How AI Is Reshaping Digital PR Workflows – with Authority Hacker’s Mark Webster

• Affiliate SEO is essentially dead following the Helpful Content Update, as the focus has shifted to AI-driven and brand-focused strategies.

• Passive link building using original survey data and “statistics” pages remains a top ROI tactic.

• AI-powered coding now enables cost-effective creation of interactive content for digital PR campaigns.

• Full-funnel link building can be automated using AI with tools like N8N, Appify, and Zapier.

• To stand out in an AI-saturated market, unique ideas and creative applications are your competitive edge.

• Authority sites still benefit most from SEO; new sites need authority before investing in passive link plays.

Mark Webster and Gael Breton have been leaders in the SEO industry for years, and they are the dynamic duo behind Authority Hacker. Their site, course, and podcasts helped people build websites and make money doing it. Be sure to check out their YouTube channel.

Mark and Gael were also big proponents of using digital PR in your SEO mix. However, after Google’s Helpful Content Update essentially crushed affiliate SEO, they recently switched their entire focus to helping people use AI tools.

So, I asked Mark to come on the podcast and help our listeners with some tricks, tool recommendations, and workflows for utilizing AI in your digital PR efforts.

Enjoy the episode!

What is Authority Hacker, and how has it changed?

Mark Webster: Yeah, so I guess Authority Hacker started in 2014. My business partner, Gale, and I have been working together for four or five years. Before that, we used to have an SEO agency together, and I think at its core we just really love building systems and like figuring out marketing-type problems.

So, Authority Hacker started as a blog, a simple place for us to share the tactics we had developed. And, very quickly it grew. A lot of people got interested in that, wanted more. We started our podcast in 2016. I think we’re up to 360-something episodes of that now. We were on YouTube.

We grew our blog massively. Our email subscribers Had a big community, which it ended up mostly focusing on niche site builders, authority site builders which was booming from sort of 2014 to late 2023. Then the infamous helpful content update, which wasn’t so beneficial for so many of us came along.

This was a big Google algorithm update that completely upended the search results for most of the keywords, which affiliate and blog type sites we’re trying to rank for and basically said, if you’re an affiliate site, then 99% of you cannot rank for any of this anymore. And yeah, just everybody’s businesses like it wasn’t overnight, it was death by a thousand cuts for some people.

But yeah, I would not recommend starting an affiliate site. And there’s very few people still remaining in that industry. Obviously for us, which was the core of our business at the time, that was a big problem. So we had to switch and pivot to, to something else. And we had been working with AI for several years, actually since before ChatGPT we’re playing around with GPT two on, it was called Conversion Do AI in the beginning, later became Jasper, I think was the name of it, which I also believe they got wiped out more or less by, by chat GPT.

Even in the early days, it was a bit rough around the edges, but, we could see the promise in that. It’s like, when this gets good, this is gonna, this is gonna be a game changer. And Chachi PT comes out and then honestly, in the beginning it was so if you wanted to just spam a bunch of articles, amazing.

But we had a really high sort of quality thresholds for the work that we do. And so it wasn’t really quite there yet. It wasn’t really until a little while later that Anthropic, which is another AI company, released Claude. I think it was Claude 3.5 or three, I can’t remember. It was the first one that was really good for kind of writing, essentially full article.

And then from that point on we started using it a lot to do a lot of our sales copy, our email copy. We ran two six-figure product launches, which were. All of the sales pages, all of the email copy, all the ads were a hundred percent created using ai. And so we just kinda saw the power of it and what it could do for a business.

But even at the time, we were like in the wrong industry, so to speak. ’cause everything was declining and Google was just like cutting everyone’s traffic. So we’re like, oh we really like doing this stuff. We, I think we can do it well, but. We wasn’t really the right time or the right industry to, to be doing it in.

So yeah, when it fell apart and we were like, actually we have nothing left anymore. We need to essentially build something from scratch again. We’re like, let’s just go all in on, on ai. Honestly, it’s where the wind is blowing like over the next five, 10 years. It’s, already is changing the world and I think we’re just at the start of that, so that’s why it’s been, it’s super exciting for us.

Vince Nero: Yeah, I, it was funny, we were at Brighton, SEO last week and we have our kind of AI powered tool list IQ that we’re in beta right now. We had a big sign that said AI powered, and you could see people coming up to it and just being like, I. What’s this ai like, how, that’s the, I don’t call it like the hot word to use the terminology, flavor of the month.

