HOW LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS ARE CHANGING DIGITAL MARKETING WITH ADAM CHRONISTER

LLM Tools for Digital Marketing

Large language models (LLM) are redefining digital marketing, and Adam Chronister’s insights help guide the way! These AI tools, like ChatGPT, empower local businesses to dominate search engines through multi-channel branding and automation. Engage on social media, email, and maps to enhance visibility in AI-driven search results. Streamline tasks with tools and optimize content for large language models’ contextual focus. Whether you’re a plumber or retailer, these strategies position you as a local rockstar. Start leveraging large language models now to build a robust presence and capture leads in an AI-powered search engine future!

EPISODE NOTES & RESOURCES:

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool
• Adam Chronister linkedin.com/in/adamchronister
• Enleaf
• Make.com
• Zapier.com

Episode Transcript – How Large Language Models Are Changing Digital Marketing – Interview With Adam Chronister

Jesse Dolan (00:19)
Everybody back to Luminate Local. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. We’ve got a great episode here today. We’ve got Adam Chronister on. Adam and I have known each other for a while. I think we met maybe at a Mastermind in Vegas a number of years back now. I think it was the first one I went to like post-COVID, which was pretty nice. And Adam, you were on a former podcast that I had, did an interview for that, which was great. So I’m excited to bring you back on here today. If people don’t know about you,

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (00:35)
Yeah.

Correct.

Jesse Dolan (00:47)
CEO and founder of Enleaf, right. digital marketing and, SEO expert speaker, been featured in what. Wall Street Journal. I you run MSN as is the MSN one, the top 10 disruptive entrepreneurs to watch in 2025, which was awesome. What, what do you think?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (00:49)
Correct, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that was exciting to be placed in the midst of that.

Jesse Dolan (01:11)
What does that mean, right? For everybody, top 10 disruptive entrepreneurs to watch in 2025, right? Why disruptive? It sounds cool, but.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (01:19)
Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s an honor to get picked up in something like that, of course. I don’t know. you know, it’s rather humbling as well, I guess. But I think for me, it’s just really trying to embrace the technological change that, you know, us founders and marketers and entrepreneurs are seeing all the time. But now more so than ever with the introduction of AI and large language models. It’s kind of like we’ve got this new Wild West that we’re embarking on, right? Which is, it’s exciting and frightening all at the same time, right? And so I’ve had the benefit of, guess, being around long enough to see such technological changes. I’m sure you… you know, you’re probably a similar age to me where you remember the early days of the internet, right? And I remember how, instrumental that is. mean, I can, my whole career, I, I can benefit towards the, introduction of the internet and then later search engines. Right. And so, now it’s, it’s almost like we get a chance, you know, to, I wouldn’t say reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but, there’s new opportunities that we don’t even probably know about yet, right? And that’s, again, there is this, some of this fear of the unknown, right? I know there’s a lot of people, particularly in the digital marketing realm that are somewhat nervous for the potential disruption and aspects of that that they’re already seeing in their businesses and businesses as well. think if they’re wise, you know, would be paying attention and at least having some optimistic concern about the shift in the landscape. But nonetheless, anytime there are technological shifts, there are also opportunities to be had. so, yeah, it’s just a fun, interesting time to be alive, to go through another technological revolution. You know, in my time here on the planet is kind of fascinating and exciting to see.

Jesse Dolan (03:35)
When it’s kind of, I don’t want to say fun as a marketer is the right word because it’s scary to write. Like you’re alluding to some various facets of it. But although Google’s change search has changed over the last few years before the AI influx, you will, fairly static, right? We’re talking about getting visibility, getting found. You mean Google, right? Like historically that’s what we’ve been talking about for the last like 10 years. It’s different now, right? There’s, there’s all kinds of facets to local visibility. So I guess that leads me to one of my first questions here for you is.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (03:57)
Right. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (04:04)
whether it be leveraging AI or like within AI, in your view, how can business owners, marketing managers listening leverage AI to gain visibility, particularly in their local market, right? Kind of on that local level. Anything you’re seeing out there right now, which may be different next month, right? Or even next year, but right now presently is very cordon. What’s your feedback on that?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (04:22)
Right.

Yeah. I mean, the very first thing I tell people is just to get involved in it. Right. I think the, answer to that question can vary from business to business, you know, from industry to industry, market to market. but I would say, you know, one, don’t get overwhelmed, start, start simple, right. Get, get into an, you know, large language model.

Start explore, exploring Google’s AI overviews, which are relatively new. you know, whether, whether you’re building roofs or a plumber, or whatever it is, like, you know, get curious, I think, I think that’s the key thing, right? and then, you know, you don’t have to be an expert in this stuff to utilize it and benefit from it. We’re simply go to something like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, whatever it is.

You know, put in your particular business and ask, start asking questions like, Hey, this is my business. This is my business challenge. what, you know, what steps or processes would, would you suggest, you know, speaking to the large language model, to improve what I’m doing this year, right? some team, I had somebody the other day reach out on Facebook and they asked like, Hey, I I’m new to AI. How do I get started? I don’t even know where to start. And I’d like to learn.

I said, well, honestly, the best thing you could do is take that question you just posted in the comments on Facebook, go to chat.gpt and paste that there. And you’re going to get a way better answer than I’m probably going to be able to give you. Right. And you’re going to get links and references. And so really this is just, you know, um, this is just the re, uh, evolution of search as we know it. Right. And so, um, you know, get out there and explore, explore, experiment and embrace it, have fun, don’t get too worried because that’s going to put you in the opposite direction where embracing technology typically is going to be the best option for those involved.

Jesse Dolan (06:32)
Yeah, that too late, right? Like you didn’t miss the boat. You know, you’re not going to be overwhelmed if you jump in now, like you’re saying, just experiment. I want to go back at him. You said, just again, for the managers, owners, marketers, listening, you said, use a Google AI overview and kind of get used to it. People are used to going to Google, doing search, things like that. What can you break it down for everybody? Maybe they’ve never looked at this. What do you mean when you say that for everybody?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (06:36)
Not at all.

Yeah, I think it’s funny because all of us use search engines, right? Probably every day. Business owners are no exception. And the thing that I find ironic is we don’t often stop and think about the results. We do our search for whatever it is we’re looking for. We get in, we get out, and we call it a day.

But if you’re a business owner and you have some need or desire to get visibility in search, which, you know, let’s be honest, most, most people do, at least they’re going to benefit from that. It behooves you to kind of understand what’s, what’s going on. Right. So I, I, you know, talk to our clients. tell them like, you know, put yourself in the shoe of a, marketer or your competition or whatever it is, you know, put in some search terms relative to your product or service, and look at what the results are, right? And then try that in different verticals. Do it with an incognito window. Try it with a different browser. Test out the difference between your phone and your desktop because a lot of people aren’t aware that the search results do vary and differ depending on the environments, right? So it’s the same thing that I see. It’s not necessarily going to be the same thing you see, but the idea is to get a good sense of what that real estate looks like. like to look at things like search engines and their results as digital real estate, right? At the end of the day, our goal is to get our clients the most digital real estate as possible. So that can look like Google search, that can look like Google advertising. It can be like placements and increased visibility and maps, right? At the end of the day, we’re trying just to get the most of that digital real estate so that when interested parties are looking for someone’s product or service, you’re more likely to show up than your competition, right?

And that can of course expand beyond search, right? There’s other realms and verticals, social media marketing and, you know, direct marketing, all of that other stuff. But the idea at the end of the day is to become either the answer or solution to your potential, you know, client’s problem and or be front of mind whenever that particular problem or need comes to the mind of your potential consumer.

Correct?

Jesse Dolan (09:19)
Yeah. I like what you’re saying too with the digital real estate. You know, we’re finding that I wouldn’t say to an exact science here or, or, uh, her client or per entity, but the more you practice that right now, you know, like chat GPT, for example, right? It’s not, it’s not indexing all your web pages and site, right? It’s doing research to give you these answers and the more real estate you’re taking up digitally, right? The more prominent, the more trust you have with them, just like you would us human beings too, right? If.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (09:41)
Right.

Mm-hmm. Right.

Correct.

Jesse Dolan (09:49)
If I see, if I’m searching for something and I see your brand three or four times on that page or around search, you have authority. You’re sticking out to me. Same for getting found right now, at least, uh, in some of these chat models, because they’re doing the same things we would as humans. They’re just doing it faster, better, or while we do something else for us. So great nugget, great nugget for everybody, right? For a tip or trick, if you will on that, Adam, another question for you is, um, I guess, that’s kind of my two cents on how it works a little bit with.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (09:56)
Yeah. Exactly. Right.

