with content marketing. Okay, but let's get into the marketing stuff. So you've transitioned, you've had that content freelance agency business for a long time.
• 9:05
  Now you've sort of transitioned into AEO. And so y- you and I were talking right before this. I was saying I think I'm still seeing a lot of content marketers say, "Actually, like, AEO is kind of just the same as SEO.
• 9:19
  Most of what you need to do for SEO applies to AEO." And I don't think that's necessarily false, but there, there's more to AEO than SEO, I think. If, like, if there's a Venn diagram, like they overlap- Right...
• 9:29
  a lot, but they're not completely overlapping. So for those of us who are new to this topic, like, how do you think about AEO, and, like, why doesn't the old SEO content playbook translate? Yeah.
• 9:41
  So the old SEO playbook is essentially you are competing for keywords and keyword phrases, and what's different about AEO is you have to think about it from a more zoomed out perspective.
• 9:51
  So how do you think about the topic as a whole? And it's much more semantic, so what are the actual words and phrases people are using when they are asking a question or trying to solve a problem?
• 10:02
  And to me, that's very different.
• 10:03
  That's a much more laser-focused version of what SEO did, where you have to anticipate buyer questions and you have to very, very deeply understand your prospective buyers and the kinds of questions that they're asking, and proactively creating content that answers those questions.
• 10:18
  So for me, AEO is more of a play at topical ownership, but also brand reputation engineering, 'cause that's, there's this whole validation layer that comes with LLMs that SEO simply did not have.
• 10:31
  Whereas SEO was a little bit more simplified. It had fewer layers, if we think about context layers. So I think it probably always should have been this way. I think this is a move in the right direction.
• 10:42
  We wanna think about content from that very proactive perspective, from a deep customer understanding perspective.
• 10:48
  And the shift with, like, AI overviews and ChatGPT and Claude, all these things, has pushed us in that direction very, very quickly.
• 10:57
  Yeah, and I think what I discovered at Dock is, 'cause, you know, I've owned our SEO strategy for four years in my day job, and now, you know, I've been asked, "Okay, figure out AEO," and I'm getting into it.
• 11:08
  Before it was like win the number one spot, and then you can say whatever you want, and you're kind of the arbiter of truth versus now- Right, clicks...
• 11:16
  yeah, now it's like the LLMs are going to look at, you know, it's not like one-to-one this way, but let's say LLMs are looking at the top 100 results and sort of, not necessarily averaging out the answer, but making conclusions based on a wider amount of data.
• 11:31
  And so you have to-- You're not the owner of the story. Like, the whole internet- Right... has to kinda be telling the same story more or less, right? So- Absolutely. And that's hard. Yeah, it's super hard.
• 11:41
  That's really hard. It's not just a link that you click on, you know? It's more what's the vibe of your brand across the entire internet. That's such a more challenging ask. Totally.
• 11:50
  The very first thing I discovered is like, okay, great, I am owning all these keywords for Dock, but and so Dock is getting cited at a very-High rate, but, like, we are not talked about on other websites. And so it's...
• 12:04
  I'm experiencing this classic problem now where, you know, the top brands are not mentioning us. Like, we have commentary on the big players in the space.
• 12:12
  They don't have any commentary on us, so it's almost like we don't exist. Yeah. And so- Right... and so now I'm having to figure out, like, how do I go out and get more people on the internet to talk about us?
• 12:20
  And I mean, that's what you and I are gonna talk about today. You talked about the validation layer. You sort of dropped that term. What does that mean?
• 12:28
  So essentially, I'm sure we're gonna get into the source signal stack- Yeah... which is my whole framework for thinking about this.
• 12:33
  But essentially, brand-owned content isn't as trustworthy as third-party validation in the same way that a press release from a company is not as compelling as some journalist picking up a story from a conversation that they had over coffee with someone.
• 12:49
  It just, it's more trustworthy if it's not promotional.
• 12:52
  And so third-party validation through sites like Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Quora, all of these third-party sites, G2 for software people, these are where the community members are essentially vouching for or validating a company's claims.
• 13:08
  And so they're more trustworthy because they're not incentivized, right? There's no... Well, hopefully. Hopefully, if you're doing it right, they're not incentivized.
