EP354: AI Search: How Brands Get Found & Recommended

Neil Twa (00:00:00) Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builder podcaster ⁓ episode of Imperfect Action, where we're just going. ⁓ Vivian, we're going to do this flying by the seat of our pants. Hello to everybody. Hello to you. Hello, hello. So if you guys are seeing us, ⁓ in, have some fun. I got a couple of things to throw up here real quick as we get going. ⁓ Let's see if this actually runs.

Vivienne Wagner (00:00:11) Bye.

Neil Twa (00:00:26) No, that is the wrong one. See that is totally see we're going to just like where's the where's the right one at? I'm pushing buttons. Is this the right one? There it is. I got the right one. ⁓ I forgot to tell everybody this.

Neil Twa (00:00:53) OK, guys, this is it. We're live. Imperfect. So if you're on and you're saying hello to us, there's a chat over here somewhere in which you guys can chat. And if you do happen to have questions, you're going to have to stick around. There's a public chat out there. So say hi if you guys are listening to this live. We're going to be talking about organic AI search engines. What does it mean in the world today, guys? I mean, this is, should I even do it?

Should I be playing in this world? What has changed? Am I already behind? Is it too late? I brought somebody in here today who I think is an expert in this. And so we're going to talk about that. What do you think? Is that what you want to talk about or do want to talk about something else?

Vivienne Wagner (00:01:34) always want to talk about that. ⁓ I do. ⁓ It's what wakes me up at night and in the nerdiest way gets me excited about like potential for people.

Neil Twa (00:01:35) Is that what you want to talk about? Okay.

Neil Twa (00:01:46) Potential is always very good. Absolutely. So what is the potential today that maybe wasn't there even last year or six months ago with the onslaught of this new AI thing that everybody's calling AI, which are really mostly task-based stuff. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:01:58) Yeah, well...

Honestly, the thing that's new is ⁓ our shifting relationship with AI platforms. ⁓ I am an SEO expert. I've been doing this for years and years, and SEO is never ⁓ sexy or exciting. Nobody ever gets excited about SEO and talking about those kinds of things. But AI doesn't pull its answers from thin air. ⁓ has to get its answers from somewhere.

Neil Twa (00:02:08) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:02:26) Nope.

Vivienne Wagner (00:02:30) SEO is still relevant, but what's shifted is our relationship with AI. We don't go to Google anymore. And if we do, we're reading the AI summary, right? Yep. Zero click. ⁓ There's no need. I tell our clients that I want you to think about Google as being a librarian. And that librarian is going to pick out some books that you would probably be interested in and you are expected to go and read them.

Neil Twa (00:02:40) Yeah, that's right. Right. We're just killing a lot of search traffic for people.

Vivienne Wagner (00:02:59) Whereas AI is the detective who's gonna read those books for you and come back to you with a singular answer. I think you can talk about a little bit more if you want. So that happens for sure in the AI overview, but when people more and more are going to chat GPT or Claude or whatever the AI platform might be, it's not just a simple search, it's actually a guided conversation. And AI is shifting that. I just had a real world experience

Neil Twa (00:03:05) Yeah. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:03:23) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:03:28) for myself using AI last week where ⁓ TMI, I had a reaction to a skincare product that I've used for years. I'd figure out why, and then I was considering trying another product and I gave ⁓ AI the link to that product and said, I think I'm having a reaction to this. What would be a good ⁓ replacement? It gave me several, we talked through it. It was a guided nuanced conversation and it ended up

Neil Twa (00:03:46) Right?

Vivienne Wagner (00:03:58) literally ⁓ giving me two or three different products and recommending one within my chat GPT thread that I was using and guess what I did? I clicked it, I purchased it and I never visited a website. Right?

Neil Twa (00:04:11) Right? A Gentic Commerce Protocol. It's such a new way that most people don't really understand it. And it's, you know, capacity. I think it's such an early adoption phase right now that even as your story is being told, it's kind of like you stumbled upon it to some degree. And I think that that discovery period that we're talking about is still well underway in this early adoption phase. So how do people who are listening to this, who might want to take advantage of that, maybe they want to be the product that you bought. What should they be thinking about?

Vivienne Wagner (00:04:22) Yes.

Vivienne Wagner (00:04:26) Okay.

Neil Twa (00:04:41) like for somebody like you right now.

Vivienne Wagner (00:04:43) Right, well, and I know like you work with people who really are product-based quite a bit with their voltage, but this, the internet works the way the internet works. So it doesn't matter if you're product-based or service-based, people are using it how they use it. And so yes, you want to be an early adopter ⁓ because visibility compounds, right? ⁓ It's not a race, it's compounding.

And so when you are an early adopter, you are much better entrenched ⁓ as the expert in your field, having the best product, whatever that might be. And more and more, it's not just about visibility. It's not just, ⁓ you know, I want to get found. You want to get recommended, right? ⁓

Neil Twa (00:05:23) Mm.

Neil Twa (00:05:28) Yeah, no, that's very true. It recommended for the specific type or use case or outcome that just hones right into your product. ⁓ And kudos to whoever was doing that with their product to solve your problem, because, well, they nailed it ⁓ as an early adopter.

Vivienne Wagner (00:05:37) Exactly.