Jesse Dolan (10:18)
I know you put out, think it was like the blog post or maybe a tweet or something I saw of a chat GPT using Bing, right? For, some of the results and kind of as a bit of a backbone, how do you think this works or maybe help explain to people how if you go to chat GPT and search for something, how is that different than going to Google right now? And you know, what’s, what’s good, what’s bad? What’s your, what’s your breakdown of that difference?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (10:25)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, so you know we have to think of link large language models essentially as a new type of search engine right and the the job of a large language model is to parse data this is why you can have you know there are systems where you can create your own agents for instance where you create and put in front of those agents or behind them your own data sources, right? And so every large language model has its data source. So we talked about Bing and ChatGBT. Of course, they have a partnership. And so a lot of the information and data that shows up, at least that is available on the web and querying the web when it comes to OpenAI and ChatGBT is coming from Microsoft Bing, right? And so that’s one area where it’s like us as digital marketers, especially in the SEO realm, I think need to be more cognizant of Microsoft being where in years past, they had such low market share that for many of us, it was kind of an afterthought, right? And same thing with Google and their AI overviews, same idea, different frame or wrapper, right? These large language models, just like search engines have to understand how to best parse information. Now, the way that they parse information and organize and prioritize what shows up is quite different, right? A large language models, hence the name language, cling a lot more onto semantics and relevance and they aggregate content as opposed to direct referential pinpoints like a search engine, right? So that is kind of how the things vary, right? But one of the things that… you know, we’re starting to really emphasize with our clientele is a continuation of a focus on building a brand and differentiators within businesses, products and services. And the idea there is, and we’ve seen this even from search engines like Google, where they’ve tried to figure out ways to better orient what constitutes an authoritative brand versus what doesn’t, right?

There’s always this potentiality to get spam or less than relevant content in search. so forever, search engines have been trying to combat that. And a big part of that problem is resolved on how do we identify what constitutes as an established authoritative brand versus what doesn’t. I think large language models very much have the capability to do that as well.

And then at the end of the day, because we are in this window of disruption, I, in some regard, want to go back to the basics, right? They’re, I find myself these days a lot more thinking about the traditional days of marketing. And I’m talking like almost pre TV where you’re like, you have radio and billboards, right? you think about the old classic Coca-Cola ads or, you know, whatever, whatever brand was out there. And so they had to use like psychology and like traditional marketing to establish brands. And I think we as marketers need to figure out how to go back to some of that basic element without necessarily avoiding the technology, right? Because I think these things are gonna start emerging more and more. And LLMs, from my estimation, introduce an opportunity to better distinguish authority and brands just because of their ability to aggregate large sets of data from a social media profile to a search query to a website. Put these all into a mix, boil them all together and say, here is the brands or the references that need to show up. Whereas search engines in some regard, although fairly complex, are arguably less sophisticated than large language models, right? So yeah, that’s kind of where my head has been at as far as a lot of these kinds of things, right?

Jesse Dolan (15:04)
Well, always data, right? The data points, know, trust in the data with regards to AI, what should we all be looking at kind of backing up the points you’re just making? What data are we looking at? What kind of hard points? What kind of KPIs when it comes to AI should we be paying attention to right now to take advantage of this and to show up or get that visibility? So.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (15:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the key is at this juncture, and I don’t see this changing drastically, a lot of the same tactics that we leveraged for search engine optimization are also going to be the same tactics that we leverage for large language models. Only I think the priority could start to shift, right?

In the realm of search engine optimization, there’s a lot of talk about off-page SEO. Usually this comes in the realm of link building. I don’t think that’s necessarily going away. But I can have a theory that the priority of things like backlinks are going to diminish over time, only because it seems like things like contextual relevance, metadata, schema markup, that large language models would be better suited by utilizing those as kind of a first point of reference. While still probably, again, depending on the model, referencing things like link authority, backlink authority, I could imagine that Google is probably still including some of that in their relevance, although it’s really hard to say at this point. But those are some of the conversations we’re having internally. We’re starting to test, you know, slowing down on an emphasis on backlink acquisition, particularly for a couple of clients who are kind of in our case study cadence, right, with their participation. like, hey, we’re going to back off on your backlink acquisition, double down on contextual relevance, technical SEO, and those kind of things, and see how it impacts you, not only in search, but also where we’re starting to show up within large language models. The other challenge that we’re still kind of in the midst of is attribution within large language models. We’re still really in kind of a mid-tier period where there are not a lot of systems that are doing a good job with that. Now, Google just announced recently that Google Search Console is soon to be looking at some kind of large language model attribution. But I don’t believe at this juncture we have dates or details on that, only an announcement that this is something they’re working on, right?

And so I think that will become more prominent over time, just like any technological change, it introduces new problems. The big problem right now is how do you attribute traffic from things like Grok or chat GBT, and in some, from a guard, probably Gemini as well, all the… Google has that infrastructure, I’m sure, being their ecosystem. But it introduces new problems. So there are going to be entrepreneurs, as well as businesses that are already established, that I think are going to come along to help solve those problems. And thus, we kind of come back to the thesis of there are new opportunities in the horizon that most of us are probably not even aware of yet as new problems arise.

Jesse Dolan (19:14)
A lot to emerge right to your point.

So just, we don’t even know where this is going to go. We’re just trying to figure out right now today what’s happening and how to leverage it. Right.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (19:20)
Yeah. And that’s the key. That’s the point is like, just, you know, get your hands wet because you don’t, you may not even know the problem or the solution right now, but if, if you’re playing with the tools, then you’re going to be ready to start, you know, putting a hammer to nail when an idea or an opportunity arises. Right. And, know, again, this, this could be business to business, right? Um, there are a lot of blue collar businesses still to this day that are not utilizing even basic technology. I’m still amazed to stay like how many businesses don’t have a website or have never done any kind of digital marketing. You know, they’re doing the bare minimum. so, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there. It’s just the opportunity, availability is going to shift and the, the, the, technology, the processes and procedures are going to shift as well. And so, you know, get involved before you do get behind. But to your point, we’re still early days in my estimation. I don’t think anyone who gets involved now is anywhere near being close to being behind. But there will be a day where if you put your head in the sand, you will find that you’re behind the curve.

Jesse Dolan (20:41)
Yeah. And there’s so many ways to use whatever just AI large language models. Like you’re saying, however, we’re going to reference them as a group, whether it be marketing to get found or leveraging it to scale or be efficient with your business. There should be some edges you’re bumping into to get this experience. I don’t want go back. You were talking about, like some of the metrics and the visibility. think the one thing that’s really challenging with the AI, regardless of the platform is you’re talking about how do we attribute traffic?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (20:55)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Dolan (21:11)
You know, how do we attribute? know you don’t have the answer to this, but just as a maybe venting and frustrated myself as a marketer, you know, how do we attribute the impressions, right? That just nobody even clicked through, but maybe there is this awesome, you know, snippet, if you will, that’s good show by AI that helps your brand. Like was really, really good. And you’re now resting in somebody’s mind, but you never got that click. There was no data point right for you to get that tangible, connection. That’s, that’s tricky. I mean, it can help you if you’re showing up and we can do our own testing, but.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (21:15)
Yeah

Mm-hmm.

Bye.

Right.

Jesse Dolan (21:41)
That’s undiscoverable almost, right? At this point, so.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (21:45)
Yeah, I mean, it is challenging. Like, and that’s, that’s kind of the conversations we’ve had with clients as of late is that, you know, there, there are KPIs that we’ve used in the past that are going to be become more and more obfuscated. We’ve seen, you know, click through rate for some brands and services has, you know, essentially been cut in half. Right. And we can see.

And track things like direct traffic, which a lot of large language models, you know, essentially accept their traffic as direct traffic. But even then, you can’t see where that’s coming from necessarily. You just see that that metric is on the rise, right? And then we’re seeing things like inside of platforms like Shopify, we’re starting to see some very basic attribution where we can see traffic coming from things like chat GBT, but really not given much more information beyond that, right? And so it is challenging, like, you know, because we tread the path to a particular project, your trajectory with particular KPIs. And now we’re having to be more agile and kind of help bridge that gap, right? And so I don’t have a perfect answer for that other than it’s like, you know, we have to think more, I think holistically and broadly about what we’re doing. And attribution hasn’t, it’s not like it’s a new challenge. It’s been a challenge for quite some time. I mean, even looking at examples of how different systems do attribution, right? One of the big challenges that we have as a digital marketing company is the difference in how Shopify, for instance, does attribution, which they do, they’re still doing like last click attribution and how Google Analytics does attribution. They’re doing a data-driven attribution model, right? And so if you compare these two things, it becomes starkly different, right? In fact, we wrote a blog post on this because we were getting so many questions from clients like, hey, why is my Shopify attribution data different than Google Analytics? And we have to explain like, well, the way that they do attribution is different, right? And the pros and cons to each, right? And so…

Jesse Dolan (24:04)
Different approaches.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (24:09)
I don’t think attribution is going to become less of a problem. It’s going to become more and more of a challenging problem, especially as things get fractured. Right. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. We’re seeing more of a fragmentation. And so as marketers and business owners, I think we’re going to have to get more comfortable with the idea of attribution being more and more blurred over time. Right. And the ironic thing is there are businesses that invest

Jesse Dolan (24:17)
All

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (24:37)
know, tens of millions of dollars on brand building activities without any real, you know, super close the gap key on attribution, right? How, for instance, do I measure the value of a brand like Nike or Coke, right? I, you know what I mean? Like I kick, somebody goes and buys some tennis shoes from Foot Locker. There’s some, let’s say they’re Nike.