• 13:15
  These are organic mentions that you're getting from community members, and that's how LLMs verify and figure out what is the answer we should give when someone asks a question. What does the community say? Yeah.
• 13:28
  That makes a lot of sense. Let's get into your framework. Tell us about it. Yeah.
• 13:31
  So the source signal stack is basically a visualization of how brands should be thinking about reputation building and brand engineering across the internet. So there's four levels of it.
• 13:42
  At the lowest level of LLM trust are the brand-owned properties, so company website, branded LinkedIn page, all the things that the brand owns and has its name on.
• 13:52
  The next layer then is the C-suite, so maybe you have a CEO who's very active on LinkedIn. They're doing the thought leadership thing. That's kind of once removed from brand owned. There's still a real tie there.
• 14:02
  There's a lot of brand affinity there.
• 14:05
  Layer three are the employee internal subject matter experts, so these are things like your VP of product, developers, people like product managers who have a lot of hands-on experience using the product, building it, talking to customers.
• 14:19
  They are quite a bit removed from brand-owned properties, so I believe this is where the real opportunity is for those people to be on places like LinkedIn and YouTube talking about what they're doing at the company and building out that, again, it's an entity signal.
• 14:33
  It's a signal back to the LLMs. This company does what they say it does, and here are the people who are talking about it.
• 14:40
  And then the fourth layer is community signals, so these are what we just talked about, the YouTube, Reddit, external creators, thought leaders, influencers within your niche, and then sites like YouTube, so places where people are creating content and talking about your brand,
• 14:55
  sometimes with a partnership in the background, but also a lot of it is organic. So finding conversations that are already happening about your company online and participating in them and leveraging them.
• 15:06
  And if people are unhappy and saying bad things, hopping into those conversations and solving problems. So that's kind of the short version. That makes a lot of sense to me.
• 15:15
  So just to repeat back what I'm hearing from you is that each of these layers sort of increases in authenticity and trustworthiness because they're, like, further and further removed from- Right...
• 15:27
  not necessarily the source, but, like, some incentive to, like, be not 100% truthful or not 100% trustworthy because it's like, you know, I own... You know, brand owns their brand channel.
• 15:40
  They're gonna say good things about themselves. Mm-hmm. The CEO, also true. But then once you get to employees and above, then there's, like, a little bit more trustworthiness there overall. Yes. Is that right? Exactly.
• 15:50
  Yeah. That's a really good way to articulate it.
• 15:51
  So it's essentially, if you think about, like, a X Y chart, it's very low in the bottom left corner of the signal trust when it's brand owned, and it's very high, you've got the shoot up to the right, when it's not an owned channel.
• 16:05
  Organic community mentions are the most trusted signal for LLMs. That makes a lot of sense. And okay, so you have this excellent article. I had it open. I'm gonna pull it up.
• 16:16
  It's called Your Employees Equal Untapped AI Search Potential. Yes. And so obviously you've just kinda teased that third layer there and how your employees can be a really, like, great sort of reputation signal.
• 16:29
  Say more about that. Yeah. So I think for a long time, content marketers and companies as a whole have thought about employee advocacy and how that's a nice thing to have, but also SEO and AEO as two separate programs.
• 16:42
  Mm-hmm. And I think now thinking about the framework and thinking about how we should be approaching this moving forward, those two pro- those two programs should probably be one.
• 16:52
  So if you can integrate employees and give them the right resources or outsource a partner like me who can come in and interview and kind of mine for those good nuggets of information and get them on a platform like LinkedIn or YouTube, even better, creating videos about what they're doing, that's kind of, that's the ultimate.
• 17:10
  That's what you really wanna go for. But if you can get them doing that, it's gonna help your LLM citation rate because it's more content that's further validating the claims that you're making about your company. And so
• 17:21
  I just really encourage companies to shift the thinking from, okay, these are siloed programs. Now they really kinda need to be married together and building on each other because they are working towards the same goal.
• 17:32
  All of this is reputation engineering. All this is brand building, and it's all happening within the public forum of the internet.
• 17:39
  So it's, I think it's a matter of how do we create more synergy between these previously very separate entities and make sure they're all building on each other.