Vivienne Wagner (00:05:43) They did. ⁓ And this is the funny part to me, what I bought worked. And I actually had argued with ChatGPT a little bit about it. Like that doesn't sound like it would be a good thing. And it gave me reasons ⁓ why this would be better. And when we go back to the idea and the concept that AI is not pulling ⁓ these answers out of thin air, it is sourcing it from a website or a product description, or even it can source it from your social media. So the

Neil Twa (00:05:52) Right?

Neil Twa (00:06:04) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:06:13) To have the nuanced conversation with AI and have your name and your business and your product mentioned means you have the details about your products and services somewhere floating out there in the internet for it to pick up.

Neil Twa (00:06:26) Yeah, well, and it's out there, right, across different platforms, across your own website, across your commentary on social media, if you're sharing it anywhere. It's literally all out there. But what are the top sources? I think I remember one of them being Reddit. But where else are the top sources that these DPTs are getting their ⁓ truth from as they're trying to tell you the truth behind your medical issue for this example? Forum. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:06:41) Yeah, well, foreign.

Vivienne Wagner (00:06:47) forums, definitely. So Reddit is, you know, obviously way, way up there. But there, it's an ecosystem. There's no like, only do it here and you'll be fine. So of course, it starts with SEO for for your website, but it's more than just plugging those things in. You as a company or brand, that framework really needs to be about your authority in the space. You're a subject matter expert, right?

Neil Twa (00:06:54) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:07:00) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:07:15) authority, credibility, ⁓ that our old friend ⁓ Google business profile. For a long time, ⁓ that were service, ⁓ virtual ⁓ service based businesses, they couldn't have one. ⁓ You had to have this physical address. And so like our agency, we're virtual. We don't have a physical address. Our physical address is like a PO box. I'm not going to start a Google business profile for that.

Neil Twa (00:07:29) Yes.

Vivienne Wagner (00:07:42) But now it's more and more important because that's actually something that ⁓ AI gives a lot of weight to. It's a verifiable source. So the people who thought they could ignore some of these things that really are rather old school and they're not new, ⁓ you need to dust them off and give them some of the love that they deserve because it's going to impact your visibility.

Neil Twa (00:07:57) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:08:04) Yeah, no, that's great. And how do you, it's just regular accounts, regular information, regular conversations, or is there a way that people can go out and start helping to move the needle on their visibility with AEO?

Vivienne Wagner (00:08:17) Yes, 100%. So ⁓ if you have the time, go into Reddit ⁓ and ⁓ chat about things and ⁓ drop information in the appropriate threads, not being spammy, but being ⁓ value packed, help inform, help answer questions. But there should be a through line running through your social media, ⁓ visual search engines like Pinterest and YouTube. ⁓ That through line...

should also hit your Google business profile. It should hit your press. You're doing any sort of press. ⁓ Press releases can, but also making sure that that press ties back to you. So if ⁓ you're mentioned in any press, go ahead and put that on ⁓ your website and make sure that ⁓ link to that external source

Neil Twa (00:08:54) What, like press releases, mean? ⁓

Neil Twa (00:09:02) Hmm

Vivienne Wagner (00:09:14) that press that you've done is there. All of it works together to create this ecosystem. So there's a lot that can be done, but there's a bit of an uphill battle because people think, well, schema markup, for example. That's old school ⁓ SEO to add that structured data. ⁓ And it was always considered good SEO hygiene, ⁓ but not necessarily the place where you can get the more ⁓

detailed nuanced information that you don't want to bog down the front of your website with. Right? You don't want to put everything there, but knowing that there's something you could put as that layer that the machines like to read, ⁓ your customers don't see it. You don't have to see it, but they're in the machines can read it. I ⁓ get that.

Neil Twa (00:09:50) Wait, right, it's all spammy, right?

Neil Twa (00:10:02) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I remember the old days, back in the SEO days when we used to go in and white text the back end of our websites to just tack up everything. Did you ever do, allegedly, did you ever allegedly do anything about that? ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:10:13) Never, never, never. I never did that. I never did that. Because I got my, I cut my teeth, so to speak, quite by accident. I started off in 2008 or 2009 as a blogger. I did. Yeah, I'm old school. Turned out I was a mommy blogger.

Neil Twa (00:10:31) Did you? Like, do straight up old school blogging, huh?

Neil Twa (00:10:38) A mommy blogger. There you go. Right there. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:10:41) I stayed home with our youngest son and didn't go back into the workforce after we had him. was very grateful to be able to do that. I raised four boys, the youngest son. And I don't scrapbook. I'm really bad at scrapbooking. No, no, I had a writing background.

Neil Twa (00:10:47) Okay.

See ya!

Neil Twa (00:10:54) ⁓ I thought everybody I thought all the ladies scrapbook. ⁓ My wife hasn't traveled. ⁓ Okay.

Vivienne Wagner (00:11:02) And so I started this blog sort of like my own little observations and whatnot, but then it became, my kids are hilarious. And so I would just like put little anecdotal stories out there. But the first time I got a comment on my blog, I didn't understand it was on the internet meal. I didn't understand how did I don't know what I thought it was when I, I had a friend who did quilts or something like that. She started a quilting blog. I'm like, well, I could start a blog too. It's like back on blogger.

