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 Hi Marketing Bestie, Is it weird to be a tiny bit jealous of my mother-in-law? I’ve lived in Florida for 2 years and have like 3 friends. She visits for 1 week and somehow has 15. I’ve never met anyone who can turn a trip into a full social calendar. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Markup AI "Just because you CAN publish an AI-drafted blog in 4 minutes doesn't mean you SHOULD." SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD 5 WAYS TO ACTUALLY WIN AT AEO, GEO, AND WHATEVER THEY CALL SEO NOWRoss Simmonds is the founder of Foundation Marketing, a company that helps B2B brands scale their content engines and increase visibility across AI platforms. He wrote the book Create Once, Distribute Forever, founded Distribution.ai, and has been telling marketers to get on Reddit for the better part of a decade. Most people ignored him. Now Reddit shows up in roughly 20 to 25% of searches inside the big LLMs, and Ross has spent years building the exact playbook everyone's suddenly scrambling to learn. His core belief hasn't changed even though the terminology has. AEO, GEO, AIO, EIEIO, whatever acronym you want to use, it's the same thing marketers should have been doing all along: create genuinely valuable content and distribute it everywhere your buyer might be looking. Listen to the full episode here where Ross breaks down his 3-part Reddit strategy, why owned distribution beats paid and earned long term, and why testing your idea cheaply beats spending a million dollars on a report nobody asked for. 1️⃣. Your Website Is Only 1 Of 20 Places LLMs Are Looking.Ross's Take: "You need to show up on as many different platforms as possible with a positive sentiment about your brand and about your story. And then you need to ensure that that content is citable by the LLMs so you can ensure that when that answer is coming back to a user who just asks what is the best ABC or what's the top element in this category, they're getting an answer that is using your content across multiple platforms as the training data to answer that question." For years, SEO basically meant 1 thing: rank on Google. Ross was already pushing back on that years ago, telling marketers that YouTube, Reddit, Medium, and LinkedIn were all search engines too. Social platforms are now their own search engines. Your audience searches on Instagram and TikTok now to find clips with answers they need. Now with AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini pulling in real time from across the internet, that fragmented reality has become impossible to ignore. LLMs are weighing citations across multiple URLs, deciding which sources to trust, and using all of it to construct an answer. Your website still matters. It's just no longer the whole game. Takeaway: Stop treating your website as your only content home. For every piece of content you create, ask where else it should live. Reddit thread. YouTube video. LinkedIn carousel. Press release. Comparison page on a review site. The goal is positive sentiment about your brand showing up everywhere an LLM might look for an answer, not just on your own domain. 2️⃣. Steal The Exact Questions Buyers Type Into ChatGPT.Ross's Take: "You're going to understand the queries, the questions that your customers have. At first they might be asking how do I solve a certain problem, then eventually what is the best solution in this category. And then the LLM is going to take all of that, pick up a few nuances around the size of their company, look at what category you're in, and use that as a query that they're going to analyze." People don't ask LLMs 1 simple question anymore. They get specific. "My company has 500 employees and needs to achieve X by this date, recommend a tool." The LLM breaks that down, runs multiple searches with variations, and scrapes the internet for signals: YouTube recommendations, a 2-year-old Reddit thread, a comparison page you wrote. Ross's approach starts with real research into what buyers are actually asking at each stage, from early problem-solving questions to specific, detailed asks further down the funnel. Once you know the actual queries, you build content specifically to answer them: landing pages for each ICP, comparison content, blog posts addressing the specific problem, distributed everywhere buyers might search. Takeaway: Document the actual questions your buyers ask at each funnel stage, from broad problem-solving questions to specific, detailed requests. Build content that directly answers each one. Don't guess. Talk to your sales team, check support tickets, look at what people actually type into ChatGPT and Google. Match your content to real queries. NOT assumed "educated guesses". 3️⃣. The 3-Step Formula For Winning On Reddit.Ross's Take: "The first one is you need to start by listening. Reddit is, in my opinion, the best focus group for authentic, true feedback. The second piece is after you've listened, you go in with the intention of adding a ton of value, sorting posts by top to see what has content market fit. The third one is to create and foster a conversation about your brand in relevant or owned subreddits." Reddit terrified marketers for years because the community punishes obvious self-promotion hard. Ross's framework works because it respects that. Step 1: listen. Read the harsh, critical feedback. Let it inform your product and your messaging. The bias towards feedback our Reddit is a good thing. Step 2: add value. Go into relevant subreddits, sort by top posts to see what content actually resonates with that specific community, then create more of what already works for them, not what works for you. Step 3: foster conversation. Engage in threads where people are already debating "best CRM" or "best running shoes." Google and LLMs treat Reddit discussions as trustworthy because Redditors are assumed to be real people, not bots. Conversations happening today become training data tomorrow. Takeaway: Pick 3 subreddits relevant to your category. Spend 2 weeks just reading and sorting by top posts before you post anything. Note what format and topics get engagement. Then start contributing value. Only after that, start participating in threads where your category gets debated. This order matters. Skipping to step 3 gets you banned. 4️⃣. Test It Free Before You Spend $100K On It.Ross's Take: "That's one of the biggest mistakes that I see a lot of enterprise brands make. They will spend tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a report that they think is thought leadership. But the market doesn't care. They didn't lead any thoughts. They just regurgitated things that were already known and wrapped it in a nice PDF, and internally they felt good about producing it, but no one cares." Ross has watched enterprise brands sink 6 figures into a research report or a video, convinced it's brilliant, only to publish it to silence. No shares, no downloads, no engagement. His fix: validate cheaply first. Post the idea on X. Try it as an Instagram story. Drop it into a relevant subreddit. It costs almost nothing and takes minutes. If it gets real engagement, retweets, comments, shares, that's your signal the idea has legs. If it gets nothing, you just saved yourself 6 figures. Ross's own "create once, distribute forever" concept started as a single tweet in 2010 that went viral before it ever became a framework, a company, or a book. Takeaway: Before committing serious budget to a big content asset, test the core idea on a low-cost channel first. Post it as a tweet, a LinkedIn update, a Reddit comment, an Instagram story. Watch the response. If people engage without any paid push, that's validation to go bigger. If it falls flat, refine the idea before you spend real money on it. 5️⃣. Your Old Content Could Beat 30 New Posts.Ross's Take: "I think that's exactly it. Like I would even argue last year some people created some great pieces of content that drove revenue, sales, pipeline, leads that they could run again and they would see success. But everyone has short term memories." The instinct when someone says "create more content for AEO" is to panic and produce 30 brand-new pieces. Ross's point: you probably already have content that worked.
Most brands let that content die instead of running it again or repackaging it. Part of the problem is internal fatigue. You've seen your own campaign a hundred times so it feels stale to you. But your audience hasn't seen it that many times. Most people have no idea you launched anything at all the first time around. Takeaway: Before creating 30 new pieces of content, audit what you already have. Which pieces drove real pipeline, leads, or engagement in the last year. Repromote those. Repackage them into a new format (turn a blog into a carousel, a webinar into short clips). Don't assume your audience remembers or even saw it the first time. Promote it again like it's new, because to most of your audience, it is. EVENT OF THE WEEK The holidays are coming. What can you do about it in September? Come learn about 6 holiday Marketing tactics to steal. While there's still time to run them before the competition. Instead of rewriting captions the night before Black Friday again. 👉 Save your seat, or RSVP for the recording. IN A MEME  Forgot to mention, she also got invited to an exclusive group as well. What am I doing wrong? Your friend, | |||||||||
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