• 17:48
  Here's why I think this is really exciting and why I hope you're correct that this is going to be a really successful tactic, is that I think almost every content marketer I talk to, their favorite work they do is with subject matter experts.
• 18:00
  Like, I think all of us hated the, like, keyword-driven world. You know, some people made it work. They were able to take a keyword and turn it into something more interesting.
• 18:10
  But-Most people I talk to, like they really love the interview subject matter expert, turn it into something work a lot more. And there's a huge demand right now for AEO work, like including my CEO.
• 18:25
  Every CEO in the world- Mm-hmm... is saying, "Go do AEO now, content marketer," and- Figure it out...
• 18:30
  the f- my first instinct was, oh God, like so much of this is offsite and might-- like I know it will involve content, but I'm not 100% sure it's the work of a content marketer that will get there, if that makes sense.
• 18:43
  Like, it feels more like back link building or things like that. But this is exciting to me because it's taking the skills that we already have as content marketers and using it for the purpose of AEO. So it's- Yeah...
• 18:56
  it's like a real kinda wedge into, A, continuing to make content and be a writer and use our skills for good, and then achieve those like AEO results. Yeah. It's a good pivot for journalists too.
• 19:10
  You know, for me, as someone who is spending so much time talking and interviewing people to try to find a story angle, this is just that within the content marketing context.
• 19:18
  And you're right, there's nothing more exciting than when you start talking to a developer or a product person and they get really excited telling you about an experiment that they ran or a problem that they solved.
• 19:29
  There is such great opportunity there for authentic storytelling and just mining for this expertise that, again, shows we have great, really smart people on our team who are solving very interesting problems.
• 19:41
  And so it's just a matter of like, you need to have a person who's assigned to pulling those insights out of those people, because the reality is like they're very busy.
• 19:48
  They don't have time to sit down and write out a lovely narrative about this problem that they solved. That needs to be someone else's job so they can stay heads down on the work.
• 19:57
  And so that's kind of what I'm trying to solve for, but I think people are coming at that from a few different angles. Yeah.
• 20:02
  I wanna ask you about that in a second, but first I wanna get back to the article, something earlier in the article. So what I liked about this piece that you wrote is how research-backed it is. Mm-hmm.
• 20:12
  And one of your points is about like the Google leak about author reputation score in 2024, and it's kind of like a signal that Google does care a lot about the author's reputation.
• 20:24
  Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that? Yeah.
• 20:27
  So there was a leak back in late 2024 where they-- I, I've referenced the black box of AI search, which means that we don't essentially know how tools like ChatGPT and Claude, how they come up with their citation rates.
• 20:39
  We're all reverse engineering and trying to figure it out, but we don't know for sure.
• 20:43
  And so with this leak, they did show that there were three different entity signals that were weighed as far as how at least Google's engine was coming up with citation rate decisions.
• 20:53
  So it was, like you said, reputation score. There was also something related to like effort, essentially how much effort did it take to create this piece of content.
• 21:03
  And a third one too that now because it's not in front of my face I can't remember. Put you on the spot, sorry. Yeah. I'm like, "I should know this. I wrote it."
• 21:10
  But essentially it's saying that author score, effort, and all these things are a really important piece of citation rate. And so if it's true for Google, it's probably true for other models as well.
• 21:20
  And so I think this is, this was a little peek behind the curtain of here's what we need to be thinking about when it comes to the evaluation process of s- that's happening behind closed doors when it comes to how do we get cited in AI search.
• 21:33
  So to me, I wanna take that piece of information and run with it and really dig my heels into this journalistic talking to subject matter experts and mining for that, and then creating content that solves for what the models are looking for when figuring out what to cite.
• 21:50
  Totally. And I think the next argument you made was that LinkedIn is getting cited at an extremely high rate by LLMs.
• 21:59
  I think it, overall, it's one of the most cited sites, but for like work-related searches, I think it's the most cited site. That makes sense. That's where most like B2B content goes.
• 22:09
  And then you kind of extend that argument to say therefore, your individual SMEs at your company should be posting on LinkedIn.
• 22:18
  And what I thought was interesting, you're not just saying posting on LinkedIn, it's like writing articles on LinkedIn. Yeah. So how did you come to that? Some of it's through my own experimentation with my own account.