Neil Twa (00:11:19) ⁓ okay. What did you think it was?

Neil Twa (00:11:32) Oh, well, yeah, blogger doesn't know what he does about blogger anymore.

Vivienne Wagner (00:11:34) ⁓ That's how old. And like I said, was my private things ⁓ about my family, ⁓ my little observations in the world. I have a writing ⁓ background. ⁓ And I'm in the Los Angeles area, and there's a radio station that many years ago was throwing what I thought to be an inappropriate contest that people driving their kids to school would hear. It was a swingers contest.

Neil Twa (00:11:42) Right. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:12:02) People can call in and win tickets ⁓ to go to this thing in Las Vegas. And I didn't, ⁓ I just had like my own little private, this is so inappropriate and this is like, shouldn't be happening in drive time and it's just empty. Like I had all of these things to say about it and I got a comment ⁓ ripping me apart and calling me names for being disapproving of that and whatever. And first of all, I answered the comment but then the second thing was, how did this person get on my private blog?

Neil Twa (00:12:03) okay. Okay.

Vivienne Wagner (00:12:32) That was my first experience with search and ⁓ having things on your website that pulled people to you. And so I did that for several years. ⁓ I still have my blog to this day. It's ⁓ still up. I don't put it. haven't put anything new on it since 2016, but I still make money from it every single month because it's optimized for search and I've created all of this content. But that's how I started realizing I could help business owners.

Neil Twa (00:12:35) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:12:44) that's cool. Just hanging out there.

Neil Twa (00:12:52) Well, there you go.

Neil Twa (00:13:01) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:13:01) Drive traffic, ⁓ that's what bloggers want to do. They want to drive traffic without paying for ads and everything ⁓ I knew I could help a business owner with.

Neil Twa (00:13:07) Yeah, there's adsense and advertising. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, there's smart things to do there. Have you ever leveraged that in any of your current business?

Vivienne Wagner (00:13:16) ⁓ the blogging.

Neil Twa (00:13:18) Yeah, well, in the old school blogging, people still find you out there and utilize that to connect with you.

Vivienne Wagner (00:13:24) ⁓ Sometimes they do. It's very separate because like I said, started off ⁓ mommy blogging, things about my kids. ⁓ is going to find that leveraging and helpful. I did work with lots of ⁓ companies and brands during my time. I was like an original influencer. ⁓ Get paid for sponsored posts, throw parties, ⁓ trips to Disneyland, all I just have to blog about it. It was quite fun.

Neil Twa (00:13:52) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:13:52) ⁓ I miss that kind of thing. ⁓ everything I know about good content and attracting people with quality content that will actually help them, that's kind of the foundation and sort of the philosophy behind the blogging that we do for our clients. I started this agency also as an accident at my dining room table because one of my friends was a high

Neil Twa (00:13:55) Right.

Neil Twa (00:14:10) Gotcha.

Vivienne Wagner (00:14:18) high-end real estate agent and needed help with her company blog that they asked her to take over for them. And ⁓ it snowballed from there. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:14:24) Interesting. So you took over her blog and started to work on it.

Vivienne Wagner (00:14:29) I did and while helping her with this assignment she had been given, I noticed that the brokerages digital marketing department was, this is back in 2013, I'm like that's not how Facebook works. They were using their Facebook page to wish their internal team happy birthday.

Neil Twa (00:14:48) OK. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:14:50) And that was it. ⁓ And so I was like, well, that's not how that works. ⁓ They're doing it wrong. And my friend said, can you talk to the guys? Well, sure. And I assumed the guys were just her real estate agent friends. No, they were the five founding partners of the brokerage. ⁓ I sat down and started, ⁓ just do this, do this. And she kind of kicked me under the table proverbially and shot me a look. And I went, ⁓ I'll get you a ⁓

Neil Twa (00:14:57) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:15:08) wow.

Vivienne Wagner (00:15:19) a proposal, that's what I'll do. ⁓ And she helped me walk it through, like that was 10 or 12. Tell, uh-huh. You say yes to opportunity and figure out ⁓ how you're gonna do it a lot of times. ⁓ It's more do it afraid, do it afraid than ⁓ do it wrong, but you figure it out as you go.

Neil Twa (00:15:25) That's the definition of imperfect action, ⁓ which we love to talk about that. That was totally imperfect action.

Neil Twa (00:15:43) Yeah. It's naked and afraid, the business story. ⁓ That sounds like an episode of something I wouldn't want to watch.

Vivienne Wagner (00:15:46) God, that is scary. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:15:54) 100%. But when we are figuring these things out, that's where you have room. I won't use the word innovate, but that's where you're open to learning. Okay, you come from a place of I don't know what I don't know. So you come from the place of how do I learn more? How do I solve this problem? And then you turn around and go, okay,

Neil Twa (00:15:54) You ⁓

Neil Twa (00:16:00) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:16:22) I know how to solve that person's problem now. Like you start those little dominoes in action falling one right after the other.