Yeah. But essentially, as I talked to people, they were like, I’m here to just see what people are doing with AI at this point.

Mark Webster: And that’s the thing though, it’s so hard to keep up with it. We literally spend all week, every week trying to keep up with it and trying to learn and practice this and do things and build things for people.

But even for us full-time on this, it’s really difficult to keep up. There’s new stuff happening all the time and it’s moving so, so quickly. So I, as a business owner, when you have other stuff to worry about, you just don’t have time really to. To keep track of everything and that’s why unfortunately I think there’s quite a lot of people starting to fall behind.

Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. Which is a great opportunity to re-pitch. Definitely check out what Mark and Gale are doing. Check out their YouTube channel. They’re putting out great stuff to, like you said, mark, keep you up to date because that is my concern, I think as an SEO, like I write aside from doing this kind of stuff, but like I’m writing the content, I’m creating, everything for BuzzStream.

But I come at this from a very kind of traditional SEO background too. So I am hesitant to make any big moves because I know. The needle is constantly moving. You can say that with, on the Google side of things, like just for search in general, like Google is changing the algorithm seemingly weekly and it’s causing all these massive fluctuations.

But to have somebody tell me, yeah, we figured out how to rank in AI overviews or chat gt or something, it’s I just don’t buy that. That’s a scalable, repeatable process day.

Mark Webster: Me neither. The thing is, as you highlighted with the Brighton SEO thing, if you say, AI powered, or just put the words AI anywhere on your product service, video message, email, YouTube.

Video, whatever, it gets more clicks and it gets more in interest because it’s flavor of the month right now. So the unfortunate downside of that is everybody is saying everything is AI powered or trying to twist their video or bring in AI into it in some way. And there’s just so much noise about, and like you don’t know what to believe.

And I think it’s a really good example of like how to rank in AI overviews. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about this and it gets a lot of attention. I think people talk about it because it gets a lot of attention rather than because they’ve really figured out to the, anywhere close to how, SEO was more or less figured out roughly what you needed to do at least.

I’m super skeptical of this stuff as well.

Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. For what it’s worth, I think the only thing that I’ve really seen at this point that I at least feel comfortable with, which is already outdated, is Ziff Davis did a study that talked about how, at the early data sets, like back when these companies were more transparent about how they’re building their tools, they were releasing some of the earlier data sets and Z Davis did this study that looked at how they were curating the information and they were using a lot of high DA news publications to curate and clean up the data that they were then using to train the LLMs.

Outside of that, it’s then you have to take a couple extra steps, like logical leaps, where it’s okay, so then therefore if you could get into those high DA publications, maybe you’re more likely going to get referenced.

But again like that’s an obvious step, but we don’t know.

Mark Webster: It’s also not very practical. It’s oh yeah, I’ll just go to all the high da publications and get mentioned there. That’s a button you can press. It’s it’s really difficult to do that.

Vince Nero: Yeah. That’s probably a good segue, Mark.

So I think before you guys were made the transition, this was maybe the end of last year and into some of the podcasts you were doing this year. I noticed you guys did lean a little bit into digital pr, and it seemed like there were some tactics that were really working for you guys.

Do you feel like digital PR and let’s say link building in general is still an essential strategy with for SEOs?

Is digital PR still an essential strategy for SEO in an AI age?

Mark Webster: Absolutely. If you’re doing SEO, then yes. When we even came out, SEO is dead, but like that was more to get attention than anything else. It’s like SEO is not dead.

Affiliate. SEO is absolutely dead for 99% of sites, 99% of businesses, mostly smaller ones out there. But if you have a real business, an e-com store and an agency, a product, a service, a local business, SEO is alive and kicking like it still works. And if anything, you could argue the link building is more important than ever because.

Content itself is essentially becoming commoditized because AI content is so good and everybody can generate very good content at the click of a button. Now so what is the differentiating factor? I. In, in SEO it falls back to links authority mentions on high DR. Sites, which usually links as well.

Yeah, I think it’s as important as it has ever been. It’s just not everybody is still doing SEO, at least from our old world.

Vince Nero: Let’s get into a little bit of the nitty gritty stuff here. So you guys have been working in AI developing workflows. You’re in it day in and day out.