How do I attribute that they actually saw an advertisement over a span of three years and that that was the motivator for them to buy, right? Or maybe they saw a social media ad and that was the thing that triggered them to like, I have affinity for that brand. And so, like it’s not a perfect answer because we obviously, if we invest money in marketing, we wanna be able to attribute that to the dollar and cent.

But I think at least in the short term, we’re going to have to get more comfortable with looking at the large trend. Is your bottom line growing? Is your generalized traffic across channels, direct referral, organic paid, is it growing? And then figure out where we can attribute things in the minutiae.

Jesse Dolan (25:43)
Yeah. I think that’s a good, for me, at least in my mind, a segue, another topic I wanted to run past you. you were on another podcast. The name is escaping me off hand. but talking about if you want to be, if you want to have this authority, right? Like you’re talking like Nike, Coca-Cola, these brands, you know, just ubiquitous to us out there, but they just, they have that authority and how we can gain as local marketers, starting in your own backyard first, right? If you’re some up in the Minnesota area, you know, if I want to be ranking or get visibility, if you will, in Minneapolis, if I’m 30 miles outside of Minneapolis, now, if I’m not ranking or I think as you put it, like the rock star in my own hometown, you good luck, you know, going to the major metropolitan area. And so same kind of thing here. Maybe you can’t attribute in your hometown why somebody clicked or why somebody, you know,

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (26:27)
Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (26:51)
leverage your call to action. But if you’re a rock star, it kind of doesn’t matter, right? You just know you’re out there. Can you share some insights on why you believe that? Which I 100 % agree with. And maybe what does that mean again to these local businesses listening or watching here? How do they take action to be that rock star?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (26:56)
Sure.

Uh-huh.

Yeah,

I mean, there’s a lot of ways. Like, I think you have to get, one, get involved in your community, However that looks, there’s different ways from various business and chamber groups. Get involved in social media marketing as best as you can, right?

I think that’s an opportunity. Get involved in generalized digital marketing, right? Because that might bridge the gap. Somebody might see you at a business, you know, development group or in, you know, on your social media profile, and then do a search for you and see an ad that pops up or see your listing in the organic results. Really at the end of the day, like my goal and what I emphasize with a lot of our clients is you want to be, you want to be the, the person, the business, the authority that comes to mind when your potential client tells are ready to pull the trigger on what it is that you do. Right.

That’s something that we’ve implemented in our brand. And I have people that they reach out to me and like, yeah, I’ve been following your stuff for years. And I wasn’t ready three years ago to launch a website or do digital marketing. Nonetheless, I’ve kept an eye on what you’re doing. And now I’m ready. And you’re the person I want to work with. That happens to me all the time. But it doesn’t happen overnight, right? You do have to establish yourself. I think part of that too gets into the realm of working on the business and not in the business. I think we’ve all heard this. Sometimes I roll my eyes when I hear that, but it’s true, right? And that doesn’t always mean that you as the business owner, operator, CEO, or founder have to do everything. In fact, you should be leveraging other people, their skills and their capabilities to help you with these other… verticals, know be it hiring hiring a marketing company to build your brand or to help you with You know dominance and surge to build a paid advertising strategy, right? But nonetheless you should have some kind of strategy To build a brand whether it’s a personal brand or the brand of the business or some combination of the two, right? I do see it seems like these days there is a lot more interest in having a personal face to the brand, right? And so I do challenge businesses to do that. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be the owner and founder, but you should have somebody who’s established and committed to the business that can also be the face of the brand, right? Somebody that you trust that’s gonna be there for the long run. Most times that’s gonna be a founder or a CEO, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. But nonetheless, it seems like market behavior is becoming more and more attractive to the person behind the brand, regardless of how big or small the company is. But even outside of that, really focusing on that brand and then leveraging all the different channels that can build upon that from search to social to good old PR and branding.

Jesse Dolan (30:24)
They leverage these different channels just to be clear for everybody. You’re saying like you better be active in them, posting on them, engaging in them. not just maybe, writing a blog post and just randomly throwing up snippets everywhere, but, participating and, doing it regularly, things like this. Is that, is that what you’re saying?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (30:30)
Right? Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean we’re we don’t have the luxury anymore of just having a single channel marketing approach right it used to be a very common where Businesses could could survive and thrive off of one marketing channel, right? Maybe maybe they got really good at SEO, right and that worked really well Maybe they got really good at running ads in search, you know Or really good at Facebook advertising or Facebook marketing I think the days of having a single channel marketing approach and having it be extremely successful are far and few between, right? Now, the beauty of having and testing multiple channels is, you know, often you’ll find ones that outperform others, but nonetheless, like as business owners, we now have to be thinking multi-channel approach, right?

And let’s be honest, if you’re a small business owner, that’s challenging, if not almost impossible to do on your own, right? And so that’s where you need partners. You need to bring in outside support or even potentially hire someone in-house. But some of the advantages you’re going to get with an agency is typically you’re going to get access to a multifaceted team of experts in different disciplines, right?

Jesse Dolan (32:03)
Yeah. At tell people just like you as a business and a business owner are an expert in what you’re selling. And if somebody was to come to you and say, well, I should just do that myself versus patronizing you. You’d have all the reasons in the world on why, no, like, trust me, you know, we got your back on this, but those same business owners often feel like they can just be Superman or superwoman and in the marketing side of things, just.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (32:16)
Right.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (32:27)
Do it all themselves because that’s part of the sales and marketing of their business, not looking at it as, you know, this, this silo of, of talent, right. Or things to do that maybe somebody else could be as effective if not more, and then free you up to be your rock star.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (32:32)
Right.

Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a reason I don’t change my own oil now could I yeah, I’ve done it before I mean, you know, I could go on YouTube and watch some videos and, but, uh, you know, one, don’t, I don’t have the skills and training, you know, to, to not maybe make a mistake. Uh, two, like my time is better served doing what, you know, what I do best. Right. Um, and there’s probably a handful of other reasons why it doesn’t make sense for me to, you know, fix my own engine or change my own oil. Like I would much rather take my car to a mechanic who that is their livelihood. That’s what they do. They’re gonna do it right the first time. So I’m saving time and money at the end of the day, right? It’s the same with anything, especially marketing.

Jesse Dolan (33:31)
Yep. Yeah. Just play to your strengths, right? And if you’re trying to grow your business, especially, you know, have some professional support, right? Whether they completely do it for you or pull up next to you at least, you know, know, trust that, want to expand also, or, or see if you agree with me, maybe there’s a better way to put it. You, you talked about being involved on these channels, right?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (33:40)
Yeah.

Right.

Jesse Dolan (33:55)
And I think that’s good advice for everybody kind of twofold. One is you can be found in these channels. Just take like Facebook or, know, Facebook’s probably a good example. I think people are searching in Facebook more than they used to, whether it be a saw post and you want to learn more or whatever. Again, it’s not just Google. So take that, you know, to all platforms, people, you can not only reach people and get exposure to them, but they are using them now to search and gather information. secondly,

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (34:07)
Sure. Yeah.

Sure.

Jesse Dolan (34:23)
It’s so you can reach people through these different platforms now, but then also if you’re engaged in all these platforms again, back to something like a chat GPT, if it’s doing a search, it’ll see you in all these platforms and that’s you get that authority and kind of that dominance as well. You agree or do you have anything else to shed on that?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (34:30)
Uh-huh.

Exactly. Yep.

No, think you nailed it on the head. That’s part of the point. And search engines are really no different. The modern search engines are aggregating data from Facebook and Twitter and all these other profiles, platforms. And so search isn’t just text-based blue links anymore. And again, that’s why I encourage people, search your name, search your business, see what comes up. Do you see a lot of YouTubes in the search results?

You’ve never done a YouTube video, you should be doing that. You should be thinking that as your SEO strategy, so to speak. Same with maps. If you’re not in maps and you see that others in your market are, there’s some work to be done there. And so the same things generally hold to be true with search engines as they do with large language models. The more pervasive you can be in these platforms, the more likely you’re going to show up when these systems aggregate results based on these platforms. Right. And so, you know, the modern day of SEO, you know, quite honestly involves social media marketing and PR and, know, general, website, you know, presence, like all of these things kind of now have to be factored into what we used to call, you know, search engine optimization.