Neil Twa (00:16:31) Right, right, because you never know where that's going to lead you. It's usually, ⁓ it's usually pivoting through those changes. I think that's what makes some people nervous is they think that there's a one-and-done activity. Well, if I just do this, I'll expect, you know, why to happen if I do X when in actuality, when you do X, what you're expecting is one, two, three, A, B, C, Z, K, ⁓ L, ⁓ A, it's just going to go off the face. And if you prepare yourself for that, then you're open to those opportunities. I think that's smart. I, I've

Vivienne Wagner (00:16:41) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:16:52) It's a squiggle.

Neil Twa (00:16:59) similar pattern of life behavior that is an opportunity was presented as long as I didn't feel like it was terribly risky or just out of my ⁓ comfort zone. I would just say yes and give it a try and see what happens. And that has just kind of been, you know, this pivot, which doesn't look right to most people. It looks chaotic, right? It looks like ⁓ unstructured, uncontrolled immaturity in some people's minds. It just looks, doesn't look like a structured path. You didn't do it the right way. There's a right way to do this. And, you know, there's a right way.

Vivienne Wagner (00:17:15) Right.

Neil Twa (00:17:29) to the fundamentals of business. Like there's a right way to managing a profit and loss. There's a right way to building a company that grows and scales. But until you get to the point where you even know what the heck you're going to sell, everything is organized chaos. Is that a fair way saying it?

Vivienne Wagner (00:17:40) Yes. ⁓ It is. ⁓ we ⁓ I'm sure you the same way. Whatever you started in your business, what did you say 16 years ago, 19 years ago? ⁓ Right. And neither are you. ⁓ Are you doing what you went to school for? I'm not.

Neil Twa (00:17:51) 19. Yeah, no, did not, not doing what I started. 19 or something.

Neil Twa (00:18:00) No, I dropped out of school. I dropped out of college to go do basically what I ended up doing now, just on a really long path around to the end result.

Vivienne Wagner (00:18:07) See, I have a degree in public administration with an emphasis on policy development. It's going great. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:18:12) how's that going for you? Yeah, are you paying for the loans or did that finally disappear too or did you have any other?

Vivienne Wagner (00:18:18) It's you know, it was it that's where the writing background came came from. So like work like and I guess it could be argued that that still is marketing because the way I was working it's like how do we want to pass this legislation? How are we going to spin this so that you know in theory? ⁓

Neil Twa (00:18:22) Got it.

Neil Twa (00:18:28) Yeah, well, yeah, it is.

Neil Twa (00:18:35) You're going to write it. That's marketing. You're selling it. Yeah, I get it. You're selling it. That's one after.

Vivienne Wagner (00:18:39) I'm very glad to not be in anywhere near politics. Glad to. Okay.

Neil Twa (00:18:43) Well, I started out on a music degree, right? Music competition, went to school on almost a full ride music scholarship. And then by my third year, I switched to business management and computer science. And then right about that time, the internet blew up. Computers were coming in. We were getting email inboxes. The world was taking off. And I'm like, me about this. And no one could. Right. I remember opening, you know, ⁓ online and looking at these ⁓ green screens and stuff. What is HTML?

Vivienne Wagner (00:18:49) wow.

Neil Twa (00:19:08) Like we were, I was learning about what all this stuff was. There was no classes and courses to teach it. There was really no point in getting, you know, the final 30 hours left of my business degree at that point when the world was changing fundamentally so fast between 98 and 2002 that I just jumped out and went into the world and said yes to just everything I could try to do and get it done and pivoted all around through the marketing, the business online mobile. went through the corporate world for about 12 years.

And then said the heck with that in 2007, because that's not what I wanted to do. And no, I'm not doing now what I started, but eventually I got back around. that now some of those skillsets can be used with AI. Imagine that. Like I can build with Claude code programs and systems and tools a hundred times faster than I used to do by knowing and understanding how it works and then building those optimizations tactically into our operations that our operators are now using as we're implementing them literally, we feel like is the speed of light every week.

Vivienne Wagner (00:19:59) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:19:59) ⁓ trying to get ahead of what I think is an adoption curve that is going to swing about thousand times faster than the internet did. ⁓ I don't know if you get that feeling as well that like you wake up every day and it feels like you're behind already and you haven't even got started.

Vivienne Wagner (00:20:07) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:20:12) I yes and no. ⁓ like I, ⁓ I know lots of friends who are in marketing, they have their own marketing agencies. You know, I see that and what I'm seeing that they're doing, they're very much like, okay, we're going to pivot and embrace AI and help AI create AI tools for our clients. We're going to give them the symptoms, the ⁓ systems we're going to help them with that.

I don't have the mental bandwidth to keep up with that because everything that you're creating, there's a new, ⁓ better ⁓ mousetrap like Frank. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:20:51) Next week. Yeah. Claude comes out and blows away five new SaaS startups, right? Open VA alone, GPT comes out with a new image thing that blows away the previous Nano Banana too. It's like every week they're trying to one up each other and you can't stay up with it fast enough.

Vivienne Wagner (00:20:55) Exactly, so-

Vivienne Wagner (00:21:04) You can't stay up with it. ⁓ know our clients, our clients are business owners who just want to run their business. They don't like ⁓ the marketing. They don't want to know about it. They just want it to work. And so we embrace sort of that other side of the coin, which is, OK, AI is clearly here to stay. How do you get found? Get found in ⁓ Because ⁓ the basis for that is

Neil Twa (00:21:12) All right.