We, mark for listeners, before, right before we started this call, Mark was seemingly heads down in some work with AI and getting frustrated. It’s like I say, it could be like a working with a freelancer sometimes, or like a brand new employee who like isn’t, maybe they didn’t get enough sleep last night.

Mark Webster: I think everyone’s had that experience of hiring someone and you have to really tell them, hold their hand and tell ’em, do this, then do this. And at some point you kinda hope that they have some common sense and that just takes over and they do it.

And more often than not, that is the case. But sometimes with ai. For whatever reason it doesn’t really get what you’re trying to do. It’s more predicting what the next word it should say is. And it’s very good at that. But you, if you forget to state something which you think is common sense or is very obvious, then yeah you’re gonna have problems.

And it’s so frustrating sometimes communicating it, communicating with ai. ’cause it feels like you’re. You’re working with a child sometimes, but then on the other end, like what you can do with it when you do get it working and usually there’s a way around it to get it working is just incredible.

Vince Nero: Yeah. Let’s get into I wanna start with kind of digital PR stuff because that’s where I personally see the agent the industry going and where you can get the most value out of building links and where your money should be going is building, this brand authority and all that good stuff.

Do you have any recommended AI workflows for digital PRs?

Mark Webster: To be honest with you, the approach that we did the most with digital PR and we’ve ran maybe a couple dozen campaigns, was to use some kind of data set or survey. Now, when you are creating your own, if you have a, an audience that you can create your own data with so you know, like a big email list, I think it is a really good idea to, to run your own survey.

It’s like very difficult for other people to build up. That kind of data. We did that a few times with the Authority hacker audience to, to great success and we were, we ended up building a number of survey pieces that wasn’t really quite so much for digital pr. That was more to kinda rank for the survey and statistics.

Keywords, which we can talk about as well. But in terms of passive links, that’s the best bang for your buck link building tactic on the planet by a country mile, as we say in the UK. In terms of digital PR specifically though I think the. What’s been interesting that I haven’t done, but I’ve seen, has been creative content.

So things like maps, infographics, and interactive content, and anything where it’s like the visualization, the display, and the interactivity are the. The nice thing you may be taking some data that’s already out there or some information that’s already out there. I saw one recently that I forgot the dementia, right?

When you forget a lot of things. So someone created a piece where it showed you like a room. And then there was like a slider and then it was like things missing from the room.

But it just stood out to me ’cause it was a really cool use of the interactivity there.

And so those types of things I really like, but it’s a little bit challenging to pull that off.

If you’re running your own business or even going through an agency like those campaigns are expensive to do ’cause you need a lot of custom dev work and that kind of thing.

So that was a barrier.

Nowadays, though, doing custom dev work and building this kind of stuff is becoming more and more trivial because you can do it all in AI.

Now, Gale, my business partner, always says the highest value words that AI can create is code.

And because all of these LLM companies are essentially heavily invested in having AI generate amazing code, like they’ve really pushed it to do that because it saves them money and they can do more in, in the long run.

So to use AI models to create this kind of interactive elements is, honestly, trivial.

You can use something like Windsurf or Lovable.

These are a couple apps you can use and they have free tiers that you can work with as well to build this. The sky is the limit, really.

It’s just that you need to tell it exactly what you need it to do in plain English and in digital PR if you’re struggling for an idea, it’s to take something that someone has done in their industry and then apply it to your industry.

So is there a before and after thing?

You could do with interactive sliders if you are a wedding photographer and how it usually looks, how I make it look or something like that.

That would be something I would be exploring a lot right now, because I think there are still not many people doing that in the digital PR space, whereas things like case studies, data sets, and scraping are very interesting.

I think most people are already using AI to process that data, to pull out insights and to write content around that.

So really in order to be unique, having access to unique data is interesting.

And there’s a site here in the uk I dunno if there’s one in the US, but it’s called Whatdotheyknow.com.

This is also a place where you can submit a Freedom of Information request. Agency, government agency department that’s signed up to this and ask for data from them.

And it’s free to do it.

And you the cool thing about it as well is you can go and see all of the requests that other people have made so you can then get ideas for different piece of information that you can request to build stories on as well.

The game, I think in digital PR now, is about how you can be more unique or stand out more from other people.

Everyone can now create, such as a basic analysis or data post, using AI.

But it’s knowing what to build that’s interesting.