Jesse Dolan (36:09)
Right. Used to that’s kind of scary when you say it like that. so going down the rabbit hole for everybody here, I didn’t read your blog posts on this yet. cause I wanted to kind of learn it from you here on the fly. email SEO, I kind of read the headline. So not only is all this traditional stuff, but what the heck are we talking about now that our emails actually matter to some degree in search? Can you tell us, tell us about that?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (36:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Yeah, so Google recently announced that they are going to start indexing, parsing publicly available email newsletters, right? So these are your, you know, your MailChimp’s, your iContact, any of these platforms where they have, you know, public indexable, as far as I understand content on there, right?

And this is positioned primarily to e-commerce platforms, although there’s probably ways to utilize this outside of e-commerce. course. the idea is Google is looking to expand their horizons into the information that they index. So now it’s theoretical that you could have an email newsletter that you essentially intended to only go to your mailing list. That, unless you particularly or specifically opt out, Google could use that information in their search results, right? And they made an announcement a couple of months on that, a couple of months ago, letting users know that this was happening, right? And even provided an option whereby you can actually add a, and I forget the URL, it’s in the blog post, a particular email address that tells Google like, hey, we want you to actually index our email list. And so we’re gonna put your moniker at

Jesse Dolan (37:56)
interesting.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (37:59)
Gmail or Google mail.com email in our mailing list to help push that process along. It’s hard to tell exactly what they’re doing. My theory outside of just purely indexing and kind of force indexing these HTML based email frames as some platforms have is, which I think is why they.

They made the announcement and said, hey, if you don’t want to do this, you have to opt out. They’re really not asking for permission. They’re basically saying, we’re doing this. If you don’t want it, then opt out. So it’s a forced opt in. But my theory is because Google looks at Gmail accounts is that if I have, let’s say a private Gmail or email marketing list rather, and I send it to you, Jesse, and it gets into your Gmail inbox that Google sees that and now starts to build references back to Enleaf, to our brand, and starts to build an additional contextual roadmap based off of that. I don’t have any hard data to back that up, but just understanding how Google works and understanding that the information they parse is not just search. It’s Gmail. It’s Google Drive. They look at all this stuff, and they factor it into various different systems that I wouldn’t be surprised if that is also what they’re doing, especially since this is a forced opt out option. But on the flip side, my mind goes to how can I use this to my advantage? I could literally create an email list of one, sending it just to Google with the context or relevance that I want them to understand, much like we used to do keyword stuffing in search. I could create a custom email that’s just for Google that says, Okay, Enleaf is the best SEO company in Spokane or whatever context or relevance I want to communicate to them, my gray slash black hat starts to come on and think about how can I use this new availability to my advantage, right?

Jesse Dolan (40:12)
Right?

It’s crazy interesting. And if, and if nothing else too, think everybody maybe should read between the lines. You’re kind of inferring it, but like they’re digesting this information. You know mean? If it’s out there, if it’s basically on a webpage, Google’s privy to it. And I guess the other side of that too, is back to your being active in all these channels as a local marketer nowadays. Hey, make sure you’re sending out email newsletters as well. Right? Not only to dominate in your local area and be a rock star.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (40:21)
Yeah. Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (40:43)
But yeah, Google and Google’s reading that too now. Right. And, even if that you mentioned, maybe that email could show up in search results, even if it doesn’t, they’re still parsing it out and reading it. And it’s part of your encyclopedia within Google, if you will, information about you. So get it out there for your prospects, for your clients and for all the bots and AI agents, right? Like just be active and just crush it out there and all your marketing channels, bring in support or professionals. if you can’t do all this, you need to do it all, you know, so.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (40:47)
Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yep.

Jesse Dolan (41:14)
That’s crazy. Interesting. just whatever the next thing is, right? Just if it’s digital, let’s just assume that it kind of matters, going forward or, or it’ll get sucked up like a, like a sponge. another thing I wanted to ask you about for reverberating listening, I meant to ask this earlier when we were talking a little bit more on the AI side, Adam is, you mentioned a tool. I haven’t personally used this yet, but I picked this up on a different show or something. heard you on, make.com. for bringing in different AI tools, right? You stuck out to me, yeah, I must’ve been listening to it, because you mentioned Zapier, which is a tool I think a lot of people use, I use it all the time. Great for connecting different things together easily. Is that what this is within regards to AI? And do you have any kind of working example maybe for, again, the local business owners, marketing managers listening on how can they leverage this? Not so much to get found, you know, but just.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (41:44)
Sure. Yeah.

Yeah

Yeah.

Sure.

Jesse Dolan (42:12)
to do things within their business sounds pretty interesting to me.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (42:16)
Yeah, there’s a lot of different systems now. There’s a make.com. Of course, Zapier has been around for a while, and they’re doing a lot of good stuff integrating AI. n8n is another tool, much like in the realm of make. And then even some other systems, like we have some systems that integrate.

Various LLMs into Google Sheets using Google Apps Script, although there are third party plugins that also do this process with no code. And so all of these systems can and should be used for automating and systemizing processes.

There’s I mean really honestly like with these you’re you’re kind of limited one to your imagination and then to To your familiarity with the tools. However, most of the tools at this point are WYSIWYG based editor tools With generally drag-and-drop flow logic where you log into your various platforms I mean take take one example You you could with little experience, you know a YouTube tutorial which there are plenty of them.

Build a system where you put out one message and it syndicates to all your social media channels, right? That’s one of those quick and dirty automations. I see people typically do then start out with But taking that further figure out what are your own business processes that you repeat, know every single day or very commonly I know for instance, we’ve built another a number of tools internally to help streamlined know, processes that we do often, right? Let’s take press releases as an example. We have a Google Sheet tool that uses a series of prompts inside of Google Sheets that allows us to essentially automate press releases. So what we are able to do is basically take answers, you know, take, we have a series of set questions that we ask for every press release.

And then we have the answers that are provided often from the client. And then it will auto-generate a press release in an AP style format. And then we just do a simple editing process just to make sure it looks all kosher. But then we now no longer have to do the heavy lifting of having a writer create that press release piece. And we can use the same model for things like blog post, even books, right? I have a whole system now that will create a whole business book within a matter of minutes just by answering a small series of questions. However, like inside your own business, there’s probably plenty of things specific to you that you can start automating and systemizing. And I think that’s part of the key with a lot of this is we’re going to have to become more lean and efficient as businesses just because these tools allow a lot more of a technological like leveling effect, right? So take advantage of it now, you know, because if you don’t, your competitors probably eventually will, right? And so just start thinking, what is it that we do day in and day out that we can automate or systemize to impact what we do and do it more efficiently?

Jesse Dolan (45:57)
Yeah. Just like if you weren’t concerned about search engines in the early two thousands, they’re just, everybody uses them now, right? You just, it’s part of what we do. It’s the fabric of finding things, buying things, living and existing almost. AI seems in the ether, seems kind of crazy, like some technological wave that’s coming, but no, it’s here. It’ll evolve under our feet and under our noses as we go forward.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (46:05)
Right.

Yep.

Jesse Dolan (46:25)
Start playing with it now. mean, you’ve kind of said the same thing multiple ways here, but like, get in there, get in the mix, be educated. If there is a big shift that happens on any given date or time coming forward, now you’ll at least be educated preliminarily on what you’re dealing with, what you’re seeing. And able to take advantage instead of saying, okay, now I need to pay attention. Yeah. You’re going to be mid or more behind the pack, you know, at that point. So get in there early.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (46:30)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (46:53)
Last area I have to kind of throw at you here, Adam, unless you have anything you want to expand on or, or drop some knowledge on is the talk about.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (46:58)
Yeah, nothing specific. yeah, great question so far. I had, you know, really enjoyed kind of, you know, talking through some of these things with you, but yeah, what else do you got for me?

Jesse Dolan (47:07)
Thank you.

I like some of the things that you say over the years about leadership, kind of being an entrepreneur and whether it be investing into different things as well, understanding where your money’s coming from, know, accumulating wealth, delegating, just so many things. I think you’re, on point for how to do this, right? As a, somebody trying to make money and provide for your family and, help everybody else and just be a good person. What are some tips or some things that you’ve learned along the way? It doesn’t have to be straight marketing or applicable to digital marketing and stuff here. but to help everybody listening and managers, entrepreneurs themselves, leadership scaling kind of lessons. you learned along the way that you really feel, you want to put back out there for everybody else.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (48:02)
Yeah, I mean, I think it obviously depends on people’s DNA, you their business DNA, so to speak. But I know for me personally, I sleep better at night knowing that I have a diversity, you know, diversity in like money streams and income, right?

You know, one of that comes from running an agency with multiple clients. Unlike a day job, there’s not a single point of failure. But even in addition to that, I take a percentage of everything that I, you know, I take home, each and every month and reinvest a lot of that, know, number one, back into myself, right. with masterminds, networking groups, training materials, but beyond that, you know, looking at things like stocks and real estate.

And I’ve done that incrementally throughout the years so that if and when we face disruption, I have other things that are my safety net, right?