Neil Twa (00:21:27) How do you get-

Vivienne Wagner (00:21:33) have good stuff on your website. Share good stuff, quality stuff that helps people about your business. Provide value and be clear about what you do. Clarity is the new currency. I'm convinced of that when it comes to this game.

Neil Twa (00:21:48) That's right. That's else clarity is the new currency. You are in authenticity. I would even caveat that.

Vivienne Wagner (00:21:53) one like yes found foundational ⁓ because it's not just about AI sussing it out. ⁓ Your clients, your customers can smell can smell in authenticity, right? They know it when they see it. ⁓ You know, and you don't want

Neil Twa (00:22:04) They're starting to. They are. Yeah. Sometimes, although that new UGC stuff is getting ridiculous, I've been playing with some of the combinations of Clean 3 and Cdance 2 with scripting and storyboard outcomes. And I'll tell you, it's getting hyper realistic. I think some point here very shortly, most everybody over the age of 40 to 50 isn't going to have any idea that they're looking at something AI generated. ⁓ It is getting so crazy.

Vivienne Wagner (00:22:28) ⁓ It's absolutely crazy, but the core of who you are as a business, the products that you have to stand behind, the services that you do, ⁓ AI can't replace integrity. AI can't replace the quality ⁓ of ⁓ what you're actually giving somebody physical. I mean, maybe you can get ⁓ your operations faster to get those products and logistically get it in their hands sooner.

Neil Twa (00:22:40) That's right.

Neil Twa (00:22:57) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:22:58) It's not going to replace the quality of ⁓ the product itself or the service itself because people aren't buying the system. They're buying their outcomes.

Neil Twa (00:23:02) True story. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:23:08) Yeah, they're buying the pain relief, right? ⁓ If they're not trying, they're not buying, as the saying goes, right?

Vivienne Wagner (00:23:10) Right. ⁓

I'm buying the skincare thing it recommended and it worked for me. So guess what? I'm more likely to go back and I'm not gonna go to my dermatologist. I'm gonna go back to that chat GPT thread, which I've saved and be like, okay, give me another product from this line or have a continued conversation with it. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:23:28) Yeah, your brand building in your own conversation, which is a very unique way to look at this because it becomes instead of a necessarily mass marketing of speaking to every person, the businesses and us and our nature of brand building now are turning to a media company format that happens to sell physical products because we're literally trying to have one conversation with one person like you who has that relationship building effort. And in that conversation, wherever they are, perplexity, GPTs, or wherever.

Vivienne Wagner (00:23:56) Exactly.

Neil Twa (00:23:58) and GROK or whatever. And it's just, they have that relationship all of a sudden with us. And from there, can it expand into millions of people, right? Who are all having those conversations with us.

Vivienne Wagner (00:24:05) Yeah. ⁓

Exactly, because when you ⁓ can stand behind your products and services, you're producing good quality and you're clear about what it is you offer and the problems it solves, you don't have to win millions and millions of people. ⁓ You don't have to pivot and update things constantly. You're being true to yourself and just making sure that AI knows about it. That ⁓ should be such a relief to business owners.

Neil Twa (00:24:13) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:24:34) That's right.

Vivienne Wagner (00:24:38) who are feeling like they're waking up and they're already behind. You don't have to be up on the latest thing. You just need to have that solid, stand behind your product and be clear about who you are.

Neil Twa (00:24:42) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:24:53) Quick pause and we'll be right back.

Neil Twa (00:25:11) So this whole AI thing, relative to what you're doing today, relative to your efforts, are you seeing that as a good effort? Are you seeing it as still a knowledge kind of time suck as everybody's learning how to figure out what to do next? Or do you really now have a, like, this is our strategy, 26, 27, this is what we're doing?

Vivienne Wagner (00:25:32) This is our strategy and my goal for 26, 27 is to make sure that our business owner clients know about it. This can change the entire trajectory of their business because what we're doing is we're, you some of the things it's, yes, it's adding more content, but it's adding it in a structured way. And again, making sure AI knows who you are, what you do and who you're for, right? That's a simple, repeatable step and

We can see it paying off already. We can see the increase in traffic to websites and ⁓ share of audience and mentions in AI and they can see it in sales. They can see it in book appointments and calls. ⁓ It's very cool and exciting for me just to be able to ⁓ watch that trajectory and see them track. It's really very world.

Neil Twa (00:26:23) Where are you seeing the most impact? Is it in that lead gen call side e-commerce side or all of the above? where are you kind of all the above and where's your favorite one?

Vivienne Wagner (00:26:29) All of the above. All of the above. We work primarily with service-based businesses, but we have people, e-commerce, we've got brick and mortar stores, they're like, we work with a lot of bridal shops. We have kind of like the gamut. You work with a client and they refer.

Neil Twa (00:26:45) Really interesting. Make sense. Find the dress.

Vivienne Wagner (00:26:55) refer, refer. So you start seeing the little industry clumps of referrals. ⁓ But one of our industry clumps of referrals is bridal. ⁓ And that's very easy to see. ⁓ All they care about is appointments. They want those brides to book an appointment, come into the store. If they can get the bride into the store, they can sell the dress, right? And so when you can see appointments going up, it's quantifiable. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:26:55) Yeah, of course.