So I guess again, like looking at the bigger agencies, the bigger companies who are doing a lot of digital PR and like reverse engineering what they’re doing, applying that to their niche, like these are the kind of things I would be focusing on right now.

Vince Nero: I mean, it’s an amazing brainstorm buddy for that kind of stuff, too.

You could, like you said, just feed it something and say, give me some versions that I could apply this to, my website or my client or whatever. You said a couple of things in there, Mark.

And I wanna maybe throw some disclaimers here ’cause I feel like I’ve heard this and I’ve tried this myself, too with questionable results, but using it to code.

What are some potential pitfalls in, I think AI in general.

We talked about, you mentioned this earlier, it’s a predictive model, right?

Like people treat it like it’s a person. It’s not like you shouldn’t treat it like that, although it’s easy to anthropomorphize this kind of stuff.

Knowing what it does and how it works, I think can help you understand the limitations. So, what are some pitfalls of using it in this way for digital PR, let’s say?

What are some of the pitfalls of using AI for PR?

Mark Webster: The thing with digital PR is if you’re using it to code something interactive, some visual, I think a map or some kind of graphical thing.

There aren’t really too many pitfalls because most of the real problems that you’re likely to have when you’re coding something with digital PR are around things like security and account vulnerabilities and all of the stuff that most coders would know. And if a non coder such as myself built it, we can’t say that there was a vulnerability there.

But you’re not really with digital pr, you’re not having people sign up or, it’s just to create that piece of content and share in your website. It’s not anything to hack in that way. So I feel like it’s really about as low risk as you’re ever gonna get.

And anybody with a website faces hacking vulnerabilities, and yet almost all of us can stay on top of that. So I don’t see it as too much of a challenge here for in this specific content context. Now, if you start going on to build, custom apps and, things like that, then yeah, okay.

There are more issues there. But honestly. At this scale, most people will be working on this. I don’t think you’re gonna be painting too much of a target on your head.

Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah.  Great points for sure. Okay. You mentioned the kind of passive links, like kind of statistics types, posts.

That’s something that I think is funny. I remember when I was at Siege Media, like coming into this, like falling backwards into it, like realizing, we have all these link goals we’re trying to hit for people, but this one post just keeps the. I keep seem to get links, where I don’t have to do outreach.

And I think at one point, Siege even made a pivot away from doing outreach ’cause they were able to get so much out of this. I think they’ve since gone back a bit to jump-start many of these. And that’s something that I think you guys have talked about in your passive link building.

It does need a little boost to start and get the flywheel going. But let’s talk a little bit about this, ’cause you mentioned how using. This kind of data-driven, passive link-building approach appears to be the most effective for link builders at present are the best bang for your buck, I think is how you put it.

Do you have any AI workflows for passive link building?

Mark Webster: Yeah, so let me just briefly explain what this is and how we’ve done it in the past, and then when we can dive into the process a bit more. But essentially. When someone googles AI statistics, let’s say, nine times, maybe nine times outta 10.

It’s a writer or a journalist who’s writing a story that needs a statistic to back up something. They’re writing. So the majority of people who are searching the majority of the search volume for that keyword is people that are likely to link to you, which is really. Key here. So if you can rank, let’s say number one for AI statistics, as we did for several years, you are able to pick up literally thousands of links from top tier publications around the world.

And we had the same problem. We were trying to build 30 links per month with outreach and it was difficult ’cause we weren’t paying for links and stuff at the time. And then it was so much work and so much effort. We’re like why are we doing this? We’re never going to reach 300 links per month.

We’re never going to do this 10 times. Like, what do we need to do to 10 x this? And so that’s when we came across the survey and Statistics post, it was a podcast I did with Stacy McNaught.

She has an agency here in the UK as well, and she put me onto this tactic.

And we explored it from there. But essentially you need to rank at the top page one at least, if not number one for x. Statistics.

Now, the way to do that is to have the best statistics post on the internet.

And if you can give it a bit of boost with some links from some other places, some internal links and things like maybe an outreach campaign to get a kickstart as you said then great.

But the number one differentiator was a statistics post is having unique data for us.

Because there are plenty of people out there who will just do a roundup, use AI to do that of all of the other statistics on the internet, and make a slightly longer list. But that doesn’t really. Cut it.

If you’re in a competitive space, you need some kind of unique data. That’s when we conducted our own surveys. You can use a tool like pollfish.com.