• 22:28
  I was not a super active LinkedIn user, but I have been-- I looked it up the other day. I've been on there for 17 years, which makes me feel so old, but I joined in 2000.
• 22:36
  Um, and it wasn't really until this last year that I really started focusing on talking about the source signal stack and this new work that I'm doing, and the traction that I'm getting there is insane.
• 22:46
  Also, the AI visibility, the citations that I've been earning through publishing a newsletter there, talking about a very focused area of subject matter expertise, carousels, long form video.
• 22:57
  These things are getting a lot of traction, and I'm like, "Hmm, brands should probably know this," because of course, we've had CEOs doing the thought leadership on LinkedIn for many years now. But what about employees?
• 23:08
  What about other people who have other very compelling things to say, who again, are a little bit further removed from the position of CEO, who, I don't know, it feels like that kind of goes with the job title now.
• 23:19
  You need to have the visibility of being on a platform like LinkedIn, talking about your work. There's a lot of opportunity there at the individual level for employees to get in on this action too.
• 23:28
  So that's kind of what kicked all this thinking off. Yeah, and I think, I mean, it's been a few years now.
• 23:33
  I think Jimmy and I had a whole episode about like, should all your employees be LinkedIn people, and the value that comes with that and, and sort of the risks of your employees also being kind of creators that then build their- Right...
• 23:46
  their own brands and can just like take off with it. But I think it's been pretty established at this point that, like I've seen some companies like Gong do this really well.
• 23:55
  Even like Apollo was doing it really well before they got kicked off- Oh, yeah... L- LinkedIn. But I've seen a few companies do this really well with just like a, a army of LinkedIn creators.
• 24:07
  And what I think is interesting about what you're saying here is that now there's also an AEO angle to it. And so it's- Yeah... like more checks in the pro column of why LinkedIn can be a great strategy.Yep, for sure.
• 24:21
  There's just so much opportunity, and again, it, it ticks a lot of boxes, like you said, and I just feel like it's such a... I feel like it's becoming more like Twitter. At least I'm seeing a lot more engagement.
• 24:32
  The engagement rate is way up. People are actually replying with good comments, funny comments too, which is something I always loved about Twitter. People are actually having a personality there.
• 24:42
  So yeah, employees as creators, I think, is a very is- interesting angle for companies to explore because it does do all these different things. Yeah. Okay, next question.
• 24:53
  Again, my CEO came to me and said this recently, "I, I think our company should have more people on LinkedIn. I want you to help our head of sales, our head of customer success," like he sort of went down a list.
• 25:04
  I think all these people should have LinkedIn presences. So I'm in a unique scenario in that I'm a team of one.
• 25:10
  Maybe most marketing teams tasked with this would be a little bigger, so they might have more bandwidth for this. But, like, how? How do you, how do you get started? Yeah.
• 25:18
  Like I know my first instinct would be to go interview them for almost like we're doing now, talk to them for 45 minutes, and then figure out some AI workflow where I can take the transcript and write a bunch of posts for them.
• 25:32
  Like, is that where someone should start? Is that it? Yeah. I mean, essentially I...
• 25:36
  So I have kind of tried and experimented and gotten a, a little bit of a system worked out to where I have found a workflow that works really well for mining, and it's a little bit templatized.
• 25:46
  It's a process, and that's what I'm calling the Source Signal Stack. I've got two different cohorts that are running right now.
• 25:51
  One's a B2B company that I'm doing this work for their employees, and one is a little bit more self-serve, where marketers are doing it either for themselves or they're going and taking this framework and using it at their own company.
• 26:03
  And so essentially it is what are the questions we need to ask? What are the journalism principles that you need to know as a marketer to really get the insights dug out of people?
• 26:14
  Because sometimes we'll say like, "I don't know what to talk about," or, "I don't have anything interesting to say."
• 26:18
  So how do you ask questions and get super curious in a way that helps you dig up those really good insights? But also, I think it's a matter of, number one, upfront education.
• 26:29
  So this is not a super sexy thing that people like to talk about, but you have to get buy-in from the people- Mm-hmm... who are gonna do it. You have to make sure they're very on board. You can't force it.
