📈 How I outrank big tech

Hey 👋

During the Summer of 2022, I stumbled across OpenAI’s playground. It was a chat interface that would allow you to talk to a robot about anything.

Later that year, OpenAI would launch a variation of this product to the public and call it ChatGPT.

But before the actual launch of ChatGPT, I saw the power of the playground. It made me think about all the ways this could affect marketing. And given that I run a marketing blog, I wanted to talk about it.

So I did what I always do when I have an idea of a topic I want to write about — I start typing it in Google.

At the time, there weren’t too many blogs talking about AI in marketing. When I looked at traditional keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, I didn’t find any keywords with promising search volume.

But, I did notice that when I started to type “AI marketing” and then hit the spacebar (in Google search), several autocomplete suggestions would pop up:

The Google autocomplete results tell me others are searching these topics, even when keyword research tools may not show a lot of traffic.

I noticed the first topic that popped up was “AI marketing tools.” And that was it! That was going to be the blog post I was going to write about.

So I did what I always do next: create a content outline to prepare myself for writing the article. (Here’s my guide to writing content outlines.)

After that, I went through my process of writing an article so that it’s both helpful for readers AND Google can understand and index easily. (Here’s my guide to writing SEO blog posts.)

I wrote the article and published it.

Then, I forgot about it and moved on to focus on other articles and my regular client work.

A couple months later, the article started ranking on the bottom of the first page of Google and reached close to 200 visitors per month.

Then, ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. And after the holidays, and into the start of 2023, ChatGPT started to grow really fast.

My article then shot up higher in the search results (and people started searching more things related to AI marketing).

Now, it reached around 200 clicks per day (all from SEO).

Popular media companies and startups saw my article moving up the ranks and they released similar articles. Some even straight up copied my list in order 🙈.

My article kept bouncing between positions 2-4 — fighting with articles from Zapier, HubSpot, and Sprout Social.

It was the big dogs vs the puppy (me).

As the article started to get a steady flow of visitors in 2023, it also brought in several thousand subscribers to this newsletter.

And I started to think about why some of these big companies would outrank me at times even though I knew my article was better (at least in my eyes).

During this time, SEO was also in flux (it still kinda is). Algorithm changes, Google panicking about what to do with AI generated content, and just SEO spam overall gave SEO bloggers a year of juicy stuff to write about.

But my philosophy about search has not changed much since I got into SEO back in 2016. And the way I approached SEO in 2018 is almost identical to how I approach it in 2024.

The main thing is I know people like to read stuff from those who have “been there, done that.” And Google wants to show that stuff to it’s users so they have a positive user experience.

So a year later, at the start of 2024, I went back and updated the blog post. I made it more personal, added new tools that I found myself using often, and I even added the word “I” in the main title tag.

The result?

It shot to the #1 spot and the article was now getting over 700 clicks from SEO per day. PER DAY!

And this year, it’s surpassed more than 170K views:

So what did I learn from this experience?

• SEO is not dead.

• Google autocomplete suggestions are powerful for keyword and content ideas.

• Writing for search engines is still important for ranking (see the article’s I linked earlier for guides).

• Meta title’s with high CTRs lead to better rankings, which leads to more traffic.

• Exit intent popups on high trafficked pages does wonders for growing email subscribers.

But the main thing I learned was that consistency builds luck. Writing about AI marketing tools before ChatGPT blew up and everyone became obsessed about AI was definitely luck on my part.

However, that wouldn’t have happened had I not been obsessed about growing Marketer Milk and writing blog posts about topics I cared about.

In the past couple years, I’ve written well over 1,000 articles (most for client sites but also for my own). And through this I’ve come to learn how much opportunity there still is out there for those who create content.

Competition is an illusion if you’re creating stuff you genuinely care about. Somehow, when you pour your heart into something, society rewards you for it.

Most people are not putting their heart into their work.

Marketers who work with love tend to produce more. And those who produce more get lucky from time to time.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• How to consistently go viral

• A guide for writing online

• 10 ways to use ChatGPT for SEO

• Planting your brand in customers’ minds

• Ad of the week

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Musk's X banned in Brazil after disinformation row

• Threads continues to gain momentum based on download charts

• Perplexity’s pitch deck offers advertisers a new vision for AI search

• The AI arms race isn’t inevitable

• ‘Emotion AI’ may be the next trend for business software, and that could be problematic

🚀 All things growth & product

WeTransfer’s Growth model to drive revenue, Clay’s path to product-market fit after 7 years, how to consistently create viral products, and how to create a smarter go-to-market strategy in just 4 steps.

💌 Emails & copywriting

Lessons from launching a newsletter, 10 copywriting secrets from Eugene Schwartz, and a beginner’s guide for writing online.

✍️ SEO & content marketing

An SEO case for quality over quantity, how to find your goldilocks keywords, 10 ways to use ChatGPT for SEO that don’t involve spamming, and a case study for scaling from 0 to 100K visitors/month in a year.

🤳 Ads & branding

Using Search Ads Insights to improve your Apple Search Ad campaigns, and how to plant your brand in customers’ minds.

🦖 Career & life

📣 Ad from the past

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Product Marketer @ Mindbloom

• Performance Marketing Manger @ Numerade

• Growth Marketing Lead @ Headway

• Growth Marketing Lead @ Haus

• Director of Marketing @ Figment

Okay, that's it for now 🧡. See you in the next Tuesday!

“Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live. Do not try to change people; they are only messengers telling you who you are. Revalue yourself and they will confirm the change.” — Neville Goddard

Riddle answer: All of them.