Marketing Speak®

The most important marketing question isn't "What works?"

According to Billy Broas, it's "What are human beings?"

Sounds philosophical? It is—and that's exactly the point.

On Marketing Speak, Billy (creator of the Five Light Bulbs framework and marketing strategist for Tiago Forte, Ryan Deiss, and major science-focused companies) makes the case for argument-driven marketing over p...

🚀 What if you could fix technical SEO issues with the push of a button?

I just interviewed Patrick Stox, Product Advisor at Ahrefs, who's revolutionizing how we approach SEO in the AI era. Patrick shared how Ahrefs built edge SEO technology directly into their site audit tool—allowing users to automatically fix canonical tags, redirects, and internal links without ever touching their CMS.

But...

Growth doesn't slow because expertise disappears. It slows when trust erodes.

In this episode of Marketing Speak, I sat down with Dov Gordon, founder of JV Grow, who has spent 15 years building a tightly curated community for established entrepreneurs who grow through joint ventures that actually work.

Dov shares why broad messaging like "get more clients consistently" no longer works, and wha...

🚨 ChatGPT updates twice as fast as Google. Are you tracking the right metrics?

Former Bing Webmaster Tools architect Duane Forrester just revealed a critical finding: Out of 50 queries tracked for one client, ChatGPT cited them ZERO times. Not mentioned, not paraphrased, not included at all.

The old SEO playbook won't cut it in the AI era. In this week's Marketing Speak episode, Duane reveals...

In a world where ChatGPT can write 50,000 words in 5 minutes, how do you create content that actually ranks and converts?

In this week's Marketing Speak episode, I reveal my framework for the AI era—and it's not what you'd expect. Instead of fighting AI with more tactics, I advocate for plugging into "Universal Intelligence" for truly original insights, writing for the "linkerati" and not just your audienc...

Is SEO dead in the age of AI? Not even close.

Google's AI overviews are literally making up statistics, citing fake sources, and providing dangerous medical advice. People are actively searching "how to turn off AI overviews" because they can't trust the results.

I had an incredible conversation with Samantha Riley on her podcast Influence By Design, where we broke down why SEO is more critica...

🔬 What happens when you analyze leaked search engine source code and build an SEO tool from it?

You discover the entire industry has been optimizing wrong for years.

Ryan Jones (Head of SEO at Razorfish) joined me on Marketing Speak to share what he learned from the Yandex and Google leaks. The truth is uncomfortable: while SEOs count keywords and stack H2 tags, search engines are plotting do...

What does a Rabbi know about selling jewelry online?

Turns out, everything.

Pinny Gniwisch made one of the most unusual career transitions: from leading a congregation to building ice.com into a $75M e-commerce success story.

In our latest Marketing Speak episode, Pinny shares:

• Why influencer culture burns out (fr...

From family gig work to a national acquisition in 30 years. 🚀

Keith McMaster started helping his police officer dad serve legal papers as a side hustle. Three decades later, his company, Firefly Legal, was acquired as part of a major industry consolidation involving 6+ companies.

When Keith volunteered to hot-seat his "old and dated" website during one of Jay Abraham's courses, he got brutall...

Your company brand can be sold. Your personal brand can't.

That's why I've been investing in StephanSpencer.com alongside my agency for decades—and it's paying dividends in the age of AI.

In this week's Marketing Speak episode, my longtime collaborator Greg Merrilees of Studio1 Design walks through the complete evolution of my personal brand website—from a simple WordPress blog in 2004 to a co...

🚨 The AI hype cycle is colliding with reality—and most companies are quietly taking their "revolutionary" AI workflows offline.

Mark Williams-Cook, founder of AlsoAsked and Director at Candour, just revealed what's really happening behind closed doors. In our latest Marketing Speak episode, Mark shares why: 

✅ Multi-site brand presence beats keyword rankings 

✅ Understanding base...

"Link building is dead," they said. They were dead wrong.

Dan Petrovic just explained why on Marketing Speak—and it's not what you think.

Traditional link building? Evolving. Content seeding with brand associations? Essential. Digital PR for AI visibility? Critical.

Here's why: Models need to be TRAINED on your brand associations. Even without backlinks, content seeding influences...

When your brand sounds like, "Yeah, we do that too," you disappear into the noise.

In this episode of Marketing Speak, I talk with Dr. Gary Sanchez, creator of the WHY.os Discovery, a framework built from hundreds of thousands of assessments and millions of data points to decode why people do what they do.

We unpack how to:

• Tu...

Most entrepreneurs ask: "How do I get my first client?"

My answer: Stop asking. Start delivering value—uninvited, uncompensated, and unapologetically.

When I dropped out of my PhD program in 1995 (drowning in student loan debt), I had no portfolio, no speaking experience, and no business asking Fortune 500 companies for their money.

But I understood something most don't: Your play...

Most CEOs and entrepreneurs are neglecting their most important asset: their personal brand.

Kara Goldin (founder of Hint Water) asked me a great question on her show: "How does SEO vary for a brand versus an individual?" My answer surprised her—and it might surprise you too.

In this special crossover episode on Marketing Speak, I explain why most business leaders focus exclusively on their co...

Most businesses expect AI to cut content costs in half and triple output. That fantasy rarely survives contact with reality.

In this episode of Marketing Speak, I sat down with Eric Enge—founder of Pilot Holding, my co-author on all four editions of The Art of SEO, and author of Using Generative AI for SEO—to discuss what actually works with AI in marketing.

Eric has built and sold four compan...

Most entrepreneurs have their calendars backwards—and it's costing them everything.

Todd Herman has spent 21 years in high-performance athletics, working with Olympic athletes and billionaire entrepreneurs. His controversial insight is that most entrepreneurs are committing the cardinal sin of business: mistaking activity for achievement.

Todd's philosophy is brutally simple: One goal. 90 days...

📉 Losing profit to unclear processes or ghosting clients?

In this Marketing Speak episode, Melissa Morris reveals why most agencies leak profit—and how to fix it with better onboarding, clearer deliverables, and data-backed pricing.

Whether you're drowning in Slack messages or tired of clients ghosting your team, this episode gives you the tools to fix it—fast.

The show notes, including the t...

🚨Podcasters: If you're ignoring YouTube, you're flushing growth down the algorithmic toilet.

In this episode of Marketing Speak, I break down why YouTube is non-negotiable—even if your download numbers are laughably low.

🎯 Inside the episode:
• The lazy podcaster's guide to turning transcripts into SEO machines
• How to clone your content with the "Evil Twin" strategy
• Why your client inter...