• 26:37
  I think that if you do, you get really lacklu- luster content and people... It just doesn't resonate. It's kind of a lot of running in place because it's not gonna go anywhere.
• 26:46
  It doesn't land as authentic or interesting, any of those things.
• 26:49
  So again, upfront education, what are the things you need to do to talk to the subject matter experts and get them bought into this idea, but also then what's the framework and type of questions you need to ask to get the right answers out of them?
• 27:03
  So that is what I am testing and experimenting with right now. It's also what I used on myself to really figure out how to do this, and I...
• 27:11
  Just using it, again, on my own account, I have seen, I think, something like 250,000 impressions just over the last 90 days. Like, it's wildly effective. So yeah, further experimenting.
• 27:22
  We'll report back on that down the road. Totally. And you're 100% right on the buy-in thing. I had... Actually, one of the AEs in our company, one of the salespeople came to me and said, "I really wanna do LinkedIn now.
• 27:34
  I think it will be really helpful for my outbound." Mm-hmm.
• 27:38
  And that made me realize, like, I always talk about putting things in the other team's language or, like, working in their world if you wanna get buy-in from them.
• 27:46
  And so this is, if, so for example, if you want a salespe- a salesperson to get active on LinkedIn, for him it was like, "Okay, if I'm doing all this outreach and then someone clicks to my profile, like I want them to see something impressive there so that then I can have like a follow-up sales conversation."
• 28:01
  And that was a bit of an aha moment for me of like, okay, to get the salesperson bought in to LinkedIn, you're not just gonna say, "Oh, it, it'll create content and increase our LLM visibility."
• 28:12
  Like, they care about that a little bit, but if their pipeline is full anyway, they probably don't care about- Right... like the company getting more leads or whatever.
• 28:19
  But for him, it was like, "This will improve my close rate if I'm creating great content." And, you know, the same will apply to our customer success team.
• 28:29
  Like if they come in knowing you as a, like a content creator and they're kind of bought into you already, that will, like make your implementations go better or whatever.
• 28:38
  You know, u- us as content marketers, when we're trying to get buy-in from these folks, it's like, how do you put this in their world so it's not like, "Let's create content together"?
• 28:46
  It's like, "Let's help you achieve your goals by like sort of making you an expert in this field." Yeah. What's in it for me? You always have to answer that question. Otherwise, what's the point? Nobody's gonna do it.
• 28:57
  Totally. Okay, a couple more questions about this LinkedIn thing. Like, you actually argued people should be writing long-form articles on LinkedIn, which I think that's like... So, so why?
• 29:06
  Is it just 'cause they're getting cited so much by LLMs? Yeah. Yeah, so that's the main thing. I'm seeing it get the highest citation rate.
• 29:13
  It's also really good for building specific subject matter expertise because there's more context, and LLMs love context. So that's just a very strategic play.
• 29:23
  I think it's very easy to share something quick and pithy and it be a one-off thing where maybe it's kind of silly, but if you really want to educate people and establish actual subject matter expertise, you have to go deep.
• 29:35
  You can't just fire off little funny tweets, essentially- Mm-hmm... like you could on Twitter. You have to have some depth.
• 29:41
  You have to really get in the weeds a little bit and do the research-based pieces like I've been doing on LinkedIn and in newsletters.
• 29:48
  I'll also say I have a sneaking suspicion that LinkedIn newsletters are gonna become very important in LLMs because I have heard some buzzing around that they're going to buy a ESP like Beehiiv, but my newsletter growth there and distribution and reach is incredible.
• 30:06
  And so I think there's a lot of potential there for people who are like, "I don't have time to do articles and a newsletter."
• 30:11
  If you do it all on LinkedIn, you're kind of killing two birds with one stone, and it's great for reaching people as well.
• 30:17
  So you're getting the LLM visibility, but you're also getting some great organic distribution because they are really optimizing for that, at least as of right now.
• 30:25
  But again, that's another thing that I've seen anecdotally and a lot of opportunity there. I've heard people in Superpath, in the Slack community several times say-They had surprising success with a- Yeah...
• 30:37
  LinkedIn newsletter. Like, if you're already running a Substack or Beehiiv or something like that, to just cross-post it to LinkedIn and it was- Syndicate, yeah... it was getting a lot of success. So great tip.
