Ross Simmonds is the Founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing, a content marketing agency that strategizes, distributes, and optimizes content. Foundation has worked with some of the most successful SaaS and publicly traded cloud companies in the world. Ross has been named one of the most influential marketers in the world by multiple marketing publications and firms like BuzzSumo and Semrush. He is also a sought-after public speaker, an angel investor, and the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:06] How a passion for the Internet led Ross Simmonds to create Foundation Marketing
• [6:21] Ross’ journey of overcoming the fear of public speaking and learning to embrace the stage
• [10:22] A brief synopsis of Create Once, Distribute Forever
• [11:37] The barriers to mass content distribution — and the importance of content amplification
• [22:01] How to repurpose a single piece of content across multiple platforms
• [27:47] Strategies for evaluating content engagement
• [36:16] What do brands get wrong when amplifying content, and how can they grow their content?
• [46:46] Ross shares his thoughts on engagement pods
• [52:03] How AI accelerates content amplification
• [1:00:31] The influence of Ross’ upbringing on his entrepreneurship
• [1:10:35] Ross’ commitment to being a dad

In this episode…

In today’s fast-paced and content-rich online landscape, simply sharing links to a piece of content on various platforms is not enough. This approach is outdated; instead, you must repurpose engaging content to build your brand. What content distribution strategies can you leverage, and how can you maximize value in your campaigns?

Many entrepreneurs fear judgment and don’t want to seem overly promotional, especially if they don’t recognize the value in their content. As a shy kid who spoke an average of five words a day, renowned content creator Ross Simmonds understands the fear of judgment, rejection, and public presentations. To overcome this fear, he recommends shifting your mindset to recognize how your content benefits your audience, allowing you to promote it on as many channels as possible. Widespread content distribution and amplification requires creating a pillar asset like an informative and engaging YouTube video or podcast that you can repurpose into highlights, reels, or moments.

Tune in to the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as William Harris welcomes Ross Simmonds, the Founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing, to discuss content amplification and distribution strategies. Ross talks about evaluating content engagement, his book Create Once, Distribute Forever, and how to use AI to accelerate content creation.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Ross Simmonds: Website | LinkedIn
• Foundation Marketing
• Create Once, Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too by Ross Simmonds
• Sujan Patel
• HeyGen
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Quotable Moments

• "If you believe that the product you built or the content you're creating is of real value, then you should be relentless in promoting it."
• "The act of distribution is tightly intertwined with overcoming one's internal fears and mantra."
• "You need to be okay with going through the 'I suck at this' phase to eventually reach greatness."
• "Building an ecosystem around your brand is just as important as creating the prime content itself."
• "We are going through one of the most transformational moments in human history."

Action Steps

1. Challenge your beliefs about content promotion: Recognize the value in your work and distribute your content with confidence. Reframing your mindset can help overcome the fear of judgment and encourage a commitment to sharing your valuable content.
2. Block consistent time for content creation and repurposing: Establish a routine schedule to create pillar assets. Regular content creation builds brand consistency and provides the opportunity for crucial audience engagement.
3. Use AI to identify key moments in your content for repurposing across different platforms: Incorporate AI into your workflow. AI can streamline the process of finding content gold mines, saving time, and allowing for strategic distribution.
4. Build an online community around your brand to distribute content in a humanized manner: Creating a sense of belonging and providing value in a community setting can foster brand loyalty and audience engagement.
5. Embrace change and keep up with technological advancements: Staying informed on tech like AI and applying these tools can give you a competitive edge in content distribution.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:00  

Music. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris  0:16  

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond, as well as help you up arrow your business and your personal life. Today, I have Ross Simmonds, one of the best sweater wearers I know. Ross Simmonds is the founder and CEO of Foundation, a global marketing agency that provides services to organizations all over the world, ranging from some of the fastest growing startups to global SaaS brands. Ross was named one of Atlantic Canada's top 50 CEOs and one of the top marketers in the world by buzz sumo and SEMrush. Ross is also a well sought out public speaker, an angel investor, and the author of multiple books, including his newest one, which we're going to talk about today. Create once, distribute forever. How great creators spread their ideas and how you can too. Ross, I feel like I've known you forever. I'm excited to have you on the podcast. William,

Ross Simmonds  1:09  

thanks for making this happen. Super excited to be here, thrilled to have the chance to share with your audience. It does feel like I've known you forever. We've grown up in the internet together in many ways,

William Harris  1:20  

absolutely. Well, I was trying to think about, where did we first meet? Right? That's always hard when it's like, it's been like, a decade, at least it's true, it has been a decade plus. I think it was Sujan Patel's slack group. That's the best that I can remember. Does that sound right to

Ross Simmonds  1:33  

you? Sounds right? It would either be a Slack group or, like, a random Facebook group. But Sujan was like, Yeah, that would probably be it. I don't even remember what that slack channel was called, but I can there being some heavy hitters in their way back in the day, and everybody's kind of done their thing in their careers. But yeah, what a throwback. I love that.

William Harris  1:51  

Yeah, I love it too. And I called out, you're the one of the best sweater wearers. And we were talking about today, you're not wearing one today. I didn't

Ross Simmonds  1:57  

wear it. It's too hot. Summer in Nova Scotia, we only get like, two months of heat, so every other time of the year, you'll see me rocking one of my sweaters, but I love it. I'm based on the east coast of Canada. Our winners are harsh, and the sweaters give me joy. So I rock a lot of different sweaters over the course of the winter months. And

William Harris  2:16

I love that I'm right there with you. I mean, I'm in Minnesota, so we're not that much different from what you guys are? Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're gonna be talking about content amplification, and I'm excited to dig into that. Before we do, I'm going to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that i po recently. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com, okay, so again, talking about content amplification, but before we do, I want to go back in time just a little bit. You run Foundation. You've worked with MailChimp, snowflake, Canvas, some of the best SaaS companies on the internet. How did you get here?

Ross Simmonds  3:06  

Yeah, so it all started with a passion for the internet. From a young age like me and my sister were just little geeks in Nova Scotia who were obsessed with the Internet. We've had this forum that we created called The Sims two community, so way back in the day, and we were running that while we were in, like, university, and we just started to see, like, wow, we can connect with people all over the globe. And she's not into the capitalism game like I am, but I saw that, and I was like, ching, ching. Like, we can make money with this thing. So I started to do it for fantasy football. Started to pay for my own tuition with that. Mike Mark started to tank. And my mom was like, Look, son, you're gonna be one of the first people in my family to ever graduate from university. Like, you gotta, you gotta figure this out. So my marks are tanking. She was like, just stop writing about sports. Write about marketing and your degree, and that will, like, help you. So I switched it over. Rossimmonds.com became, like my my first marketing blog started to write, started to get DMS, and they weren't even called DMS back then, but I started to get people like reaching out, sending me messages like wanting me to speak, wanting me to help their companies. And then I just continued with it. So if I was to fast forward and give you like a quick summary of what happened between university and now, I just kept creating content online about my ideas on marketing, and from that, people were attracted to my ideas, and they wanted me to service their company and service their brand. So I started to work with local startups. Then I remember writing one piece, and it was like, how to do marketing to millennials. And Bacardi reached out to me, and they were like, hey, we want to fly you into Miami and do this like session while our leadership team, I was, like, 22 at the time. I had no idea that the internet could do this type of thing. They bought my flight. They flew me out and I do my thing. And I was like, Wow, this, this is really going to take off. So I got a gig with the local CBC, which is essentially like our version in Canada of the PBS. And I did all of our I trained like a bunch of, like, journalists and writers on social media. I was training like some of our top broadcasters about how to use social media. I was setting up their Twitter accounts when it was called Twitter all that stuff. And I was like, whoa. Like, CBC has got a lot of money if they're willing to, like, get me to be flying around the country to do this and train people. I'm sure there's brands that would do this too. So I was like, I'm already here. Bye, Felicia, I'm going to do my own thing. Quit, started my own thing. Kept writing, kept creating, and then the clients just kept knocking on the door. Which is which is great. And you fast forward to today. As you mentioned, we've worked with some of the most ambitious brands in SaaS. We've helped them scale their content marketing engines. We've helped them build content marketing engines that have driven multi millions of dollars on a monthly, weekly basis, and it's been an absolute joy. I've also had the privilege of investing in some companies that have gone to the moon, so to speak, and it's been a fun journey. I love the game overall, and

William Harris  6:01  

I appreciate that you said it's been fun. That said you don't get to where you are without having some kind of hiccup or hurdle or something. What's, what's one of those moments that you can remember where you said, Boy, this is tough. I don't know. I don't know if I'm cut out for this. I don't know if this is cut out for me. Like, I don't know if this is gonna happen. Like, we've all had those moments. But what's one for you, William,