Neil Twa (00:27:01) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (00:27:16) Yeah, in the store. Yeah. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:27:24) That's fun to be able to do. It's very rewarding work.

Neil Twa (00:27:28) That's very cool. Well, I mean, the, outcome, I think of our conversation is for us to not really have anybody necessarily listening to this, be afraid of AI. It's really kind of figure out where you fit. Pivot, create opportunity. Either you're selling physical products, you know, you really got to think about how do I reach that customer, that audience? What are maybe like for the physical world people for a second, where what are like the three things they should be doing maybe today, daily, weekly, monthly to impact their visibility in the, in the engines.

Vivienne Wagner (00:27:58) So when you say ⁓ physical people, mean brick and mortar?

Neil Twa (00:28:00) Physical product, product people, builders who have a dress to sell maybe online or offline retail.

Vivienne Wagner (00:28:06) Yeah, well, the first bit of advice that I have to any business owner is ⁓ don't discount what you do as a consumer. How are you behaving? Because for you to say, I'm going to I hate pop ups that fly in my face when you land on a website, but let's do that because it's probably a good tactic. No, you hate it. Everybody hates it. Don't do what you hate. Do what you do and and get into that consumer mindset first. First and foremost.

Neil Twa (00:28:15) Right.

Neil Twa (00:28:24) Okay.

Vivienne Wagner (00:28:36) But the other thing is make sure that you are leveraging everything that you can about your product and who's it for. The old formula of what are the pain points that you solve for? What are your people looking for? And have that ⁓ very clearly listed in your social media ⁓ content that you're sharing, in your captions, in your images, all of that. AI can see all of that.

So it's not necessarily a one thing you can do, but it's just knowing that you need to explain why your product is valuable and who it helps. What does it solve? And that's across really everything because AI picks it all up. AI picks up your individual Instagram posts. So does Google now, but ⁓ it can see all of that. So if you ⁓ post a picture of your product and you say, know, sleep restored,

Neil Twa (00:29:21) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Vivienne Wagner (00:29:32) Okay, well if you've got a product that is like a ⁓ linen spray or a melatonin something, you can't just say sleep restored. You need to explain ⁓ what this solves. ⁓ Don't leave so much to the imagination. Don't try to be witty or clever. ⁓ What do you... Yeah, like, ⁓ yeah, when you're Apple, sure. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:29:49) ⁓ You're not big enough for that. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:29:56) or Nike, yeah, and then you can play around with it, right?

Vivienne Wagner (00:29:58) Right, but that's really what it is. And just the idea that you have a good business, you sell a good product, you have good services. Make sure that you are clear about those things in ⁓ all of your marketing, holistically across the board. If you are making that clear, AI's gonna pick up on it.

Neil Twa (00:30:19) Yeah, that's amazing advice and I appreciate you bringing that on. Is there anything I didn't ask you or any questions we didn't cover or a topic you want to cover that we didn't get to yet?

Vivienne Wagner (00:30:27) gosh, I could just talk about this stuff all day long. ⁓ I do still think that keyword research is very important. ⁓ People think, you know, not necessary because it's all AI. Well, keyword research will tell you what's the volume that they're searching for, ⁓ whatever the word is. And you think you're using language that your client needs ⁓ and what they're looking for. But sometimes we have an internal short

Neil Twa (00:30:30) Hahaha

Neil Twa (00:30:35) Okay.

Neil Twa (00:30:45) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:30:57) shorthand that we use. We're industry experts, so we think everybody else is asking for the same thing. You've got to do a little bit of research and see what that is. Product-based example. We had a client who was a wigs, beauty supply. She had brick and mortar. She also did e-commerce. And she was naming each of her wig products, things like the Sasha, the Roberta. She's naming them these names.

But I started doing keyword research for her. And I said, do you sell pink wigs? Well, yeah, we got one or two. Okay, well, we need to name them pink wigs because there's 30,000 monthly searches for pink wigs each month. 30,000 people want a pink wig. And like, maybe that's a little spike around Halloween, but ⁓ who knows? So by being able to ⁓ understand that people ⁓ are getting specific or granular,

Neil Twa (00:31:39) Pink wigs. Yeah. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:31:48) That's enough.

Neil Twa (00:31:55) Yeah.

Vivienne Wagner (00:31:55) and maybe not she was able to ⁓ retitle some of her product descriptions, ⁓ use image file naming that was helpful ⁓ and describe it in a much better way. Now she of course had to balance that with how are we tracking this for my inventory? It's like, I gotta make sure that that still works for our fulfillment. But ⁓ guess what increased on her ⁓ sales chart? Pink wigs, because people could see them. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:32:22) over 30 days, I'm sure she saw quite an increase.

Vivienne Wagner (00:32:25) She did. So all of these things ⁓ that are old good practices, they're still important today. They have extra layers, ⁓ but those foundational ⁓ good practices, do a little research, it still matters today. And that's not technical. A lot of that's just common sense.

Neil Twa (00:32:30) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:32:34) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:32:45) Yeah, that's very good. Well said. Well, I appreciate you coming on and having some fun and just doing an impromptu live with me today and just going with the flow.

Vivienne Wagner (00:32:53) Absolutely, because it's imperfect. We're going to just roll with it.