• 30:46
  I launched my newsletter there, um, eight or nine weeks ago, and it already has 1,700 subscribers, which is, that's insane for... I paid nothing. That's awesome. So last couple questions for you.
• 30:58
  If I'm a content leader listening, like, what are the highest leverage, like, three, four things I can do right now for AEO? I'm putting you on the spot, but, it, like, what do you- Yeah... tell people when they ask you?
• 31:09
  Number one, do an audit. So zoom out, see where you're getting citations already, what's working, and then look for the low-hanging fruit.
• 31:17
  So a good way to do this is to look for, look at your top three competitors, do a gap analysis, see where they're getting cited and you're not, and then start creating content to fill those gaps.
• 31:27
  That can be written content. That could be video content. Ideally, if you're in a perfect world, you're gonna do both.
• 31:33
  But then also get very specific about figuring out what your customers are using to search when it comes to AI. What's the model that they're using? What are the types of questions that they're asking?
• 31:47
  Are they using Perplexity? Are they in Claude? Are they in, like, OpenAI, ChatGPT? Figure that out, because it's really easy to try to do a lot of things at once and not make a lot of progress.
• 31:59
  So get very clear about where your customers are and what they're asking. And then, so I guess that was kind of two in one. But then the third one would be get on LinkedIn.
• 32:07
  Get on LinkedIn, have two to three subject matter experts, find people who are willing to do it, and set them up so that they can publish two to four times a week.
• 32:17
  I think two to four times a week, that's a great place to start.
• 32:20
  Get very focused on their subject matter expertise, reference the company when they're doing posting, and then start tracking visibility from there and see what changes, what gets better, gets worse.
• 32:30
  That's a great place to start. Perfect. Okay, last question. You joined Superp- or, or Pro Community recently.
• 32:38
  I'm curious why, and I'm curious, like, what value you're seeing in, like, the sort of quarter you've been in the community so far. Yeah.
• 32:46
  Being a solo marketer and someone who works from home can be very lonely and very isolating. I've been doing it for 12 years now, so I've gotten very familiar with this feeling.
• 32:55
  But I was looking for a community to join where other people were trying to figure out AEO and everything that's happening with AI search. So Superpath seemed like a good place to do that.
• 33:06
  I think it's also where a lot of decision makers are and spend time. So as I'm doing my own thought leadership work, that's a good place for me to be connecting with people and seeing what other people are working on.
• 33:16
  Sharing newsletter editions in the Amplify This channel has been really great. I've gotten a lot of commentary and feedback that I, people don't always reply to emails, so it's been really nice for that, too.
• 33:27
  But community, I just think people need community, especially marketers. Everything right now is very weird, and it's very hard and stressful, and it's just, like, a nice little place to go and vent sometimes, too.
• 33:38
  [laughs] So there's that. Yeah. There's just really smart questions. And I think- Mm-hmm... what's funny is sometimes people, they join Superpath because, like, they want answers.
• 33:48
  But then what I've learned over time is the value is the questions that other people ask, and you're like, "Oh, wow, I wasn't thinking about it that way," or- Mm...
• 33:55
  yeah, I don't know, it's like a different sort of signal that's just helpful. And yeah, I hear you.
• 33:59
  I've been working as a solo content marketer mostly at home for 10, 10-ish years now, so definitely feel you on that front. That's why I joined, too.
• 34:07
  Like, I've always been a solo in-house person, and I, you know, I need my, I need more peers around me so I can keep learning, for those of us who aren't doing Harvard certificate programs.
• 34:17
  [laughs] Uh, Kaylee, thank you so much for joining. If people want to follow you or subscribe to your newsletter, where should they go? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, of course. My website is kayleymoore.com.
• 34:28
  I'm still on Twitter for the time being. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Those are the three main places I spend time, probably more than I should, but yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thank you.
• 34:37
  And I forgot to plug this. Kaylee is doing a Slack AMA in Superpath Pro- Oh, yeah... on May 28th, where you can ask her all of your follow-up questions to this interview and ask smarter questions than I did.
• 34:50
  So thank you, Kaylee, so much for joining, and have a great rest of your week. You too. [outro music]