It costs about a dollar per respondent to build your surveys there and gather some unique data. But you can also pay using Google Ads, to rank at the top.

Now I haven’t done it enough to say whether it’s worth it, if you are, if links are very valuable to you, and especially if you’re already paying, hundreds of dollars a link to an agency, then it’s probably something you want to explore, at least in the beginning to, to maybe validate if it’s worth then, putting all the effort to try and rank organically for it as well.

But yeah, if you’re able to do all that, then it’s just about running a simple outreach campaign for it.

Our favorite subject line, there was missing stats in your article. ’cause everybody’s gonna open that and then it’s just oh yeah, I noticed you had a missing stat in your article about x.

And then we had our, one of our stats in there.

It was the prospecting was also categorized by kinda like subtopic and then we would put an image of the survey result, the pie chart.

Just add a bit of legit legitimacy to it.

And we got so many links from that. It was, if you’re someone who’s been doing a lot of guest posting outreach and banging your head against the wall with everyone asking for money and just not responding, this was like swimming downstream again, finally after years of trying to swim up the river, yeah, it’s been, it is been great.

We built. Done this, I think three or four times, and we’ve built several thousand links to our site.

And this, in fact, the majority of our sites to Authority Hacker have been built now through these three or four posts. So it’s pretty incredible.

Vince Nero: That’s amazing. And yeah, there’s definitely, I think some nuances. I did a deep dive blog post recently, and I think the one thing that people are pushing back on is that I always recommended, there are certain thresholds. Like you can’t be a brand new site to do this.

Most of the time I think it really is industry dependent.

But yeah, that’s where. I think some people get hung up. They’re like, oh, I’ll just do a statistics post, and they’re your brand new site and you’re, you’re not gonna rank.

Mark Webster: Yeah. And as, as always, when you’re trying to rank, it’s a zero sum game.

There are 10 slots and, or mostly 10 slots on page one.

So, you have to stand a chance of being there to give the example of the AI statistics keyword.

We were featured on forbes.com, which is Dr. 90.

For years, we were DR 78 ourselves, so I don’t think we would have ranked if we had the same content and were Dr. Zero.

So yeah, there is, there’s something in there.

Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for laying out that strategy, I think for listeners, was that something that you had any AI help with?

Mark Webster: So at the time, not really. We had the only AI help we had in organizing the data.

When we created the survey posts, we included all the surveys and their statistics. When we’re creating the statistics posts, we pulled out all the statistics that we could find from other people. We used AI to ensure there were no duplicates and to rewrite content as needed.

So very basic stuff.

But I think where an AI is starting to become a real game changer in link building is in the kinda whole, the end-to-end automation that you can do with it now.

So I’ll give you an example. Like when you are.

Think of a basic guest post. To send, you need to conduct some kind of prospecting.

Maybe you’ll be scraping Google or looking at sites ranking in Google for specific keywords, or using a tool like Ahrefs to find prospects that are linking to someone else. You’re taking that data, you’re putting it into a Google sheet. You’re maybe manipulating it in some ways.

Doing tasks like deduplicating to ensure you don’t have the same website twice.

Once you have the list of prospects, you then need to find contact information.

So I mean there are many email finding tools out there.

hunter.io is the one that we use for a long time in order to find contact information.

But even then, you need to pick which person at the company you’re gonna contact.

Is it the co-founder, the head of marketing, the editor?

And there are all these kinda like decisions that you make along the way, but it’s the same decision you’re making for every prospect, more or less.

So that creates an exciting opportunity to automate this using AI and using some automation systems.

I think most people are probably familiar with Zapier.

It’s like a tool that you can connect to different things. Apps, different tools together and do things make.com is another one. It does essentially the same thing. It’s a little bit more complex and you can do more things in there.

And N8N is another one that many people in the AI space are using these days. The reason being is you can self-host it and it’s it’s more or less free to do this whereas Zapier is very expensive. Every Zap.

Yeah. I don’t know. It’s like a dollar or something now.

It’s it’s crazy.

So N8N is great and you can plug it into something called Appify. I’m never quite sure how to pronounce that.

Which is a platform where people have built something called actors, which are essentially scrapers.

So any kind of scraping operation that you would ever do in your prospecting for link building somewhat has more than likely built an.

Appify actor that, that does this.