Ross Simmonds  6:21

I will never forget when I got on stage for the first time and spoke in front of an audience about marketing. My nickname in high school was shy Ross. I was a shy mode. I didn't like attention, I didn't like people looking at me. None of that was my jam. I was super quiet. I probably said like, five words a day maximum. And I see a lot of these traits in my kids today, but like, I was shy, and I went in, I signed up to speak at this event, and I go on stage, and I'm wearing a white shirt and I'm speaking, but I'm sweating the entire time I'm talking. Like, drenched. It looked like I was in a wet t shirt contest. You could see everything like there was nothing being left to the imagination. Everyone could see it all. It was bad. So I come off stage, and I'm like, literally, drips. Like, drips are following me. While I'm walking, people are talking to me. I'm a sweaty mess. And I was like, I'm done in this game. Like, these folks are gonna like, I'm written off. I thought it was done. And then I did a pitch. I did a pitch, and it was the same sweaty situation, like I can remember, this was a fortune 500 brand. I go into their office, they fly us in. I thought I had it, and I just am drenched in sweat, reeking with nerves. Like my pitch was great, but I physically and I had to overcome that. I had to overcome the fear of just like, being fully in front of people. And the only way that I got through that, and I still would say, like, if I went back to that young version of me, and I was like, here's a pill you could take to fix this, I would have done it like I actually, I've never talked about this. I even went to the doctor to find out, like, Is there something wrong with me? Like, Why am I sweating? I'm not nervous, but, like, I keep sweating when I'm on these stages. And it was nerves or something, sure, but I just kept signing up. I kept signing up to do it, I kept pitching, I kept presenting, I kept trying to reach out to the biggest conferences I could find. And eventually it became easy, and now I can go down to like Brazil, for example, recently, and I spoke in front of like 12,000 people, and then I didn't sweat, I didn't stress. It was a very chilled experience. So that was brutal. It was like one of the worst things for me to overcome, and probably one of the most difficult, because it was embarrassing, because it's sweat and that's gross and, like, there was no coming back with some of those relationships. I didn't get the pitch. I still believe I lost that deal because I was a sweaty mess. But after I gave that presentation, people came after me and they were like, Oh, you did great. Blah, blah. They didn't really notice the sweat. But, yeah, that would be the worst thing. So,

William Harris  9:02  

I mean, I think the thing that I appreciate about that is you, you got through this basically through reps, which I think is an important thing for everything. But the other thing that's interesting, I don't know if this is true, this is me speaking outside of my my realm of expertise. I've heard it said that your body doesn't know the difference between excitement and nervousness. Interesting, yeah, like, psychologically, it's like, the same thing firing. And so I'd love to do more research than this to see if that's actually true. But just that idea that it's like, if you can convince yourself you're like, I'm not nervous, I'm excited, right, right? Okay, just shift that just a little bit,

Ross Simmonds  9:41  

yeah, yeah. It's interesting. That might have literally been, like, a subconscious change or shift that took place that got me there, because, like, it was consistent, and then somehow, now it doesn't faze me at all. I'm just able to do my thing.

William Harris  9:55  

I love it. I want to get into the content amplification stuff then, because this is what. I'm really excited to talk to you about when you've got this book here. Create once, distribute forever. This is the most recent one. When did this come out? This is only a couple months

Ross Simmonds  10:10  

old now. Yeah, it is. It came out in 2024 so early April. Yeah, yeah.

William Harris  10:13

What? What is the I mean, it's obvious from the title, but like, if you were gonna summarize this a little bit more for people listening, like, what is the goal of this book? Yeah,

Ross Simmonds  10:22  

the goal is simple. I want people who are creating things of value to be able to get those things out there to more people. And I think there's a lot of challenges that creators, entrepreneurs, even marketers, face today that are stopping them from being able to do that. Like when I talk to founders, especially early on, there's so many mental blocks that stop them from distributing their work, whether it's a product, whether it's a software, whether it's an e-commerce brand that they're launching, people are struggling with a lot of mental things associated with distribution, and I think once you get through those roadblocks, the next step is really to figure out amidst all of these different channels, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, you name it, Reddit, Quora, all of them. Where do you go? Like, where do you go? So the book is intended to be a two fold kind of a book, where first we dive deep into the opportunity. We dive deep into understanding what might be stopping you from distributing your content relentlessly. And then the final one, which is actually a playbook on all of the ways that you can distribute your stories and get them out there

William Harris  11:27  

to the world. Okay, so let's start with that. Then what's stopping people, like in your experience, what is the number one thing stopping people from actually going forth and doing this? And then let's get into the tactics.

Ross Simmonds  11:37  

Yeah, the number one things are rooted in fear. There's the fear of being judged. So people don't want to seem too promotional. People don't want people to say, oh, you're a seller. Like, why are you so focused on business now? Like you're not. Why are you so focused on this new project? Like you're not sharing funny things about what's happening in the Olympics or in the memes. Like, why aren't you sharing that anymore? Like people are fearful of being judged. People are fearful that their content, their product, their service, just isn't that good, and that people are going to tell them that, and they're going to get that feedback, and it's going to hurt their feelings. A lot of people have that fear. People have a real fear in social media age of being unfollowed. So people are afraid that they're going to be too promotional talking about their work, and because of that, people are gonna smash that unfollow button, and that hurts their ego. And those are some of the biggest fears that people have. It's like the fear of being judged. They're fearful of kind of being shown that like, Oh, I did this thing, and people don't actually like it, and getting that response, these are some underlying fears that a lot of people have when it comes to not actually distributing their work as much as they should.

William Harris  12:48  

Yeah, it reminds me of something that I heard one time, and I wish I remembered who said it, but it was something along the lines of, if you want to change your position, where you're at, you have to change your your beliefs first, right? Not even just your mindset, your beliefs, that there's something that you are believing that is holding you back, and so you're believing that if you do this, people are going to unsubscribe from you, or that if you do this, this is going to happen, and those beliefs are what's holding you from moving forward. I think that's powerful.

Ross Simmonds  13:18  

I love that because it's also like the belief that the belief in the fact that you created something valuable should be all you need to convince yourself that you should distribute your work like if you believe that the product that you built, the content you're creating, the service that you're providing, can actually help people, then you should be relentless at helping people, because there's only so much time we have on this earth, so you may as well use that time to help as many people as you can. If you actually believe the thing that you're doing can help people, if you don't think that it can help people, then that's a whole nother conversation and a whole nother dialog. But I hope you're doing it because you think the thing that you are creating distributing can provide people with entertainment, can provide them with actual utility value. It can provide them with status, whatever it might be, it's valuable to them. And if it is, then you need to believe that it is worth promoting every single day as much as possible, on as many channels as possible. And at the end of the day, the people who unfollow you because you talk about your business too much, something that is like a part of you, they they weren't really meant to follow you anyway, like, it's okay to lose a few followers. Like there's billions of people in the world. Losing one follower shouldn't matter. It shouldn't impact you that much. It's

William Harris  14:33  

a really good point. So I saw a video of Gary V the other day, maybe two weeks ago, and he was doing, like a webinar or something. He was, like a sales call webinar, something along the lines and but while he was doing he was actively getting his eye stitched, like so I don't know what happened, but like his eye, he was getting stitches in his eye. And it was actually, it was the the webinar, whatever was going on was, was actually done by a buddy of mine, Benny fish. Sure, okay, we grew up together, and so it was just wild to see this happen. But is, is content affiliation? It sounds really good, but is it something where you have to be willing to be like Gary Vee and you need, you know, a 20 person team recording you while you're getting your eyes, uh, stitched up. Or is there a better playbook that can work for, let's just say the majority of us, yeah,