Neil Twa (00:32:56) ⁓ And you know what? I always say at the end of my episode, do something imperfectly, and something perfect will happen along the way. So I appreciate you joining me. And thanks for all who checked this out. Yeah. We'll have everything in the show notes and wrapped it up, guys. Like, comment, engage, as always. Help us beat big tech out there by getting some organic love around this. And then we'll see you guys on the next episode.

Vivienne Wagner (00:33:03) Absolutely my pleasure.

Neil Twa (00:33:17) All right.

Vivienne Wagner (00:33:18) Cool.

Neil Twa (00:33:19) That was it, man. Now we just have to wait for it to finish uploading.

Vivienne Wagner (00:33:22) Alright, well thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I do have a ⁓ free webinar where I'm teaching AI visibility and go into depth on what that is. ⁓ Can I? ⁓ OK, perfect I will.

Neil Twa (00:33:24) My pleasure. ⁓

Neil Twa (00:33:34) Nice. We can use that as a call to action when I send it out. Yeah, just email me the details and the time and stuff like that. And when I get to when I post this to the substack, we'll put that inside of that.

Vivienne Wagner (00:33:45) That would be great. do ⁓ them live here and there and then I always have one that's on demand. So I'll get you ⁓ the on demand. But I appreciate the ⁓ opportunity to come on your show. Wasn't ready for live, but I think that went okay.

Neil Twa (00:33:50) Awesome. Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:33:57) Awesome.

Yeah, you did great. ⁓ Audio and all, we still pulled it off. Do you, ⁓ well, it happens. That's just fine. We got a few more minutes here. ⁓ The ⁓ same effect on our side. If there's any opportunity, I don't know if you have a podcast or whatever, if we can get the message out with people who are wanting to build businesses to an exit, ⁓ e-commerce growth, multiple channels. That's exactly what we do at Voltage ⁓ is just to help them grow, get more profitable and then help them ⁓ with their exits. So we've got.

Vivienne Wagner (00:34:04) Yeah, I don't know why that happened. Thank you, though.

Neil Twa (00:34:28) One exit right now that's coming out at around 29 million. We've got another one. It's going to be around 10 or 12 million at the close. We're working with him to get that ready and prepped for sale at the end of this year. ⁓ So we build them from zero with them, or we grow existing businesses that are either TikTok or Shopify or Amazon. ⁓ We grow those channels up. We build them on the fundamentals, profitability, growth, scalability, technology. AI obviously has become a component of that over the last three, four years ⁓ at the tactical level. And I'll do a little workshop with folks just to explain those five different things they need to do.

to build their company to a multi-channel exit. And then we help them in a membership boardroom advisory role, not a course or a program, ⁓ but a six or 12 month effort to get them into a saleable state, ⁓ an omni-channel profitable state. And then I help them get to the exit because I have a group and network of people behind me ⁓ that can either buy in the 10 to 20 million range, or we have ⁓ networking groups who can buy in the 25, 50, 100 million range, depending upon the size of their company. So I help them through that entire process.

Vivienne Wagner (00:35:25) That's incredible. ⁓ I will keep that in mind because like I said, we mostly do service based businesses. It just ⁓ kind of rolled out that way, but we do have a couple that are ⁓ e-commerce and yeah, yeah.

Neil Twa (00:35:31) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:35:38) Yeah, if there's ever ability to talk to that. We do that. under membership format and we do it as a small group. I've had 320 inside of our membership group since 2019. So we keep it very small. And ⁓ since we have our own companies, we run 20 different brands. ⁓ We work with them under that advisory role and ⁓ network capitalization, funding, growth, AI, technology, the whole component of the business operations, multiple channels.

Vivienne Wagner (00:36:05) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (00:36:06) So they're on Shopify, we'll make sure they get done correctly on Amazon. If they're not on TikTok, we make sure they open that channel correctly. We even have five. And one of my brands will do about 14 million this year. We have six big box stores under control in that operation. And we're opening additional channels there. So we can also help companies expand in a big box if they're interested in that too.

Vivienne Wagner (00:36:24) Okay, so I'm like taking notes on this and I'm going to put this ⁓ in our follow up notes on this call because ⁓ like I said, ⁓ mostly service based but when we get the e-commerce people, nobody wants to work forever. So ⁓ yeah, so I think maybe what I'll do is know that this is a possibility and you know, see where the product

Neil Twa (00:36:27) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (00:36:31) Yeah, absolutely. It's fun to talk about it.

Neil Twa (00:36:38) Mm-hmm.

That's right. We should be planning for an exit, a real exit. Not the fire sale. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:36:54) based clients are ⁓ and then maybe we could host a little workshop where you can teach.

Neil Twa (00:36:56) Yeah, absolutely.

Happy to do that. Love to go over the five topics and teach them something. It's never a pitch. There's no add to cart. It's actually an invite to take them from Sailable to Operator to Exit. So I interview those who work with us and make sure they're very good. I usually turn most people down, which is why it's been such a small group of people since then. But if they're the right people and I can actually help them with our team, then we talk about what it looks like. And of course, referrals. So I always pay my friends and family and people who and partners and

Vivienne Wagner (00:37:02) Awesome.