And I find that as, as a business owner and entrepreneur, having that safety net also allows you to not make, decisions out of desperation, right? it’s also why I suggest people that are thinking about going out on their own, maybe they have a day job, you know, have a really good nest egg, save up six months to a year of equivalent salary before you make that jump. So that when you start your, you know, your entrepreneurial adventure, to speak, you’re not going to, you know, you’re not going to be desperate to take on less than favorable clients or do things that go against your, you know, your business acumen or any of that kind of thing. Right. So I’m a big believer in diversity or diversification rather, and making money work for you. Right.

Jesse Dolan (50:00)
That provides some security. Yeah, I think you have some great points there. Whether somebody’s starting out on their own, branching off, like is it get that nest egg going, just the head space that you’re able to be in when you’re not. Every decision is critical, can we get bread this week or not. Yeah, you’re gonna plot your course and stick to it if you can kind of shed some of that stress, right, and have that perspective. I really like that. I really like that for everybody.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (50:16)
Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Thanks.

Jesse Dolan (50:27)
I think that’s about it for me, Adam, great knowledge. We kind of covered a range of topics, but really all centered around, think, digital marketing and helping people grow their business. 2025 is going to be interesting. We’re about what halfway through here. I don’t think we’re done seeing evolution in this space at all.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (50:38)
Yeah. It is. All right. No.

No. Yeah, it’s going to be wild. Try your best. And I’m speaking to myself as much as everybody else. But try your best to enjoy it, not get too anxious about it.

And yeah, just, just enjoy the ride. think, I think that’s all you can do when there, there is unknowns, right? There’s this big fear of unknown, but, also understand that, you know, with, with new challenges and problems, there are also new opportunities. And that’s, I think the thing that, keeps me going, you know, when, when things get tough or when it gets a little bit, you know, rocky as far as, what does this look like? Right. Just know that there will be.

Other opportunities out there and if you’re open to it, know, you’ll be there to embrace it

Jesse Dolan (51:39)
Yeah, somebody’s going to do it, right? Might as well be you or me or us. for sure. All right. Thanks Adam. Hope to have you on again in a future show here. Talk more about this as things will change. But in the meantime, appreciate it.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (51:40)
Yeah, why not you, right? Yeah.

Pleasure.

Episode Transcript – How Large Language Models Are Changing Digital Marketing – Interview With Adam Chronister

Jesse Dolan (00:19)
Everybody back to Luminate Local. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. We’ve got a great episode here today. We’ve got Adam Chronister on. Adam and I have known each other for a while. I think we met maybe at a Mastermind in Vegas a number of years back now. I think it was the first one I went to like post-COVID, which was pretty nice. And Adam, you were on a former podcast that I had, did an interview for that, which was great. So I’m excited to bring you back on here today. If people don’t know about you,

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (00:35)
Yeah.

Correct.

Jesse Dolan (00:47)
CEO and founder of Enleaf, right. digital marketing and, SEO expert speaker, been featured in what. Wall Street Journal. I you run MSN as is the MSN one, the top 10 disruptive entrepreneurs to watch in 2025, which was awesome. What, what do you think?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (00:49)
Correct, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that was exciting to be placed in the midst of that.

Jesse Dolan (01:11)
What does that mean, right? For everybody, top 10 disruptive entrepreneurs to watch in 2025, right? Why disruptive? It sounds cool, but.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (01:19)
Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s an honor to get picked up in something like that, of course. I don’t know. you know, it’s rather humbling as well, I guess. But I think for me, it’s just really trying to embrace the technological change that, you know, us founders and marketers and entrepreneurs are seeing all the time. But now more so than ever with the introduction of AI and large language models. It’s kind of like we’ve got this new Wild West that we’re embarking on, right? Which is, it’s exciting and frightening all at the same time, right? And so I’ve had the benefit of, guess, being around long enough to see such technological changes. I’m sure you… you know, you’re probably a similar age to me where you remember the early days of the internet, right? And I remember how, instrumental that is. mean, I can, my whole career, I, I can benefit towards the, introduction of the internet and then later search engines. Right. And so, now it’s, it’s almost like we get a chance, you know, to, I wouldn’t say reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but, there’s new opportunities that we don’t even probably know about yet, right? And that’s, again, there is this, some of this fear of the unknown, right? I know there’s a lot of people, particularly in the digital marketing realm that are somewhat nervous for the potential disruption and aspects of that that they’re already seeing in their businesses and businesses as well. think if they’re wise, you know, would be paying attention and at least having some optimistic concern about the shift in the landscape. But nonetheless, anytime there are technological shifts, there are also opportunities to be had. so, yeah, it’s just a fun, interesting time to be alive, to go through another technological revolution. You know, in my time here on the planet is kind of fascinating and exciting to see.

Jesse Dolan (03:35)
When it’s kind of, I don’t want to say fun as a marketer is the right word because it’s scary to write. Like you’re alluding to some various facets of it. But although Google’s change search has changed over the last few years before the AI influx, you will, fairly static, right? We’re talking about getting visibility, getting found. You mean Google, right? Like historically that’s what we’ve been talking about for the last like 10 years. It’s different now, right? There’s, there’s all kinds of facets to local visibility. So I guess that leads me to one of my first questions here for you is.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (03:57)
Right. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (04:04)
whether it be leveraging AI or like within AI, in your view, how can business owners, marketing managers listening leverage AI to gain visibility, particularly in their local market, right? Kind of on that local level. Anything you’re seeing out there right now, which may be different next month, right? Or even next year, but right now presently is very cordon. What’s your feedback on that?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (04:22)
Right.

Yeah. I mean, the very first thing I tell people is just to get involved in it. Right. I think the, answer to that question can vary from business to business, you know, from industry to industry, market to market. but I would say, you know, one, don’t get overwhelmed, start, start simple, right. Get, get into an, you know, large language model.

Start explore, exploring Google’s AI overviews, which are relatively new. you know, whether, whether you’re building roofs or a plumber, or whatever it is, like, you know, get curious, I think, I think that’s the key thing, right? and then, you know, you don’t have to be an expert in this stuff to utilize it and benefit from it. We’re simply go to something like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, whatever it is.

You know, put in your particular business and ask, start asking questions like, Hey, this is my business. This is my business challenge. what, you know, what steps or processes would, would you suggest, you know, speaking to the large language model, to improve what I’m doing this year, right? some team, I had somebody the other day reach out on Facebook and they asked like, Hey, I I’m new to AI. How do I get started? I don’t even know where to start. And I’d like to learn.

I said, well, honestly, the best thing you could do is take that question you just posted in the comments on Facebook, go to chat.gpt and paste that there. And you’re going to get a way better answer than I’m probably going to be able to give you. Right. And you’re going to get links and references. And so really this is just, you know, um, this is just the re, uh, evolution of search as we know it. Right. And so, um, you know, get out there and explore, explore, experiment and embrace it, have fun, don’t get too worried because that’s going to put you in the opposite direction where embracing technology typically is going to be the best option for those involved.

Jesse Dolan (06:32)
Yeah, that too late, right? Like you didn’t miss the boat. You know, you’re not going to be overwhelmed if you jump in now, like you’re saying, just experiment. I want to go back at him. You said, just again, for the managers, owners, marketers, listening, you said, use a Google AI overview and kind of get used to it. People are used to going to Google, doing search, things like that. What can you break it down for everybody? Maybe they’ve never looked at this. What do you mean when you say that for everybody?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (06:36)
Not at all.

Yeah, I think it’s funny because all of us use search engines, right? Probably every day. Business owners are no exception. And the thing that I find ironic is we don’t often stop and think about the results. We do our search for whatever it is we’re looking for. We get in, we get out, and we call it a day.

But if you’re a business owner and you have some need or desire to get visibility in search, which, you know, let’s be honest, most, most people do, at least they’re going to benefit from that. It behooves you to kind of understand what’s, what’s going on. Right. So I, I, you know, talk to our clients. tell them like, you know, put yourself in the shoe of a, marketer or your competition or whatever it is, you know, put in some search terms relative to your product or service, and look at what the results are, right? And then try that in different verticals. Do it with an incognito window. Try it with a different browser. Test out the difference between your phone and your desktop because a lot of people aren’t aware that the search results do vary and differ depending on the environments, right? So it’s the same thing that I see. It’s not necessarily going to be the same thing you see, but the idea is to get a good sense of what that real estate looks like. like to look at things like search engines and their results as digital real estate, right? At the end of the day, our goal is to get our clients the most digital real estate as possible. So that can look like Google search, that can look like Google advertising. It can be like placements and increased visibility and maps, right? At the end of the day, we’re trying just to get the most of that digital real estate so that when interested parties are looking for someone’s product or service, you’re more likely to show up than your competition, right?

And that can of course expand beyond search, right? There’s other realms and verticals, social media marketing and, you know, direct marketing, all of that other stuff. But the idea at the end of the day is to become either the answer or solution to your potential, you know, client’s problem and or be front of mind whenever that particular problem or need comes to the mind of your potential consumer.

Correct?