Ross Simmonds  15:27  

yeah. So if you want to go after the like, goat status, then you do what Gary's doing, right? Like, if you're striving to be on that level and you have the resources to do it, then go for it, right? Like, do that. That's the that's the playbook. He has kind of laid it out there over the last few years, along with folks like the hormozi couple. Like, there's a lot of folks who are crushing it in this lane. So, but for for everyone else, who might be just like trying to jump into the pool, but not go right into the deep end, yet, I think you don't need to necessarily think of distribution as always being on right, like, you can still take care of your day to day. But what I would advise is that you block time off in your calendar on a weekly basis, if you can do daily even better, where you add, like, let's say, an hour, where in that hour you're going to maybe set up a camera. Maybe you're going to schedule some time with somebody on your team, and you're going to jump on a zoom call. And when you get on that Zoom call, they're going to ask you a bunch of questions about when things that you're working on, things that you're thinking about, some news, some media coverage, stuff like that, and you're just going to answer them. Getting in the reps to the point of our earlier conversation is key to eventually being at that goat status. In my opinion, you need to be willing to put in the reps. And there's a lot of programs and initiatives out there today that you can sign up for that get you in the process of creating but I think for all of us as entrepreneurs, marketers, people in ecom, B to B, whatever space you're in, we're all familiar with the value that comes from content. And if we can all be aligned there that we should create good content, then we should be asking ourselves, okay, how can I create valuable content regularly? For some people, it's gonna be just pulling out their phone and yapping and talking into the camera and then sending that to their team, maybe getting them to chop it up. For some people, it's gonna be exactly the playbook that you're showing, which is, jump on a podcast, add a bunch of value to people, and then start to use that as a pillar asset that you can repurpose. And to me, that's where it all starts. It starts by identifying your strength and then using that to create a pillar asset. What does that mean? It means you're looking to develop a piece of content in some format. It could be audio, it could be video, or it could be written text that is worth repurposing and remixing. It doesn't need to be somebody with a video camera in your face. 24/7, it could just be an hour webinar or an hour podcast, whatever it might be that you do on a regular basis. But then you take that, and then you start to turn it into multiple things. So this podcast could become a bunch of reels on Instagram. It could become a carousel on LinkedIn. We could turn Elumynts of this into a carousel on IG we could turn it into a Twitter thread. We could turn it into YouTube shorts. We could even turn it into probably four or five blog posts, one about how to overcome nervousness. One about amplification concern, one about how powerful beliefs are. You could turn so many micro moments out of this single episode into assets that give you the power to distribute from one single asset, it all over again. So to me, the long story getting a little bit longer to your question is you don't need to start at that level of goat status where you're doing all the things start small, identify a pillar asset that you can get comfortable creating time and time again, and then repurpose that until you're tired.

William Harris  18:53

Yeah. So I think it was an episode of Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income where he was talking to somebody who had no I take it back. I remember exactly where it was. It was a THiNK Media podcast, and there was a guest on there that was talking about drawing their YouTube channel. And when they launched one of their first YouTube channels, because they knew that what they were doing, they already masked millions of followers on the one YouTube channel. They were launching another one. They knew what was good and what wasn't. And I think they threw away the first, like 10 episodes. They're like, just recorded of just to do it. And they were just like, okay, trash it. It's not good enough yet. So we're gonna do the next one. And to your point, I think sometimes it's like, it's okay to say you gotta get in front of the camera and it what you get out of this might be garbage. You might not post it, but you just got to get the rep in of doing it to get to that point where you can feel comfortable with it. And then the 10th one might be where you're like, This is good. I can publish this now.

Ross Simmonds  19:47

100% like you look at any of the first like the top YouTubers, one of my favorite things to do when I feel bad about the quality of my content is like, go back to their first videos. They're grainy, they're messy. They're sloppy. Even Justin Bieber's first videos were garbage, right? Like, you need to recognize that it's okay to start mediocre to eventually reach greatness with the content that you're developing, and you have to be willing to go through that. I suck at this space. Like a lot of folks in marketing get get very much caught up in this idea that they can't show that they're not an expert right away, right? Like you don't need to start as being perfect, but if you can just get started and be okay with going through that I suck at this phase, you'll eventually start to learn a few tricks of the trade, and that's what gradually has happened over the course of my career. Consistently, I go on x and I play this game of, I'm just going to share links, and then I realize that just sharing links is great from a curation lens, but creation is where all the value is. If you want to grow on X, you actually have to create native content for the platform. So I started to shift my strategy to that writing threads, all of those things, takes my account from 30 to 70,000 like, those are the things that happen when you were intentional with, like, learning and being okay with going through that, I suck at this phase. And then, just like, applying that methodology across every channel possible. So

William Harris  21:10

the let's get into the practical side of that, because it's difficult. Let's say you've got your piece of pillar content, and you you've put this together. I don't know what's a good cadence, but let's say you're putting out, like, a solid piece of content once a week, even, like, this is aggressive to put on a pillar of content. Like, how are you going to practically repurpose that? Let's say that the majority of the people who are listening to this, just so we're clear, this is not the solopreneur. This is an e-commerce business owner who likely has at least one person on their team in the marketing that can be doing some of this stuff. Typically, talking, we're growing from 10 million to 100 million, so maybe one, maybe even two people in their marketing team, maybe a contractor. So they've got some things now, how do they take that pillar content and start to turn it into the right pieces of content on the right channels.

Ross Simmonds  22:01  

Great question. So I'm gonna pretend that this e-commerce brand is in the wonderful world of sports. I'm gonna pretend that they're trying to connect with dads who want to get in shape. And I'm gonna pretend that they run a podcast that brings in like, people who educate you on like, how to take care of your health and the benefits of water and stuff like that. Stuff like that. So let's pretend that that's the scenario. They're creating pillar assets every week. They have two marketers on their team. Ideally, they're creating podcasts and they're interviewing these folks, and they've also connected it to video. So just by doing that, they have two formats of content right away. They have audio format and they have a video format. So their marketing team should be empowered to say we're going to facilitate and schedule these interviews before between our founder and a bunch of thought leaders in the space. Now the person who runs social should be thinking about two key things. One, we want to get hype before the episode drops and then post the episode launching. We need to keep getting people back into our funnel to listen to hear, because they're dropping references to the product through the entire podcast. So how do you do that? So the social media person should know the calendar around the podcast, and then, prior to the podcast taking place, they're writing tweets, LinkedIn, posts, etc, to announce what's coming. They're also, potentially, even after the podcast is recorded, going to schedule in Premiere through YouTube an upload of the video asset that's going to launch that interview. So now you're going into YouTube, you're going to have that premiere pillar asset go live. You're then going live on Spotify, Apple. You're probably using a syndication service to make sure that you hit every podcast platform that you can now, that same social media person is also good at listening, so they listen to the actual episode and they try to find money moments. Now, a few years back, we actually would have had an individual listen to every episode for a client to find key moments where they're talking about things, and they'd write down by hand the timestamps. Now there's tools with AI like Claude, chatgpt. We're even working on things in this space ourselves, where you can actually just upload the audio file, it will identify the money moments for you, and you can essentially start to chop those moments and share them and repurpose them. You've that same social media manager. So this so far is still just one person should be able to take a tool like capcut, they go in, they take those clips, they upload it there, they add captions using AI, and then directly in capcut, they're going to share it to Tiktok. They're going to download that same file. They're going to share it on YouTube shorts. They're going to share it on Instagram as well. Now at this point, they're probably already saying, I'm a little bit tired. I've done this. This is crazy. Like, what else do I do? You can schedule videos in advance to go out on some of these platforms as well. You can leverage buffer. You can leverage HootSuite, one of these tools, to upload these files that you also found, to make sure that they're going out for the next few months at a time. So they're always going out. You're always active, and you're tagging the people who were on it so they're more. Likely to reshare it. You're uploading it to your stories, and when you do that, you're making sure that you tag the people that were interviewed again. At this moment, we're still just talking about one person as the social media manager that's running this so they get tagged. Now here's where things start to shift into a new person. So social media people tend to be really good at doing all of those things, but when it comes to writing long form blog posts that are actually rooted in like search intent, you're probably going to want to bring in an SEO or a content writer. That person is going to be listening to the same episode, and they're going to say in this episode, they talked about how dads over the age of 35 really need six glasses of water. Ah, how many people every single month are typing in? How much water do I need? Every like I'm a male, I need? How much water do I need to drink? You start to do the keyword research around that, and then this person is going to take that section of the video, they're going to listen to it, and then they're going to transcribe it. They might rewrite that entire transcription to read like a blog post. They might realize that there's a graphic that they could create as well, and then they're going to put that graphic in it. Now, that blog post gets sent to the Social Media Manager who goes back in a buffer, and they start to schedule that over the course of the calendar. They're also going to pin that thing on Pinterest, even though not a lot of dads are there, but a lot of moms might be there, and they might make the decision for the dad on what they actually buy as it relates to their health. So it goes into Pinterest too. Then you're sharing it on LinkedIn, social media. Person schedule, that graphic that you created that's gonna go out on all those channels as well. At this point, people are probably exhausted, and they're really tired, and I wish I could tell you that the job is done, but it's not yet. You're then going to take that blog post and you're gonna submit it to a subreddit. There's one community called danit, which is backslash R, D, A, D, D, I T. You submit the content to data, which is a community of, I believe about 50,000 maybe more, dads who happen to be on Reddit. You submit it there and say, today, I learned that dads need X amount of water every single day. Dads go wild. They start reading it. They click the blog post, they listen to the podcast. They hear about your product. They go into your funnel. You run remarketing ads to them, bada boom, Bada bing. That's the distribution engine. That's how you amplify content.