Vivienne Wagner (00:37:21) Very cool.

Neil Twa (00:37:27) Clients who send us referrals, ⁓ always pay them good fees for their support.

Vivienne Wagner (00:37:32) Yeah, well, mean, to be able to ⁓ build one's own economy and, you know, set your own path, it might not be fun to make your way through that for us, but it beats ⁓ working for somebody else. Even on the scary days.

Neil Twa (00:37:37) Exactly.

Neil Twa (00:37:50) I think so. ⁓ Well, even on the Mondays or Tuesdays, ⁓ it ⁓ can always see the positivity in it. And at this point, you know, I'm deep and I'm an unemployable person now by a long shot. ⁓ And I don't live anywhere near an employable location. Anyways, we live on a 65 acre ⁓ farm with three other houses and my in-laws live on one side and my parents live on the other. ⁓ Yeah, we homeschool our girls. These are my four daughters ⁓ and my wife and we're out here.

Vivienne Wagner (00:38:03) I feel the same way.

Vivienne Wagner (00:38:14) that's my dream.

Neil Twa (00:38:20) doing life ⁓ in the country working on Starlink and you know when I'm not here I can be out cutting a tree down like this weekend we had a tree get hit by lightning and a very large storm and Went right down the middle of the tree and split a good portion of it So I downed it and then spent all of Saturday took about nine hours To limit all out saw it all down almost all the way down I got about 20 feet left to go and cut the rest up and yeah, it really shot right through the middle of that tree. There's a

about a quarter inch section going from the top to the bottom where you can see it's scorched right down through the entire tree. And when I went to cut it, it's split open from top to bottom like this big, just that huge tree, 75 foot tree in our backyard. so it's right. I have about 50 more that I'm staring at. And it was off on what we call the point, which was away from the house, which is just fine. But I'll tell you, if you've ever stood within 50 feet of a lightning strike on a tree, you will.

Vivienne Wagner (00:38:51) Wow. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:38:57) I'm sorry you lost the tree, but-

Vivienne Wagner (00:39:11) don't believe I have.

Neil Twa (00:39:12) yeah, it's quite an experience. Quite an experience. Never, ever had it. The whole air pressure in the house changed. You know, you could feel the air come out. It's just, it was a giant explosion. I was like, wow, that was something else. The girls were in the living room. There's big windows and they saw this huge purple pink bolt of explosion go off as it hit the tree. Why that tree? Nobody knows. There's taller trees and bigger ones around it, but it hit that one. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:39:28) wow.

Vivienne Wagner (00:39:34) That's so weird. have been on like my, I don't know, it's probably 30 years ago, longer. I was on like a cordless phone holding my baby, talking to my mother, and there was a storm. And I felt that the baby's hair did this and lightning hit right outside of the house. But before it did, little baby's hair just

Neil Twa (00:39:52) go off for a sec. You can feel the energy. Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:39:58) Wow.

Neil Twa (00:40:02) Yeah, yeah, we could you could feel the pressure in the house change and it just dropped. mean, it was so loud. It was incredible. And yeah, it took that tree out, no doubt. ⁓ That's what we do out here and cut trees down when there's nothing to do. ⁓

Vivienne Wagner (00:40:12) ⁓ well, ⁓ I, I, ⁓ but I mean, I that's my my dream. And we're here in Southern California, which is ⁓

Neil Twa (00:40:20) ⁓ Yeah. Hard to get some acreage out there for less than a few million.

Vivienne Wagner (00:40:27) ⁓ It is well and and away from ⁓ everything that you would want to be, you know, away from you can certainly get acreage out here, but it's like in between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Nobody. Nobody wants that and you know we have family here. I've got aging parents I'm taking care of that I don't. I won't get an escape from here anytime soon, but you are living my dream. That's what I want.

Neil Twa (00:40:32) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:40:41) Yeah.

Neil Twa (00:40:54) ⁓ That's awesome.

Vivienne Wagner (00:40:55) I want to compound, want to get up in the morning with ⁓ no real schedule or meetings I have to be to. My big dream is to just have a leisurely morning walking through my garden with my cup of coffee and go, ⁓ we're getting a new pumpkin. Like, that's what I want.

Neil Twa (00:41:11) That's kind of what we do out here. ⁓ We just got finished getting through with it. have a hundred foot by 50 foot heritage seed garden with 12 rows on one side. And we got about eight different raised beds on the other side ⁓ that we build out there. And the girls go out and go out every day and work on it ⁓ in the summer. Now it's all planted. So it's waiting to kind of grow for the spring. And we have a lot of fun getting out there and getting in the dirt and, know, getting a cup of coffee and go and see what, see what's going on in the day. ⁓ Very relaxed.

Vivienne Wagner (00:41:14) You're the red dream meal.

Vivienne Wagner (00:41:38) It's a nice, soothing way to start the day. ⁓ Walk through the garden.

Neil Twa (00:41:41) It absolutely is. Love limited mountains. So this thing just gave me an error and said I need to refresh the screen. So I'm going to do that. I might lose you. Our uploads are still going. So let me do this and hopefully it won't foobar. ⁓ I'll be right back, hopefully.

Neil Twa (00:42:10) Okay.

Vivienne Wagner (00:42:12) Okay.