Jesse Dolan (09:19)
Yeah. I like what you’re saying too with the digital real estate. You know, we’re finding that I wouldn’t say to an exact science here or, or, uh, her client or per entity, but the more you practice that right now, you know, like chat GPT, for example, right? It’s not, it’s not indexing all your web pages and site, right? It’s doing research to give you these answers and the more real estate you’re taking up digitally, right? The more prominent, the more trust you have with them, just like you would us human beings too, right? If.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (09:41)
Right.

Mm-hmm. Right.

Correct.

Jesse Dolan (09:49)
If I see, if I’m searching for something and I see your brand three or four times on that page or around search, you have authority. You’re sticking out to me. Same for getting found right now, at least, uh, in some of these chat models, because they’re doing the same things we would as humans. They’re just doing it faster, better, or while we do something else for us. So great nugget, great nugget for everybody, right? For a tip or trick, if you will on that, Adam, another question for you is, um, I guess, that’s kind of my two cents on how it works a little bit with.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (09:56)
Yeah. Exactly. Right.

Jesse Dolan (10:18)
I know you put out, think it was like the blog post or maybe a tweet or something I saw of a chat GPT using Bing, right? For, some of the results and kind of as a bit of a backbone, how do you think this works or maybe help explain to people how if you go to chat GPT and search for something, how is that different than going to Google right now? And you know, what’s, what’s good, what’s bad? What’s your, what’s your breakdown of that difference?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (10:25)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, so you know we have to think of link large language models essentially as a new type of search engine right and the the job of a large language model is to parse data this is why you can have you know there are systems where you can create your own agents for instance where you create and put in front of those agents or behind them your own data sources, right? And so every large language model has its data source. So we talked about Bing and ChatGBT. Of course, they have a partnership. And so a lot of the information and data that shows up, at least that is available on the web and querying the web when it comes to OpenAI and ChatGBT is coming from Microsoft Bing, right? And so that’s one area where it’s like us as digital marketers, especially in the SEO realm, I think need to be more cognizant of Microsoft being where in years past, they had such low market share that for many of us, it was kind of an afterthought, right? And same thing with Google and their AI overviews, same idea, different frame or wrapper, right? These large language models, just like search engines have to understand how to best parse information. Now, the way that they parse information and organize and prioritize what shows up is quite different, right? A large language models, hence the name language, cling a lot more onto semantics and relevance and they aggregate content as opposed to direct referential pinpoints like a search engine, right? So that is kind of how the things vary, right? But one of the things that… you know, we’re starting to really emphasize with our clientele is a continuation of a focus on building a brand and differentiators within businesses, products and services. And the idea there is, and we’ve seen this even from search engines like Google, where they’ve tried to figure out ways to better orient what constitutes an authoritative brand versus what doesn’t, right?

There’s always this potentiality to get spam or less than relevant content in search. so forever, search engines have been trying to combat that. And a big part of that problem is resolved on how do we identify what constitutes as an established authoritative brand versus what doesn’t. I think large language models very much have the capability to do that as well.

And then at the end of the day, because we are in this window of disruption, I, in some regard, want to go back to the basics, right? They’re, I find myself these days a lot more thinking about the traditional days of marketing. And I’m talking like almost pre TV where you’re like, you have radio and billboards, right? you think about the old classic Coca-Cola ads or, you know, whatever, whatever brand was out there. And so they had to use like psychology and like traditional marketing to establish brands. And I think we as marketers need to figure out how to go back to some of that basic element without necessarily avoiding the technology, right? Because I think these things are gonna start emerging more and more. And LLMs, from my estimation, introduce an opportunity to better distinguish authority and brands just because of their ability to aggregate large sets of data from a social media profile to a search query to a website. Put these all into a mix, boil them all together and say, here is the brands or the references that need to show up. Whereas search engines in some regard, although fairly complex, are arguably less sophisticated than large language models, right? So yeah, that’s kind of where my head has been at as far as a lot of these kinds of things, right?

Jesse Dolan (15:04)
Well, always data, right? The data points, know, trust in the data with regards to AI, what should we all be looking at kind of backing up the points you’re just making? What data are we looking at? What kind of hard points? What kind of KPIs when it comes to AI should we be paying attention to right now to take advantage of this and to show up or get that visibility? So.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (15:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the key is at this juncture, and I don’t see this changing drastically, a lot of the same tactics that we leveraged for search engine optimization are also going to be the same tactics that we leverage for large language models. Only I think the priority could start to shift, right?

In the realm of search engine optimization, there’s a lot of talk about off-page SEO. Usually this comes in the realm of link building. I don’t think that’s necessarily going away. But I can have a theory that the priority of things like backlinks are going to diminish over time, only because it seems like things like contextual relevance, metadata, schema markup, that large language models would be better suited by utilizing those as kind of a first point of reference. While still probably, again, depending on the model, referencing things like link authority, backlink authority, I could imagine that Google is probably still including some of that in their relevance, although it’s really hard to say at this point. But those are some of the conversations we’re having internally. We’re starting to test, you know, slowing down on an emphasis on backlink acquisition, particularly for a couple of clients who are kind of in our case study cadence, right, with their participation. like, hey, we’re going to back off on your backlink acquisition, double down on contextual relevance, technical SEO, and those kind of things, and see how it impacts you, not only in search, but also where we’re starting to show up within large language models. The other challenge that we’re still kind of in the midst of is attribution within large language models. We’re still really in kind of a mid-tier period where there are not a lot of systems that are doing a good job with that. Now, Google just announced recently that Google Search Console is soon to be looking at some kind of large language model attribution. But I don’t believe at this juncture we have dates or details on that, only an announcement that this is something they’re working on, right?

And so I think that will become more prominent over time, just like any technological change, it introduces new problems. The big problem right now is how do you attribute traffic from things like Grok or chat GBT, and in some, from a guard, probably Gemini as well, all the… Google has that infrastructure, I’m sure, being their ecosystem. But it introduces new problems. So there are going to be entrepreneurs, as well as businesses that are already established, that I think are going to come along to help solve those problems. And thus, we kind of come back to the thesis of there are new opportunities in the horizon that most of us are probably not even aware of yet as new problems arise.

Jesse Dolan (19:14)
A lot to emerge right to your point.

So just, we don’t even know where this is going to go. We’re just trying to figure out right now today what’s happening and how to leverage it. Right.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (19:20)
Yeah. And that’s the key. That’s the point is like, just, you know, get your hands wet because you don’t, you may not even know the problem or the solution right now, but if, if you’re playing with the tools, then you’re going to be ready to start, you know, putting a hammer to nail when an idea or an opportunity arises. Right. And, know, again, this, this could be business to business, right? Um, there are a lot of blue collar businesses still to this day that are not utilizing even basic technology. I’m still amazed to stay like how many businesses don’t have a website or have never done any kind of digital marketing. You know, they’re doing the bare minimum. so, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there. It’s just the opportunity, availability is going to shift and the, the, the, technology, the processes and procedures are going to shift as well. And so, you know, get involved before you do get behind. But to your point, we’re still early days in my estimation. I don’t think anyone who gets involved now is anywhere near being close to being behind. But there will be a day where if you put your head in the sand, you will find that you’re behind the curve.

Jesse Dolan (20:41)
Yeah. And there’s so many ways to use whatever just AI large language models. Like you’re saying, however, we’re going to reference them as a group, whether it be marketing to get found or leveraging it to scale or be efficient with your business. There should be some edges you’re bumping into to get this experience. I don’t want go back. You were talking about, like some of the metrics and the visibility. think the one thing that’s really challenging with the AI, regardless of the platform is you’re talking about how do we attribute traffic?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (20:55)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Dolan (21:11)
You know, how do we attribute? know you don’t have the answer to this, but just as a maybe venting and frustrated myself as a marketer, you know, how do we attribute the impressions, right? That just nobody even clicked through, but maybe there is this awesome, you know, snippet, if you will, that’s good show by AI that helps your brand. Like was really, really good. And you’re now resting in somebody’s mind, but you never got that click. There was no data point right for you to get that tangible, connection. That’s, that’s tricky. I mean, it can help you if you’re showing up and we can do our own testing, but.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (21:15)
Yeah

Mm-hmm.

Bye.

Right.

Jesse Dolan (21:41)
That’s undiscoverable almost, right? At this point, so.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (21:45)
Yeah, I mean, it is challenging. Like, and that’s, that’s kind of the conversations we’ve had with clients as of late is that, you know, there, there are KPIs that we’ve used in the past that are going to be become more and more obfuscated. We’ve seen, you know, click through rate for some brands and services has, you know, essentially been cut in half. Right. And we can see.