William Harris  27:07

It's brilliant. That was well laid out. There's so much there. And like you said that that's two, two full time people really working on this? I mean, yeah, solopreneur, they couldn't do all of that. Where do you draw the line between engagements on some of this. So, like there's you could take this out to umpteen different channels, but engagement being a part of this, right? If all you're doing is just posting this on Reddit, but you're not engaging on anything else on Reddit, Redditors, I love that. Same things will be true for the algorithms on a lot of the social channels. If you just throwing this up on Instagram reels, but you're not doing anything. How? How do you, how do you evaluate how much engagement needs to take place outside of you posting on these places? Right?

Ross Simmonds  27:47  

Yeah, I would say you should try to be as active on these places as you can. If you have the resources to dedicate someone to a channel, then I would do it, and even if it's for a quarter, right? Like, I love running in quarters in terms of, like experiments. So if you believe that Reddit could work for you, and you notice that Reddit is showing up in the SERP more than ever, give someone on your team a quarter where 35% 25% 50% of their time is now dedicated to just like, figuring out Reddit for you. And when they do that, if they're going in and they're tinkering, they're experimenting, you might you'll see your engagement rates increase, and then you can tackle it. So engagement is important. Now let's say, for example, your people are already at capacity, and they don't even want to share this podcast episode with their CEO, their CMO, because they're like, I'm gonna have so much work to do. Instead, what you could do is you could actually hire some people to be like your engagement specialist at a relatively lower cost. So you can hire some people on a contract, or freelancers, or even your own customers who are, like, super passionate about your project, your product, and be like, Alright, look, I'm gonna give you 750 a month. All I need from you is for you to put up 150 75 posts in these communities every day, or every not every day. That would be, well, every month, like you give them a bit of a contract around how often you want them to engage on your behalf, and then you set that type of a relationship up. So that would be one way that I would do it. And then give them the keys to the castle a bit and let them interact and engage. Or you bring in another social media manager, and their sole responsibility is to manage activity across multiple accounts. Yeah. But I also want to throw out like, this is just organic. And sure, I am a huge believer in paid. Like, I talk a lot about organic social I talk a lot about Reddit and things like that. The fastest way to scale is always paid, right? Like, this is the, this is not, I don't want to call it the slow way, but it's like the way of like, earned attention, right? And paid, I think, is an accelerant that you should sprinkle on top of all of this stuff. If you're launching these blog posts, they should be supported with paid if you're going and Reddit. Support your content with paid. If you're doing Instagram reels, tiktoks, support it with paid. See which ones are driving the most ROI for your business. Scale that up until it's saturated and nobody clicks it anymore, and then move on to the next one. So I do want a caveat that as much as I love organic distribution, sprinkle paid on top of everything.

William Harris  30:18  

Yeah, and this goes back to I also used to run a lot of blogs in the SaaS space. And I think that's where you and I initially connected. Was more on that side of things. In every single blog post that I would launch for any one of the SaaS companies I was working with, every blog post had some budget put towards, paid behind it, $100 a blog post, whatever that was that went towards, just trying to get the traffic there, because, like you said, it's a catalyst sometimes, yeah, people just need to even know that that exists. And then, because they do now, it gets shared. And now that it's shared, it gets more organic attention as well. And so 100% with you doesn't need to be a big budget, but something that's there to get that, etc,

Ross Simmonds  30:56  

100% like, it's one of the cheat codes, especially in organic video. Like, right now, I think a lot of people sleep on the power of paid with organic video. All you need is one good share, right? Like, all you need is one person to see that video that has 20,000 50,000 followers, or a celebrity to be like, I'm gonna put this on my story, and then your entire life changes. One celebrity sees a picture of your skort that you're selling, they swipe up, they buy, then they're doing a dance in it, and you're like, Oh, wow. T swift just

William Harris  31:28  

did this. Like to say, I know where that reference is coming from, yeah? Like, that's the kind of

Ross Simmonds  31:34  

thing that you can have if you run paid. So I encourage folks to embrace it for sure.

William Harris  31:39

Yeah, we've had a lot of examples of that exact thing. There's a company called Power pony, and I want to say that it was, I want to say Paris Hilton ended up getting one. And there's a couple other people. It's like, you know, when they do it just it skyrockets sales. There was another cool company called centiler, and it was interesting. JLo was spotted wearing the coat, and there was a little bit of a blip, but not much. But when Meghan Markle was spotted wearing the coat, like, sales went through the roof. It was just wild. Like, certain wild, certain celebrities can have a bigger impact than others, depending on your brand and the brand fit too. Yeah,

Ross Simmonds  32:17  

I see why you love B to C. Like, that's so cool. Like no one's no one's creating a video of being, like, I just logged into my CRM like it's just not happening in my world. Like there's no no celebrities talking about the social media tools or the data management or the waste management software that we're working with. But I love that. I love that. Maybe in my next chapter, I'll launch a sweater company, and I'll get you guys out Elumyntal be my first, my first go, but I gotta get to 10 mil first.

William Harris  32:47  

There you go. No, no, I like that. Okay, so talking algorithms a little bit more. Another thing that sometimes I think about, maybe I'm paranoid, but I'm convinced that LinkedIn knows what I did. And so if I write a post on LinkedIn, and then I and then I click Command C, I'm convinced that it knows that I just Command C this, and it's like, no, we're gonna, like, you know, devalue this post that you're about to post. And so I do as little copy and paste as I possibly can. And then even scheduling tools, I don't, I don't use them very often, if at all, because I I'm just convinced that the platform is like, Nope, you weren't native. So Screw you. We don't. Am I being overly paranoid about this? Or do you think that there's something to this? And if so, how do we go from okay, it's fine using a scheduling tool to like, now you're creating natively on every single one of these, and that takes a lot more time. It does

Ross Simmonds  33:37  

take a lot more time. I think there's truth to it that will never be disclosed by a lot of the platforms. But I also don't know if the percentage so when you think of the algorithm, it's essentially oftentimes broken out into, like, certain things have certain weights. So associated with whether it's native or not native, to me is probably like a point 02, on the weighting scale, like it's not a significant amount of a weight to determine whether or not this gets pushed to everyone where I would stop me from scheduling things. So I believe, simply due to the efficiency gains and the ability to be more places more frequently, scheduling is the play for most people in those moments of idleness. Though I love a native post. I love pulling out my phone, going natively, and writing it out and crafting it. And I would say there is potential, but I don't know if it's like correlation or causation. There is oftentimes more traction that you see on this. And when I I've recently read someone, I forget who it was they were, like all of everyone on our team has to publish things natively. And the reason I they said that was because they felt like you care more when you are pressing publish, and you know there's going to be an immediate response, versus you scheduling it in the. Future, right? Like I can write an email cold to somebody and schedule it for next week, and I'm like, oh, it's not right now. I don't care. I might get a note of office. It doesn't faze me, but if I know I'm pressing send and right at this moment it's gonna hit their inbox, I might think about it, and I think there's something to just like an increase in the actual quality of the content less so the algorithm. I think it's the quality. I think you create better content when you know that the reaction and the response is going to be immediate. And I feel that, like, I can schedule content on x and not really care of that much about like, Oh, this one's going to be promotional. This one, I'm gonna try to get more sales on my book. This one, I'm going to plug Foundation heavy. But if I'm Native, I feel like, Oh, I gotta try to drop a but, like a banger. This needs to be really good. So long story again, little bit longer. I don't think the algorithm has that much of an impact as it relates to scheduling platforms. But I do think, as a human, we actually are more enticed to create better content when we go direct to native versus if we schedule it.

William Harris  36:10

That's fair. What are some things that people are doing wrong with content amplification?

Ross Simmonds  36:16  

The biggest thing that a lot of people are doing wrong brands in particular, is that they just share links to blog posts, and they call it it's dead. It is dead. The approach is completely dead. You can't just share links. I see this on LinkedIn. I see it on x i see it on Facebook. That was like, 2017 2016 the playbook does not work anymore. You can't just take your URL, share it and then include the title and expect people to click it doesn't work anymore. What you actually if you even go on LinkedIn, you'll notice that, I dare anyone to pull up their LinkedIn and just scroll through their feed, and what they're going to notice is that there's a lot of big images, there's a lot of big videos. And if you look closely, you'll see a link, but it's gonna be super small, even the thumbnail is super small. Why? Because LinkedIn doesn't want you to leave LinkedIn. They don't get money when you're off of their site. Neither does Facebook and neither does X. They want you to stay there. So x is launching this articles feature with the expectation that people are gonna write full on articles on their site. If you look at Tiktok like, they don't want people to click links. They want them to stay here or use their shop like platforms want you to stay in their ecosystem. And in the past, you could, like, drop a link and get tons of referral traffic, but across a lot of businesses, I'm seeing a dip in referral traffic from social and it's because the platforms want you to stay there. So what do you do? You create native content for the platform, and you extract value on the platform as much as possible. You're creating articles that live on the platform. You're creating video content that's built into their systems, their tech. You're not sharing YouTube on LinkedIn. You're sharing a LinkedIn video on LinkedIn. You're not trying to get people from x to visit your YouTube channel. You're uploading a native video file directly to x. So the biggest thing that I see as a problem today is that people are stuck in 2019 and they're trying to get people always to their blog, to their blog through social when it just doesn't work, unless you're driving the paid game today. So let's talk the algorithm does hate links like the algorithm straight up hates links. It does.