And it’s very inexpensive to do, as you can scrape Google, LinkedIn, and other platforms, such as YouTube comments, if you want.

Or you can connect it to other databases like Apollo, and you can scrape there, and you can pull out thousands of prospects in a few minutes for 20 bucks, which is incredible.

And you can also set it to do this every day.

So, you can let’s scrape LinkedIn every day, or scrape Google once a month, look for new sites and keywords, and add them. Then, you can add it to your sheet and check if you’ve reached out to it before.

You can find contact information to connect to Hunter.io and other places.

And you basically your entire workflow, which in the past someone or a team of people would do manually.

You can now do all of that automatically using AI.

And that’s not even to mention when it comes to writing out emails to prospects because.

For the longest time, we had a world where there was a shotgun-style outreach approach, where you would use one template and blast it out to as many people as possible, and the template didn’t change. And then you had the kind of sniper-targeted approach where you’d spend sometimes five to 10 minutes researching and writing a custom email to every prospect.

You achieve a much higher response rate, allowing you to send far fewer of them. You can do both now with ai, which is pretty wild. So being able to send personalized outreach at scale to thousands of people per day, it’s a complete game changer when it comes to cold outreach. And at the moment we’re doing this for a.

Called Outreach actually to sell something. So we’re working with a recruitment agency to pitch their services and book calls using this approach. But the exact same thing works for link building now. So yeah, it’s really exciting times and we’re at the forefront of some big changes in that space.

Yeah, it’s very exciting.

Vince Nero: Yeah, that does all sound really exciting. I think’s almost overwhelming to the point where it’s like you don’t know what or where to get started.

Mark Webster: I think that might be I think a lot of people have this problem with getting started. Yeah. Because, as a perfectionist myself, I think of like, how do I build this mega system that’s, I’m gonna press a button and it’s just gonna get me links that, that’s the wrong way to approach it.

When you’re getting started, just pick one small part of a process that you repeat and try to automate that. And the best thing in the world now is you can use ai.

Just ask it. “Hey, this is what I’m trying to do. How do I automate this with mig.com? With N8N?”

And it will tell you, it will give you a good explanation to it. It’s gotten to the stage now where people even have built. Chrome extensions, which you can then load when you’re working in NAN and it has all, all this kinda reference material from the NAN support pages and instructions for how to use it so you can ask it a question and it tells you exactly what you need to do within your workflow.

So there’s no excuse now. If you don’t know how to do something, you just work with AI and it will hand hold you all the way. That’s how we’ve learned everything.

Vince Nero: Yeah, same. It’s definitely, I now just have chatGPT open all the time and I just bounce questions off of it.

How, what’s the, I had to do math equations.

I have, research for how can I do this study where, what are some resources and all that kind of stuff. I, we just published this link Building trends report we did with Citation Labs. I had Chat GPT help with all the data analysis.

I wrote it, but then for the coding, like we already had our state of digital PR kind of thing.

It’s like an interactive, it’s different than our blog layout.

It’s nicer.

I had our developer do it and spend the time, so instead of having him needing to custom-code this out. Again, I asked chat GPT, can you use this same exact style and put this new text into this?

And my dev time, our dev person’s time on this went from a couple of days to a couple of hours where he was just trimming up the edges and customizing a little bit.

Yeah, I mean that, that kind of stuff, like you said, picking off a small piece, I think is probably a little more digestible, and again, don’t be afraid to ask the platforms you’re using for help, because they’re really good at that, is what I’ve seen as well.

Mark Webster: I think, as well, just one other thing to add is if you’re working in a team, quite often you have people who are responsible for specific parts of the process, and you know they’re doing the same thing over and over again every day.

So when we had a team of people building links, we would often build internal tools that users would use to speed up their work or automate certain tasks.

This is 2014, 2015, 2016.

So, way before AI was a thing, we would sometimes pay tens of thousands of dollars to a development agency to help build us this tool.

And now that is entirely trivial for, to do that. It’s you go to chatGPT, you say, “Hey I need to build this tool. Here’s the input, here’s what I’d like it to do, and here’s an example of what the output should look like.”

And you have your tools. It’s built like it’s, it’ll be done in a few minutes, so yeah.

That is another interesting place you can start with if you’re doing a lot of this stuff at scale, is just custom coding, internal tools. And again, when you’re doing it internally, there’s much less that can go wrong because you’re, no one else is gonna be using it.