And track things like direct traffic, which a lot of large language models, you know, essentially accept their traffic as direct traffic. But even then, you can’t see where that’s coming from necessarily. You just see that that metric is on the rise, right? And then we’re seeing things like inside of platforms like Shopify, we’re starting to see some very basic attribution where we can see traffic coming from things like chat GBT, but really not given much more information beyond that, right? And so it is challenging, like, you know, because we tread the path to a particular project, your trajectory with particular KPIs. And now we’re having to be more agile and kind of help bridge that gap, right? And so I don’t have a perfect answer for that other than it’s like, you know, we have to think more, I think holistically and broadly about what we’re doing. And attribution hasn’t, it’s not like it’s a new challenge. It’s been a challenge for quite some time. I mean, even looking at examples of how different systems do attribution, right? One of the big challenges that we have as a digital marketing company is the difference in how Shopify, for instance, does attribution, which they do, they’re still doing like last click attribution and how Google Analytics does attribution. They’re doing a data-driven attribution model, right? And so if you compare these two things, it becomes starkly different, right? In fact, we wrote a blog post on this because we were getting so many questions from clients like, hey, why is my Shopify attribution data different than Google Analytics? And we have to explain like, well, the way that they do attribution is different, right? And the pros and cons to each, right? And so…

Jesse Dolan (24:04)
Different approaches.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (24:09)
I don’t think attribution is going to become less of a problem. It’s going to become more and more of a challenging problem, especially as things get fractured. Right. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. We’re seeing more of a fragmentation. And so as marketers and business owners, I think we’re going to have to get more comfortable with the idea of attribution being more and more blurred over time. Right. And the ironic thing is there are businesses that invest

Jesse Dolan (24:17)
All

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (24:37)
know, tens of millions of dollars on brand building activities without any real, you know, super close the gap key on attribution, right? How, for instance, do I measure the value of a brand like Nike or Coke, right? I, you know what I mean? Like I kick, somebody goes and buys some tennis shoes from Foot Locker. There’s some, let’s say they’re Nike.

How do I attribute that they actually saw an advertisement over a span of three years and that that was the motivator for them to buy, right? Or maybe they saw a social media ad and that was the thing that triggered them to like, I have affinity for that brand. And so, like it’s not a perfect answer because we obviously, if we invest money in marketing, we wanna be able to attribute that to the dollar and cent.

But I think at least in the short term, we’re going to have to get more comfortable with looking at the large trend. Is your bottom line growing? Is your generalized traffic across channels, direct referral, organic paid, is it growing? And then figure out where we can attribute things in the minutiae.

Jesse Dolan (25:43)
Yeah. I think that’s a good, for me, at least in my mind, a segue, another topic I wanted to run past you. you were on another podcast. The name is escaping me off hand. but talking about if you want to be, if you want to have this authority, right? Like you’re talking like Nike, Coca-Cola, these brands, you know, just ubiquitous to us out there, but they just, they have that authority and how we can gain as local marketers, starting in your own backyard first, right? If you’re some up in the Minnesota area, you know, if I want to be ranking or get visibility, if you will, in Minneapolis, if I’m 30 miles outside of Minneapolis, now, if I’m not ranking or I think as you put it, like the rock star in my own hometown, you good luck, you know, going to the major metropolitan area. And so same kind of thing here. Maybe you can’t attribute in your hometown why somebody clicked or why somebody, you know,

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (26:27)
Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (26:51)
leverage your call to action. But if you’re a rock star, it kind of doesn’t matter, right? You just know you’re out there. Can you share some insights on why you believe that? Which I 100 % agree with. And maybe what does that mean again to these local businesses listening or watching here? How do they take action to be that rock star?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (26:56)
Sure.

Uh-huh.

Yeah,

I mean, there’s a lot of ways. Like, I think you have to get, one, get involved in your community, However that looks, there’s different ways from various business and chamber groups. Get involved in social media marketing as best as you can, right?

I think that’s an opportunity. Get involved in generalized digital marketing, right? Because that might bridge the gap. Somebody might see you at a business, you know, development group or in, you know, on your social media profile, and then do a search for you and see an ad that pops up or see your listing in the organic results. Really at the end of the day, like my goal and what I emphasize with a lot of our clients is you want to be, you want to be the, the person, the business, the authority that comes to mind when your potential client tells are ready to pull the trigger on what it is that you do. Right.

That’s something that we’ve implemented in our brand. And I have people that they reach out to me and like, yeah, I’ve been following your stuff for years. And I wasn’t ready three years ago to launch a website or do digital marketing. Nonetheless, I’ve kept an eye on what you’re doing. And now I’m ready. And you’re the person I want to work with. That happens to me all the time. But it doesn’t happen overnight, right? You do have to establish yourself. I think part of that too gets into the realm of working on the business and not in the business. I think we’ve all heard this. Sometimes I roll my eyes when I hear that, but it’s true, right? And that doesn’t always mean that you as the business owner, operator, CEO, or founder have to do everything. In fact, you should be leveraging other people, their skills and their capabilities to help you with these other… verticals, know be it hiring hiring a marketing company to build your brand or to help you with You know dominance and surge to build a paid advertising strategy, right? But nonetheless you should have some kind of strategy To build a brand whether it’s a personal brand or the brand of the business or some combination of the two, right? I do see it seems like these days there is a lot more interest in having a personal face to the brand, right? And so I do challenge businesses to do that. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be the owner and founder, but you should have somebody who’s established and committed to the business that can also be the face of the brand, right? Somebody that you trust that’s gonna be there for the long run. Most times that’s gonna be a founder or a CEO, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. But nonetheless, it seems like market behavior is becoming more and more attractive to the person behind the brand, regardless of how big or small the company is. But even outside of that, really focusing on that brand and then leveraging all the different channels that can build upon that from search to social to good old PR and branding.

Jesse Dolan (30:24)
They leverage these different channels just to be clear for everybody. You’re saying like you better be active in them, posting on them, engaging in them. not just maybe, writing a blog post and just randomly throwing up snippets everywhere, but, participating and, doing it regularly, things like this. Is that, is that what you’re saying?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (30:30)
Right? Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean we’re we don’t have the luxury anymore of just having a single channel marketing approach right it used to be a very common where Businesses could could survive and thrive off of one marketing channel, right? Maybe maybe they got really good at SEO, right and that worked really well Maybe they got really good at running ads in search, you know Or really good at Facebook advertising or Facebook marketing I think the days of having a single channel marketing approach and having it be extremely successful are far and few between, right? Now, the beauty of having and testing multiple channels is, you know, often you’ll find ones that outperform others, but nonetheless, like as business owners, we now have to be thinking multi-channel approach, right?

And let’s be honest, if you’re a small business owner, that’s challenging, if not almost impossible to do on your own, right? And so that’s where you need partners. You need to bring in outside support or even potentially hire someone in-house. But some of the advantages you’re going to get with an agency is typically you’re going to get access to a multifaceted team of experts in different disciplines, right?

Jesse Dolan (32:03)
Yeah. At tell people just like you as a business and a business owner are an expert in what you’re selling. And if somebody was to come to you and say, well, I should just do that myself versus patronizing you. You’d have all the reasons in the world on why, no, like, trust me, you know, we got your back on this, but those same business owners often feel like they can just be Superman or superwoman and in the marketing side of things, just.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (32:16)
Right.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (32:27)
Do it all themselves because that’s part of the sales and marketing of their business, not looking at it as, you know, this, this silo of, of talent, right. Or things to do that maybe somebody else could be as effective if not more, and then free you up to be your rock star.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (32:32)
Right.

Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a reason I don’t change my own oil now could I yeah, I’ve done it before I mean, you know, I could go on YouTube and watch some videos and, but, uh, you know, one, don’t, I don’t have the skills and training, you know, to, to not maybe make a mistake. Uh, two, like my time is better served doing what, you know, what I do best. Right. Um, and there’s probably a handful of other reasons why it doesn’t make sense for me to, you know, fix my own engine or change my own oil. Like I would much rather take my car to a mechanic who that is their livelihood. That’s what they do. They’re gonna do it right the first time. So I’m saving time and money at the end of the day, right? It’s the same with anything, especially marketing.

Jesse Dolan (33:31)
Yep. Yeah. Just play to your strengths, right? And if you’re trying to grow your business, especially, you know, have some professional support, right? Whether they completely do it for you or pull up next to you at least, you know, know, trust that, want to expand also, or, or see if you agree with me, maybe there’s a better way to put it. You, you talked about being involved on these channels, right?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (33:40)
Yeah.

Right.

Jesse Dolan (33:55)
And I think that’s good advice for everybody kind of twofold. One is you can be found in these channels. Just take like Facebook or, know, Facebook’s probably a good example. I think people are searching in Facebook more than they used to, whether it be a saw post and you want to learn more or whatever. Again, it’s not just Google. So take that, you know, to all platforms, people, you can not only reach people and get exposure to them, but they are using them now to search and gather information. secondly,

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (34:07)
Sure. Yeah.

Sure.

Jesse Dolan (34:23)
It’s so you can reach people through these different platforms now, but then also if you’re engaged in all these platforms again, back to something like a chat GPT, if it’s doing a search, it’ll see you in all these platforms and that’s you get that authority and kind of that dominance as well. You agree or do you have anything else to shed on that?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (34:30)
Uh-huh.