William Harris  38:21  

And I don't even say the algorithm. I'm convinced the algorithm doesn't care if you put that in the first comment, like it's still smart enough to know that it was you. Yeah, it just hates it in general. But let's talk about cross promotion. Let's say that you do have a blog, and you're trying to grow the blog, not just that individual platform, or, I don't know, a podcast, and I you know you've got great clips that you're putting out on Tiktok that you're not necessarily linking out from those clips. But how do you go about growing that other channel that maybe isn't linked to other things, and so the only way to get it to grow is to somehow link back to that at some point in time. Are there certain channels that are better to it? Or how would you go about growing, let's just say the blog itself, if you're not sharing? Yeah.

Ross Simmonds  39:00  

So everyone thinks that it has to be a link, but it doesn't. I think you created the call to actions exist in the material itself. So at the end of the clip, you're saying you want more subscribe, and you're saying it on camera. Like you can pre record a clip that goes at the end of every single Tiktok that you share, whereas, like, if you enjoy that, guys, here's where you can go check this out. Blah, blah, blah, and you have, like, four or five of them that you rotate and that you start to use on your different episodes and your different assets. Like, have the call to action a part of it and tell people go to Spotify, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the next episode. Or, like, call out past episodes that were bangers, and like you're saying at the end. If you found this valuable, be sure to check out episode E, Episode E, 14 with me and so and so. It was absolutely delight. You're going to check it out on Spotify Apple, wherever you get your podcast. Then people are going to start to fall into your ecosystem. So that would be the play there. But in addition to that, you have to recognize that these video. Platforms, people don't always get all the way to the end, and when they get to the end, they sometimes will just swipe up or left or right, depending on the platform. So I would include a superimposed reference to the podcast, the name of it, the name of your social handles, whatever it might be. And then from this, you're going to start to build a deeper connection with them. And then ideally, you get them off of it to click onto the link with a blog. To your point, it's very difficult. My record would be to try to get email subscribers. So instead of just trying to get people to read your blog, you want to give people something of value that they submit their email to, and then when they get that value, you're going to start getting their emails. And that's how you're going to get people back to your blog. So you're going to capture people to your blog two ways. Either one is through organic search, SEO. They land, they read, they get value, but when they get that value, you have a pop up that's going to say, hey, let's pretend that we're in that dad health thing again. Do you want a checklist for the 10 things that you need to do to get rid of your dad bod by 2025 oh, I'm submitting my email. You submit it, you get an email automatically. You're now subscribed. And now we're going to send you a drip campaign with a bunch of blog posts as well as introduce our product to and you're going back to our blog, and you're auto subscribe. So the way I would think about it is try to have as many CTAs as possible, call to actions, to get people in your ecosystem and tell stories in a way that captures their info, and then use that to get them back to your podcast, get them back to your blog, and get them into your world.

William Harris  41:30  

I love that. And the thing that you were talking about like these, these in text type CTAs. We always call them content upgrades, right where it's just like, I'm gonna upgrade your content a little bit so you're reading this, but I've got something even a little better for you, if you want to get this downloaded as well. Exactly,

Ross Simmonds  41:44  

I love that. That's exactly the key. Like, if you can give people a little bit of additional value, it's a it's a major win. Is there any certain types of upgrades that you've seen like work ridiculously well in your world well?

William Harris  41:55  

So again, I'm going back to my SaaS days right now. So this is where I don't, because I don't do this in in a professional capacity anymore, but the ones that I liked at least then, and I'd love to know your take on if these are you're still seeing these work well, but I really appreciate what we called the in content, content upgrades, or the in text content. So you know, 1/3 of the way as you're reading through there, it's right there, versus it being a pop up. I thought pop ups were very intrusive. They work to a point right? Like, there's a lot of fairness to them. But this was, like, it really felt like you got, like, a really qualified person. And I liked the sliding on the bottom right, which was often, like, you said it was like a six drip email sequence, whatever. These are ones that worked for me back in the day. I like it. I'd lean on you, though, to say, like, are there certain types of content upgrades that you see working these don't necessarily have to be in e-commerce. I'd love it if they were. But just in general, you're saying, This is what people tend to be reacting to.

Ross Simmonds  42:50  

Yeah, the challenges still hit. Like, in this is e-commerce in particular, specific, like, there's a lot of ways that you can get a lot of value by having challenges associated with like things that people care about, and then when you get them in there, you're able to sell your product and offer it and communicate it to people. I see those as still working ridiculously well. And the reason is simple, it gives people a bit of a time frame on how long they're going to have to invest in something. So when intent is high and they're like, Okay, I'm gonna go into a green smoothie challenge. Oh, I need this blender to actually go in the green smoothie challenge. So that tells me one I need to buy their smoothies. So you've got a customer. If you sell smoothies, that person just bought it. Cool. Congratulations. And then you get to drip campaign the moat hopefully build a thriving community with them. And then more people are gonna be like, I did this green smoothie challenge, and it was amazing, and then it just starts the cycle again. So yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of value in that. One other thing that has been interesting is communities as a upgrade. So I've been seeing a lot of brands tap into this idea of, hey, if you want to be in a group with more dads or moms who are doing like homeschool, whatever it might be, like, they have these upgrades where you can join a facebook group, and then you fill in the information, and when you join that Facebook group, you're also going to get first dibs on their product. There's this thing called a ruin you. I don't know if you've heard of this, but it's like this baby climbing thing that we bought for our kids. And there's this Facebook group, and they run a masterclass on content distribution before they launch, like, new blocks and things. They go to this group and they're like, Hey, folks, we're doing a pre launch, and they'll announce it in the group, and then everybody sees it, and everybody's like, they're selling, oh, before it goes live for the masses, it's wild. And it all happens because on their website somewhere, they had like this. CTA, Hey, join our group, and you get them in, and it's just like a great place for them to distribute their content. And we talk about groups in the book as like an underrated distribution channel, because when you look at Facebook, you look at actually look at all these platforms, the ability. Or a brand to connect with its followers has never been more difficult on LinkedIn, I was looking at a post Google put up this post, and they had like five likes, but they had like 800,000 followers. How does that make sense? It doesn't make sense, but the algorithm doesn't want them to reach their audience. They want them to pay to reach their audience. What I love about groups is that it feels more human, and as such, it shows up in your feed more organically. I think Facebook's going to be investing a lot more into like the groups functionality and making it even a pay to play game a little bit as more and more brands start to catch on to the opportunity there. But I think groups is a ridiculously underrated opportunity for distribution for brands, no matter if you're e Comm, B to C, B to B, you name it, groups are wildly underestimated, in my opinion.

William Harris  45:47  

I love it. So because I got a question about groups, then, yeah, well, I agree with you completely. It's interesting also that Facebook tends to be the dominant one in a lot of B to C type groups. Slack always felt like it was the dominant one for a lot of B to B type groups. For sure, there are groups. I mean, like, we're in, I mean discord groups and every other group, right? Like, in circle.so, and like, there's lots and lots of groups now, yeah, I want to pull back on some of the content amplification stuff. What about, what about engagement pods? Are those still a thing? Is it completely taboo? Is it? Like, nah, in the right context? Like, yeah, groups like that. For anybody listening doesn't know, engagement pod, right? Basically, you, you're in a group, Slack group, and somebody submits, Hey, I just got this blog post. Can you go like this article that I just posted on LinkedIn or whatever? And everybody goes and likes and comments and shares and does whatever the idea was to trick the algorithm. I don't think, I think the algorithm is smarter than that. Smarter than that, but I'm just curious benefits. Cons,