Yes, there’s less risk involved.

Vince Nero: Yeah, for sure. I. This all got me thinking. Mark I want to end here hopefully on a positive note, but it’s a more philosophical question I think, for you. So as you get into this all reminds me of this one book I read a long time ago by Thomas Friedman called The World is Flat, right?

And it’s this idea that with these technological advancements, things become more globalized. Also, the playing field is a little more leveled, right? So what you end up with, I think in these cases are a lot more noise, at least in this stage.

Like we are, like you said, like you can do a lot more a lot quicker, and easier.

It raises the question of whether everyone can do it; we’re just going to add a lot more noise.

So, how do you utilize this to differentiate yourself? If you’re just automating everything. Your competitors can do the same. So what’s the mindset?

How do you think this is going to turn out for this kind of thing?

How do you use AI to differentiate yourself?

Mark Webster: I think it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by this, as it’s changing so fast, and get into a bit of a nihilistic view of what’s going on here.

If you look into the past when big technological changes come along, how many telephone operators did we have 50 years ago plugging cables out and connecting calls, right?

That job does not exist anymore.

Like barring, maybe a few, like high-profile executives, have their assistant or their secretary set up a phone call with the president or whoever it is someone else important.

Nobody, almost nobody, uses this job role anymore.

Yes.

Every, everybody has jobs and there’s no labor.

There is no shortage of jobs. Right now.

There’s a shortage of labor of anything else.

So what does it mean, and you’re absolutely right. It levels the playing field and anybody can build an app any can, one can build a website, anyone can create content, anyone can create social media content. So that gives everybody in the world access to, to do these things and bring their ideas to life.

So it’s the idea. The, like the fundamental core of what you decide you want to build, which becomes the differentiating factor, in my opinion. For how you stand out against Yeah. All of the noise. ’cause there, there certainly is a lot of it now, and there’s gonna be so much more in future.

I think eventually we will have. AI algorithms like filtering out more of that noise. So, like you may have your own personal algorithm sorting out your Twitter or your Facebook feed, so you only kinda see the stuff that is relevant or you care about, and you won’t rely on the platform to do that for you.

We’ve seen this with websites and with blog content. It’s just so much AI content out there now that, how do you differentiate it?

Turns out there is actually some people still creating very good content. They’re putting a lot of effort into it.

Maybe some of them are even using AI to augment themselves kinda and to write the information.

But it’s like the research and the planning and the idea and the creative part that, that, that is helping them to stand out from everyone else. And honestly, those people had been standing out from everyone else for a long time because that type of content has always won. My, I’m not too worried about it.

Of course, there could be a day when AI takes over the world and everyone is out of a job.

I don’t know.  Maybe it will happen. Perhaps it won’t. I’m not too down on humanity just yet. But what I do know is that. When there’s so much disruption as we’re seeing right now, there’s so much opportunity because yeah.

Businesses, we’ve seen businesses are being wiped out, left and center. So if you’re able to stay even a little bit ahead of the curve on this there’s a lot of money to be made.

Vince Nero: Yeah, that’s a great message to end here, Mark. If you learn these skills, you know how to use the tools, but it’s ultimately the person behind the tool.

And it’s not necessarily, don’t think of it necessarily as a shortcut.

Like you’re gonna be able just to flip a switch and you’re gonna get a ton of links, like you said, like you gotta be willing to put the work and roll your sleeves up if you do want to truly differentiate yourself as the message that I hear from you is, I appreciate that. Mark, where can people find you?

Where can people find Authority Hacker if they want to get in touch?

Mark Webster: Yeah, so we have a now weekly podcast over youtube.com/authority hacker. So we do a weekly podcast.

We share a ton of actionable things that we’ve built using AI and troubleshoot along the way, and just what’s working, latest models to use all sorts of stuff like that.

So if you’re a business owner who feels like they’re struggling to keep up with this stuff, then check out our podcasts for sure.

We also maintain an email list, where we share some of the latest tactics and occasionally post videos on projects we’re working on that others can build upon.

So you can check that out. I think it’s authorityhacker.com/subscribe. Yeah, those are the best places. Hope to see you there.

Vince Nero: So thanks again to Mark. Thanks again to you, listeners and watchers. Have a great day.

Vince Nero

Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his 2 kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.

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Website: https://buzzstream.com