Ross Simmonds  46:46  

yep. So I think times are changing. I think in the early days, it was an amazing growth hack that could get you millions to hundreds of 1000s of impressions in the matter of minutes. Not every social media channel is created equal, though, like I think on X, you can play the game with engagement groups and crush it. I think you can get a ton of reach, a ton of impressions, connect with a bunch of people. You could also get banned and blocked for doing it, but I think you can get a lot of traction on LinkedIn. I think it still works relatively but not to the same level of extent that it used to in probably six years ago. It was a great way to win, and you could do some ridiculous numbers on Instagram. It died. I think on Instagram, it's completely dead. I grew an account from zero to 150,000 followers on Instagram during the heyday. And it was a B to C play, selling coffee. Great, great business, making tons of money on the back of it, but they caught on to essentially these groups that we were creating where everybody would shout out somebody else every other day. So it was called like a shout out for shout out group, where every other day somebody would be designated as the brand that we would shout out. So every other day we would shout out other accounts, and they would get our followers, we would get theirs. And it was a beautiful thing. Instagram caught on to that. They caught on to the algorithm, they caught on to the shifts, and they throttled everybody's followers and reach, and kind of killed a lot of the accounts in the same, same vein. But I think, I think it's a channel by channel question, and on some channels, it will work extremely well. I still think it works well on Reddit. Not a lot of people realize it, but I think it works ridiculously well on Reddit. The key on Reddit, though, is that you have to with a lot of these channels. You have to understand the URL. You have to understand the way that the internet even tracks things right. Like, if everybody is coming through on a single UTM parameter, where, like, let's say you copy and paste a link and it says that it was copied from LinkedIn. They know the source of traffic, but if you tell people go to my LinkedIn account and click the first link, that's a different experience, and the algorithm won't pick up on it as naturally so you want to, and it is tricking the algorithm. If my advice to anyone who wants to play the game of an engagement group would be to not be so lazy with sharing the links and instead tell people I just put up a post and then force people to go find it and then retweet, go like it, go comment, etc. Last part on this in the it wasn't a leak, because Elon released it for free, but Elon shared the algorithm for x, and the number one value, most valuable thing was replies. So the other thing is, like, cool. People are retweeting your posts. People are liking your post, bookmarking your post, bookmarking might have more weight. We don't know that that was launched and announced after the release of the algorithm, but like, get people to talk, get people to reply to your post. That's how you get more reach on X today than any other channel, and I think on other accounts, in other places, it's probably very similar, but I agree, yeah. But the thing that you got to keep in mind is, like, AI is ruining a lot of things. And all these AI comments aren't doing anybody any favors. And if you have somebody's if your response is just an AI written comment, guess what? The algorithm has AI built into it. It knows that that was written by AI, so it isn't gonna work.

William Harris  50:15  

I hate this too, so I'm getting them on LinkedIn a lot lately, where it's like, I'll post, I'll post a really long thing on LinkedIn about, let's say, a podcast episode. And, you know, I've got a whole bunch of bullet points about what the episode was about and what we were going into and then it's like, you get the AI comment from somebody that's like, really great. Do you have any like, what are your top four takeaways? I'm like, Well, you could read the post that I just posted, that you commented on, or you could watch it like,

Ross Simmonds  50:43  

yeah, it's wild. The worst one I ever saw, someone announced that they were let go from a company, and someone had an AI comment that just said, congrats. And I was like, Are you serious? This person is like, asking if anybody knows where they should apply, introductions, to recruiters, etc. But they were like, I had a great X number of years. And then this person was like, congrats. I'm like, Yeah, whoa. Like that. That's not it, that's not it. That's not it.

William Harris  51:08  

That is a very beneficial segue into AI, because I wanted to talk to you a little bit about AI with distribution as well. And you brought this up a little bit about even just using chat GPT. And I'll tell people right now I use chat GPT with a lot of the stuff that I do on my podcast as well. And so I will use chat G P t, where I'll upload the transcript. I'll say, Can you pull out for me, any any companies that were mentioned, any people that were mentioned? What are the timestamps? Can you pull out for me? Like the top 10 quotes that deal with X, Y, Z, topic? Can you pull out for me? There's a whole these different things that I'm asking chatgpt to do, because it makes my work easier. I already know about where I want to go with this, but it makes it a lot easier for me to be like, oh, yeah, that was at this timestamp. So I can go back and I can see what was the context. Yep, great. We're gonna use this. What are some ways that you are seeing AI really help accelerate the amplification game.

Ross Simmonds  52:03  

So there's a lot of different ways. The first one I would say, is that it used to take a lot of time to create anything, but now it can be accelerated. So you can take an entire transcript of a podcast and be like, hey, I want you to pretend that you're Ross Simmonds, a digital marketing specialist, and you also specialize in copywriting. Here's what I want you to write. I want you to write four LinkedIn updates, two tweets, and I want you to write a blog post summarizing this entire conversation. Can you do this for me? And then it's going to actually do that. You also are going to say please and thank you, because you don't want the AIS to come and get

William Harris  52:38  

you and your family someday in this here the Minnesota. Yes,

Ross Simmonds  52:43  

I'm being nice to mine. Being nice to mine. So you get that content, and you can, like, use it to actually start to schedule your stories and the things that you promote within the matter of minutes and seconds, which is pretty cool. You can also leverage it to, like, create visuals and images, which is also fascinating, right? Like before, you would have to find a designer. You would need stock photos and things like that. Now you can go on to mid journey. You can go on to Dolly. You can go on to photo.ai any of these sites. And you can ask it to create for you an image or a visual of some sort. And then you get that in seconds to supplement your asset. If anyone is interested in seeing a fully optimized se article that was written 100% with AI. Well, not 100% because I'll give you a hint into it in a second. Just Google, SaaS, pricing guide, Foundation marketing, and you'll see this piece that we wrote a couple 1000 words. It's 100% AI. It was submitted to subreddits and got a ton of traction. People loved it. Put it into a community called indie hackers. People went wild for it. We closed deals on the back of this piece, and it was all written with AI. Now even the graphics and images within this piece were created with AI, and the way that you do it is just like essentially treating the AI like a colleague, rather than just a task manager. And you talk to it, you give it insight, you share with it links, you give it some data, you give it some ideas, and then you work with it. And then we have what we call like this content elevation checklist, where, after we get AI to create a piece, we go through a checklist of things that we need to do to improve it. These things are related to quality, to make sure it reads like a human, that it seems like it was human created, and allows Google to like it. So that's one, one process. Now, another thing that I have found to be ridiculously valuable with AI on the amplification side is the act of like using AI to create things that promote it, so you can use AI at scale using things like Canva. Canva just launched a bunch of AI tools, full disclosure, very friendly with those folks, so no FTC issues, but like you can go over to Canva and set it up where you can identify podcasts and say, All right, I want you to write. Okay, 10 great quotes from this interview between William and Ross, and it will write up the quotes directly from the script. You can then say, hey, AI, can you now send me a spreadsheet with that and include William's handle for X Ross's handle for x in that spreadsheet next to the quotes and who said what? They'll format that all. You can now upload that to Canva. Canva can use its smart automation feature to, like, literally, take your quote and input it into like, 20 or 30 graphics. You can have 30 graphics created. You can use mid journey to take a bunch of our shots and, like, superimposed design and visuals on top of it, and then have a social media bank of content scheduled for like, months. And this used to take, like I grew up in the original ad days that would have taken two days by a production manager back in the day, like it would have taken a lot of time. Now, it can be done in five minutes. So things like that make it so easier. So much easier, just on the back of AI. Now I'm going to geek out for a sec because I haven't found the use case yet, but I'm really, really itching to find it. But with Hey, Gen, H, E, y, G, E N, you can create a deep fake version of yourself. So what I love about that is there's things I love and there's things I hate. What I love about that is that you can essentially have these tools create an AI version of yourself talking about whatever you want. You can upload a script. It will read it with your voice. It doesn't always pick up the abouts and the aboots and stuff like that, as the Canadian accent would have, but it gets really, really close. And I believe there is a world where you can build a great distribution engine on the back of AI related videos. And I believe in e-commerce, you could probably scale out like 20 to 30 AI models and have them talk about your product in some way and be promotional. And you can test all of that different creative with deep fakes, not actually paying models sure you could go down the path where you license them. There are a few tools where you can license AI models from people who are like in their car, talking into the camera and stuff like that, which is wild, but this is where we live in now, and it's like amazing, like you can test you used to have to re record to test the intro to a video. Now you can have 20 videos that are tiktoks with different intros different hooks, and you can test those hooks without paying talent to actually change their hook. It's kind of good for everybody. As somebody who has, like, had to record videos for brands before, it's like, it's a pain, but now there's an AI that will make me say the things differently. It's amazing. It might do courses. Oh, go ahead. Go for it. Go for it. Well, am I where you're thinking,

William Harris  57:51  

Am I imagining this, or did you actually run this as an experiment where you posted you side by side with your Hey Jen, and you're like, hey, which 1am I? Which one is the real represent. I thought that was

Ross Simmonds  58:02  

that wasn't, that wasn't, you're not imagining this. So I ran this experiment myself. I created a deep fake version of me, and I had it say a script. Then I turned on my camera, I looked at the camera, and I read the same script. Now I was like, All right, folks, pick which one you think is me. No one was getting it right. Really. All thought that the AI was the real version of me and that the real me was a fake. And they were calling it out. Some people were so confident, like, you should have seen the comments. People were like, I've known you for 14 years. I know for sure. I was like, You don't know me for sure. So I was like, All right, it's Thanksgiving, Mom, come here. It's like, Mom, can you, can you tell which one is me? She couldn't tell, she couldn't tell which one was AI. So at that moment, I was like, All right, Mom, we need to have a safe word. We need a safe word because if somebody calls you, you need to know that. This is what I will say, Hang up the phone like you can create fake defects for people. So the tech is there. People aren't realizing it, but the tech is there. I think we're going through right now, even though not everyone sees it, one of the most transformational moments in human history. And you're going to get on Zoom calls in the next five years, and you're going to think you're talking to a real person. It's not going to be a real person. It's going to be a deep fake version of them who's connected to an LLM that is trained on everything that they think, all of their pricing, all of their pitch, all of their stories, every zoom call they've ever had, and you're gonna have a full on conversation with that person, but that person's gonna be in Malibu, drinking a tequila shot or something like it's not going to be human to human much longer. And it's interesting. I don't want to say it's exciting. It is exciting, but it's going to be, there's going to be a lot of things happening. Yeah,

William Harris  59:45  

there's just, like, navigating what that means in real life is going to be interesting. It

Ross Simmonds  59:50  

is, um, it's, it's a fun time.

William Harris  59:53  

It is a fun time. It is a fun time because you're the start of something completely transformative. And, yeah, figuring out how to navigate that is, is interesting. I want to dig into a little bit about who is Ross Simmonds here, because I think it's always fun to get into the personal side of everybody as well. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. And you know, is there somebody who had an impact on you becoming an entrepreneur? Or what do you think what helped you to become the Ross Simmonds that is today that your mom can't tell is the real one versus the fake one?

Ross Simmonds  1:00:31

Yeah, for sure. So I grew up in Nova Scotia, small, little town called Preston, and I would say like we were low ish income, family, but two, like, like, people would say, like, you're not privileged, but I was ridiculously privileged with love. Like, my parents were super involved. They gave for me everything they could. They were always showing up for every sporting activity, even though my dad was my own basketball coach, and he benched me once because I wasn't that good and I didn't play practice enough, but like, they were there, they showed up. So I had all the love in that regard. And my grandparents, luckily for me, like I grew up with them. And one of my grandparents was a paving he ran a paving company, and I got to see his control over his life. And it was, like, fascinating to me. I was like, All right, anytime I need grande to pick me up from school, he's there. Anytime I need grande to, like, take me to the mall, he's there. How does this man always have time? And it was because he ran his own company. So I was like, All right, I need to, like, run my own company, apparently. And he's really ingrained in us this idea of, like, hustle from a young age, where we used to go around. And at the time, I hated it, but I kind of loved the outcome. We used to go every Christmas, every like winter, knocking on doors, no matter how snowy it was. And we would sell Christmas wreaths to like, people's doors. And I got, like, my early taste of selling. We would sell these things for like, $45 which was a lot back then, but he would make them by hand. He was a real Hustler, and I would sell them. If I sold them, he would give me like five bucks. He kept 40 Sure, not a fair deal, but hey, grampies got to do what they got to do. So he was with a question in the early stages, one of my biggest influences around the idea of entrepreneurship, and then my parents, luckily for me, again, just like were so supportive and pushing confidence in me, not confident enough to be able to go on stage without sweating, but confident enough to, like, pursue my dreams and recognize that they always have my back no matter what I was doing.

William Harris  1:02:34  

And it sounds like this has caused you to be, let's say, playfully competitive, but a bit overly competitive when it comes

Ross Simmonds  1:02:41  

to board games, I love a good I do love a good board game. It's true. Like me and my cousins, we used to spend a lot of late nights playing Monopoly. I am obsessed with board games. I even back in the day when I was in high in Elumyntary school, me and one of my cousins, we entered a competition where we had to design a board game. And we designed this game called your race to the NBA. It was like a mix of the game Life Plus, like something that we came up with, and we won, like the local community, like competition for the best board game, which was amazing. And that, like, got my itch to always compete. So we kept going in, we kept competing, and we kept doing things. And I just fell in love with board games. I fell in love with chess. I joined a chess club. Became relatively good. I still don't think I'm as I still can't beat my dad. He's a killer at it. But, like, I'm big into it. Like, now I'm training my little ones how to play. I'm big into Catan. I'm big into all those things. And the reason is because, like, to me, this is a little bit of a weird thing, but it's a real thing. I think that games help with strategic thinking totally. And for me, I do not enjoy being idle, and I do not enjoy, like, small talk that has nothing of value, and I know I should see a therapist about it, but, like, I just want to always be, like, doing something to improve, and like, get better, or, like, have thoughtful experiences. And if I'm around folks and I'm like, and they're like, Yeah, let's play a game. I'm like, Cool. I get to stretch that muscle. I get to work that muscle. So, so I love that, and that's been something with me ever since I was a young kid. I always enjoyed games, and I still love them to this day. And if I was to say, like, a future life for me, after all of this, would be like to get into the game world and just like, chill out, make some games and let people enjoy them.

William Harris  1:04:32  

You mentioned a few chess, Catan, etc. Is there one that stands out right now as like, this is your favorite game?

Ross Simmonds  1:04:38  

Yeah, I'd say right now, I'm big into this game called one night werewolf, and the reason is, seven it's a short game. It's less than 10 minutes. You're everybody gets like, it's kind of like a murder mystery, but it's a very short game. And the reason why I like short games is because there's not a lot of time for people to build up hostility against my competitive. Did this. So it's like a quick in and out. It's like, I hate Ross, but now I'm friends again, but like, risk people hate me, and we don't talk for like, weeks at a time. So Catan has the same impact on people. So I like these ones right now. I like games where people aren't are too mad and angry at me at the end of the at the end of it. Yeah.

William Harris  1:05:19  

So you've stuck with board games for your competitive nature, but there was a time when you felt more there was a physical competition that you wanted to win and run and do, right? WWF, what's up with 100%

Ross Simmonds  1:05:34  

Yeah. So when I was a young kid, me and my dad every like, what was it? I think every Thursday with Smackdown or something like that. We were just like, always gigging out over wrestling. And I wanted to be the 123, kid, like, I wanted to be a wrestler. Shawn Michaels, all those guys I aspired to, and even today, like, I've got wrestling toys as like little commemorations from my childhood. I've got a Delo Brown, I've got the rock Mark Henry, all of these guys that were part of the nation of domination back? Yeah, I loved wrestling. It was a big part of my childhood, and I just fell in love with it, and I fell in love with the art of it. I no longer watch it as closely like once in a while, I got a few group chats where people will start to talk about it, and I'll be like, Oh, cool. What's going on, and then I'll see WrestleMania or something like that, but I don't watch it as much as I used to. I do miss the days in which I could enjoy it all the time, but I think that's a past life that I loved for sure. And I think about like I can remember many days screaming at the top of my lungs. Do you smell what the Ross is cooking my classmates and it being a real thing. So, yeah, I love those days

William Harris  1:06:45

that reminds me of on the basketball courts. When I was growing up, instead of Grant Hill, I was Grant will, right? I love it. I'm grandma.

Ross Simmonds  1:06:55

That's amazing.

William Harris  1:06:56

I understand that there's a quote that you live by, and I always appreciate learning what kind of quotes people live by, because I think that it's it tells you a lot about what's in their heart, what's in their mind. And this phrase that you told me, it's a wonderful phrase, what is, what is the phrase? What is the quote that you Hakuna

Ross Simmonds  1:07:13  

Matata, it means no worries, right? Like it's a life philosophy, and I've lived by it, and I it's just one of those things that allow me to kind of just stay, stay the same amidst chaos, right? Like, oftentimes I feel like the world needs more Hakuna Matata right now, like a lot of people, need Hakuna Matata because there's no reason to be as stressed as we are. Like, society is more stressed than ever. We're more anxious than ever. We're we're stressed over everything, and I think everybody can just chill a bit. And I love Hakuna Matata, because it's like, at the end of the day, all we've got in this life are the experiences that we share with one another. And that's it. Like, let's enjoy it. Let's enjoy this thing and recognize everybody's gonna have differences. And that's cool, too. It's like, hakuna matata, as long as you're not doing harm to anyone, like, I'm chilling. I'm cool, you're cool. Let's let's just chill. So I live by that philosophy, and I hope that I can pass it down to my kids, because to me, that's really a lot of my essence is around now that I'm a dad, it's like passing down as much good as I can to them, and for me, I would love and I know it's gonna be tough. I know it's gonna be hard. I know you can't control all of it, but I really do hope that they have a philosophy that is close to that Hakuna Matata, because I would hate for them to always just be stressed. And I think so many people are overly stressed in a world that doesn't need them to be as stressed as they are completely. And I honestly let me go deeper on this. I think, I think for me, the reason why it's easier to be Hakuna Matata as like my quote, is because I've seen a lot, and because I've seen a lot, I know that a lot of this stuff in business, and that is in the modern world, and that is now in my privileged life, doesn't really matter, right? Like, a lot of the stressors aren't that big of a deal. Like I lost one of my cousins to like a gun violence back in the day, right at the end of my driveway, that's real stuff, right? Like somebody on following me on x doesn't matter. Someone complaining about something on the comments on LinkedIn doesn't matter. Someone calling my book bad doesn't matter. So like, hakuna matata, all these things don't matter to me, like they're not that big of a deal. So I think a lot of people would benefit from having a bit of perspective on like, the end of the day is what's going on and stressing you out right now gonna matter five years from now, 10 years from now, if not Hakuna Matata, keep it moving. Let's go.

William Harris  1:09:47  

I love that. I think we need to add up like a parenthetical clause to it, though it's Hakuna Matata, parentheses, unless you're beating Ross in a board game, and parentheses. That's

Ross Simmonds  1:09:57  

true. That is true. That is true. True. I take unserious things, very, very serious 100%

William Harris  1:10:06  

you mentioned this about, you know, passing on what you can to your kids. And one of the things that I like, the name of the podcast is up arrow, which is a mathematical notation for making numbers much, much bigger than exponents. And I like looking at, like, what are ways that you're trying to improve, and up arrow your your personal life. And the thing that you talked to me about was, like, parenting. And so tell me a little bit about, like, why that's the area that you've really focused on, you know, doing the best that you can. And like, how and why?

Ross Simmonds  1:10:35  

Yeah, so for me, parenting has been an absolute joy. It's the hardest thing I've ever done, without question, but it's also given me the most satisfaction and joy in my life. And I've gotten all the business awards. I've gotten tons of wires and E transfers and applause and all that good stuff. But nothing in life that I have come across yet is like, as good as this dad mug, like the number one dad mug for me is literally everything. And every day I drink out of that mug. I've got like, three of them now, and I drink out of these mugs, and I am able to stay humble and reflect on, like, what my why is, and my why is those three little people downstairs, crying, screaming, doing whatever they're doing, but like they're my why, and for me, I just believe for my best up arrow is to be a great dad. Because if I'm a great dad and I can show up for them, if I can provide for them, if I can give them a great life to experience whatever they want, if I can be intentionally focused with them, then I'm doing my doing my job. If I can give them the shoulder to cry on, but also the ear to speak to, that they feel is going to listen that matters to me. So the things that I do are are very intentional. Like I try to be very active with my kids, both from like a physical activity standpoint, like when they're around me, we're trying. I'm going for runs. We're going for jogs together. We're playing tennis together. We're playing basketball together, like we're doing those things. We're going swimming together, doing all the stuff. On the educational side, I'm trying to teach them things, like we do school days, we do game nights, and I'll be I'll pretend I'm Bob Barker and I'm coming down and I'm wearing a top hat and all kinds of craziness. And I just try to be fun with them, but at the same time, try to instill into them value. So like every night, we're doing mantras. I've got them saying and repeating after me with these little ideas that I want them to kind of believe in. I want them to express gratitude. So we do like this gratitude sharing at the end of dinner each night where we share a rose, a thorn in a bud, something that went very well, something that didn't go well, so we can be comfortable with sharing our flaws. And even me, I go down I talk about things that didn't go well for me, and I hope that that allows them to feel like, oh, I can be open with my parents about this. And then a bud, I always want to entice them to try something new. So a bud is like, what's something new you did today? And then they share that as well. So those are little exercises that I try to do in addition to that, like, I just, I just try to be there, like I try to be present, try to put away the phone as much as possible, that kind of thing. And the reason is, I think again, like a lot of a lot of folks these days, get go through it, and they go through it because they don't have support. And I want to be the same support that my parents gave to me to my kids, and that's really the hope.

William Harris  1:13:30  

Yeah, I that's I got three kids as well. You know that impacts and resonates with me so much. Being the hardest thing that you've done, but the most rewarding thing that you've done, and the thing that you feel like you're never doing a good enough job doing, yes, so

Ross Simmonds  1:13:46  

ever. That's the hardest part. It's like, I will. I can give a talk and be like, All right, that wasn't good. But like, every day this is like, how could I have responded better to that? Like, how could I have been better when they came in screaming at 2am Dad, there's a bee on me. There's no bee on you. It's the middle of the night. There's no bees in the winter. It's like nightmares, but like, how do you respond when you're coming right over to sleep all that stuff, right? Like, it's a it's a beautiful thing, and it's a beautiful exercise as a human to have to go through. I find and I I've loved every moment of it.

William Harris  1:14:20  

I feel like I've learned more about being even just like a good adult by having kids like I've learned more than I ever thought I could have learned. And one of the ways that I use that translate into the rest of my life. There's a song by John a blank on his name, John Foreman, where he talks about, there's somebody's baby there's, there's somebody's baby girl. In the song talks about how this, this, this lady is homeless and drunk, and he's like, you know, Sure, she's just trying to get high and blah blah, but she's somebody's baby girl, and she's somebody's baby still, right? And it's just the idea that it's like, I think just putting that into perspective, that the person who's honking their horn at you. You, or the person who just did XYZ at work, or the person who's doing this or this, or just flicked you off, or whatever is going on, like, there's somebody's baby. And there was a time when they were a two year old, a three year old, who was like, pick me up. There was a time when they were like, play hide and seek with me. And like, when you can put yourself in that mindset and just think, we're all still actually that that person, we're grown up, we have, like, bigger bodies now, but there's not much difference from that. It helps me to have compassion for people much more than I think I would otherwise.

Ross Simmonds  1:15:33  

That was beautifully said. I love that.

William Harris  1:15:38  

I've got one more question for you, because I found out this just the other day, and I didn't realize this about you. You love physics. And if there was an, if there was a topic that I was going to nerd out more on than anything else, it's physics. I love it. If I wasn't doing this, like, if I could just go back and just do anything that I want, I would probably be not just in any physics, but studying the physics of light. It's one of my absolute favorite things. Love it. What? What area of physics are you the most excited about? Are you? And I'm just gonna throw a few things, like, Are you, like, you know, quantum physics? Are you getting into some of the stuff that Terence Howard's talking about on the Joe Rogan podcast? Like, where do you go? Where's the physics?

Ross Simmonds  1:16:19  

Yeah. So it's, it's a story, so in, holy smokes, this is gonna sound bad. A long time ago, I met a girl, and she is now my wife, and we went to high school together, and I was one grade above her, and she was bright, she was super smart. And I was like, okay, smart person, can you help me with my math and my bio class and my physics class, and she became my tutor. And then fast forward, we're now married and stuff, but she was always one year behind me, and she always was able to, like tutor me on things that I was doing the year after. And she got a physics degree. She got a physics degree, she got a minor in meteorology. And she is still, to this day, the smartest person that I know. She's way smarter than me. That's why I also was like, All right, we need to make babies, because we can combine your smarts with my ambition. We're gonna have some great kids. So through all that, my competitiveness came out, and I was like, you know physics, I gotta learn physics. I'm still a marketing degree major, but like, I need to know physics. So I went down the rabbit hole quantum physics is like, the thing I geek out about, yeah, but more than anything, it's like I read the basics still to this day, because I'm trying to be able to, like, have intelligent conversations with my wife. She's like a trained meteorologist. She's a brilliant mind and has a physics degree and all that stuff. And I just like try to keep up with her. So I'm deep into the books. I've been in them for for a long time, just to be able to have those conversations, the things that we do for love, you could say,

William Harris  1:17:51

Absolutely, I love that, Ross, it's been so fun having you here on the show today. If people want to work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to get in touch? Stay in touch? Yeah,

Ross Simmonds  1:18:03  

the easiest place to go would be rossimmonds.com that's where you can find links to all of our businesses, Foundation labs, the stuff that we're doing, software products that I'm working on, all of that good stuff. And yeah, you can add me to any of the social media channels as well. I'm on all of your favorite platforms, all your favorite channels. But before we do wrap up, William, thank you so much for having me on. Thanks for bringing this type of content to the industry at large. We need more of it across all spaces. So thank you for making the time and huge shout out to you and the entire Elumynt team. I love what you folks are doing, man,

William Harris  1:18:36  

I really appreciate that. It's been really, really good. Thank you for sharing your heart, your passion with us, and thank you everyone for jumping in and listening to us today. Have a great day.

Outro  1:18:47

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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