Exactly. Yep.

No, think you nailed it on the head. That’s part of the point. And search engines are really no different. The modern search engines are aggregating data from Facebook and Twitter and all these other profiles, platforms. And so search isn’t just text-based blue links anymore. And again, that’s why I encourage people, search your name, search your business, see what comes up. Do you see a lot of YouTubes in the search results?

You’ve never done a YouTube video, you should be doing that. You should be thinking that as your SEO strategy, so to speak. Same with maps. If you’re not in maps and you see that others in your market are, there’s some work to be done there. And so the same things generally hold to be true with search engines as they do with large language models. The more pervasive you can be in these platforms, the more likely you’re going to show up when these systems aggregate results based on these platforms. Right. And so, you know, the modern day of SEO, you know, quite honestly involves social media marketing and PR and, know, general, website, you know, presence, like all of these things kind of now have to be factored into what we used to call, you know, search engine optimization.

Jesse Dolan (36:09)
Right. Used to that’s kind of scary when you say it like that. so going down the rabbit hole for everybody here, I didn’t read your blog posts on this yet. cause I wanted to kind of learn it from you here on the fly. email SEO, I kind of read the headline. So not only is all this traditional stuff, but what the heck are we talking about now that our emails actually matter to some degree in search? Can you tell us, tell us about that?

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (36:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Yeah, so Google recently announced that they are going to start indexing, parsing publicly available email newsletters, right? So these are your, you know, your MailChimp’s, your iContact, any of these platforms where they have, you know, public indexable, as far as I understand content on there, right?

And this is positioned primarily to e-commerce platforms, although there’s probably ways to utilize this outside of e-commerce. course. the idea is Google is looking to expand their horizons into the information that they index. So now it’s theoretical that you could have an email newsletter that you essentially intended to only go to your mailing list. That, unless you particularly or specifically opt out, Google could use that information in their search results, right? And they made an announcement a couple of months on that, a couple of months ago, letting users know that this was happening, right? And even provided an option whereby you can actually add a, and I forget the URL, it’s in the blog post, a particular email address that tells Google like, hey, we want you to actually index our email list. And so we’re gonna put your moniker at

Jesse Dolan (37:56)
interesting.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (37:59)
Gmail or Google mail.com email in our mailing list to help push that process along. It’s hard to tell exactly what they’re doing. My theory outside of just purely indexing and kind of force indexing these HTML based email frames as some platforms have is, which I think is why they.

They made the announcement and said, hey, if you don’t want to do this, you have to opt out. They’re really not asking for permission. They’re basically saying, we’re doing this. If you don’t want it, then opt out. So it’s a forced opt in. But my theory is because Google looks at Gmail accounts is that if I have, let’s say a private Gmail or email marketing list rather, and I send it to you, Jesse, and it gets into your Gmail inbox that Google sees that and now starts to build references back to Enleaf, to our brand, and starts to build an additional contextual roadmap based off of that. I don’t have any hard data to back that up, but just understanding how Google works and understanding that the information they parse is not just search. It’s Gmail. It’s Google Drive. They look at all this stuff, and they factor it into various different systems that I wouldn’t be surprised if that is also what they’re doing, especially since this is a forced opt out option. But on the flip side, my mind goes to how can I use this to my advantage? I could literally create an email list of one, sending it just to Google with the context or relevance that I want them to understand, much like we used to do keyword stuffing in search. I could create a custom email that’s just for Google that says, Okay, Enleaf is the best SEO company in Spokane or whatever context or relevance I want to communicate to them, my gray slash black hat starts to come on and think about how can I use this new availability to my advantage, right?

Jesse Dolan (40:12)
Right?

It’s crazy interesting. And if, and if nothing else too, think everybody maybe should read between the lines. You’re kind of inferring it, but like they’re digesting this information. You know mean? If it’s out there, if it’s basically on a webpage, Google’s privy to it. And I guess the other side of that too, is back to your being active in all these channels as a local marketer nowadays. Hey, make sure you’re sending out email newsletters as well. Right? Not only to dominate in your local area and be a rock star.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (40:21)
Yeah. Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (40:43)
But yeah, Google and Google’s reading that too now. Right. And, even if that you mentioned, maybe that email could show up in search results, even if it doesn’t, they’re still parsing it out and reading it. And it’s part of your encyclopedia within Google, if you will, information about you. So get it out there for your prospects, for your clients and for all the bots and AI agents, right? Like just be active and just crush it out there and all your marketing channels, bring in support or professionals. if you can’t do all this, you need to do it all, you know, so.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (40:47)
Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yep.

Jesse Dolan (41:14)
That’s crazy. Interesting. just whatever the next thing is, right? Just if it’s digital, let’s just assume that it kind of matters, going forward or, or it’ll get sucked up like a, like a sponge. another thing I wanted to ask you about for reverberating listening, I meant to ask this earlier when we were talking a little bit more on the AI side, Adam is, you mentioned a tool. I haven’t personally used this yet, but I picked this up on a different show or something. heard you on, make.com. for bringing in different AI tools, right? You stuck out to me, yeah, I must’ve been listening to it, because you mentioned Zapier, which is a tool I think a lot of people use, I use it all the time. Great for connecting different things together easily. Is that what this is within regards to AI? And do you have any kind of working example maybe for, again, the local business owners, marketing managers listening on how can they leverage this? Not so much to get found, you know, but just.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (41:44)
Sure. Yeah.

Yeah

Yeah.

Sure.

Jesse Dolan (42:12)
to do things within their business sounds pretty interesting to me.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (42:16)
Yeah, there’s a lot of different systems now. There’s a make.com. Of course, Zapier has been around for a while, and they’re doing a lot of good stuff integrating AI. n8n is another tool, much like in the realm of make. And then even some other systems, like we have some systems that integrate.

Various LLMs into Google Sheets using Google Apps Script, although there are third party plugins that also do this process with no code. And so all of these systems can and should be used for automating and systemizing processes.

There’s I mean really honestly like with these you’re you’re kind of limited one to your imagination and then to To your familiarity with the tools. However, most of the tools at this point are WYSIWYG based editor tools With generally drag-and-drop flow logic where you log into your various platforms I mean take take one example You you could with little experience, you know a YouTube tutorial which there are plenty of them.

Build a system where you put out one message and it syndicates to all your social media channels, right? That’s one of those quick and dirty automations. I see people typically do then start out with But taking that further figure out what are your own business processes that you repeat, know every single day or very commonly I know for instance, we’ve built another a number of tools internally to help streamlined know, processes that we do often, right? Let’s take press releases as an example. We have a Google Sheet tool that uses a series of prompts inside of Google Sheets that allows us to essentially automate press releases. So what we are able to do is basically take answers, you know, take, we have a series of set questions that we ask for every press release.

And then we have the answers that are provided often from the client. And then it will auto-generate a press release in an AP style format. And then we just do a simple editing process just to make sure it looks all kosher. But then we now no longer have to do the heavy lifting of having a writer create that press release piece. And we can use the same model for things like blog post, even books, right? I have a whole system now that will create a whole business book within a matter of minutes just by answering a small series of questions. However, like inside your own business, there’s probably plenty of things specific to you that you can start automating and systemizing. And I think that’s part of the key with a lot of this is we’re going to have to become more lean and efficient as businesses just because these tools allow a lot more of a technological like leveling effect, right? So take advantage of it now, you know, because if you don’t, your competitors probably eventually will, right? And so just start thinking, what is it that we do day in and day out that we can automate or systemize to impact what we do and do it more efficiently?

Jesse Dolan (45:57)
Yeah. Just like if you weren’t concerned about search engines in the early two thousands, they’re just, everybody uses them now, right? You just, it’s part of what we do. It’s the fabric of finding things, buying things, living and existing almost. AI seems in the ether, seems kind of crazy, like some technological wave that’s coming, but no, it’s here. It’ll evolve under our feet and under our noses as we go forward.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (46:05)
Right.

Yep.

Jesse Dolan (46:25)
Start playing with it now. mean, you’ve kind of said the same thing multiple ways here, but like, get in there, get in the mix, be educated. If there is a big shift that happens on any given date or time coming forward, now you’ll at least be educated preliminarily on what you’re dealing with, what you’re seeing. And able to take advantage instead of saying, okay, now I need to pay attention. Yeah. You’re going to be mid or more behind the pack, you know, at that point. So get in there early.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (46:30)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (46:53)
Last area I have to kind of throw at you here, Adam, unless you have anything you want to expand on or, or drop some knowledge on is the talk about.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (46:58)
Yeah, nothing specific. yeah, great question so far. I had, you know, really enjoyed kind of, you know, talking through some of these things with you, but yeah, what else do you got for me?

Jesse Dolan (47:07)
Thank you.

I like some of the things that you say over the years about leadership, kind of being an entrepreneur and whether it be investing into different things as well, understanding where your money’s coming from, know, accumulating wealth, delegating, just so many things. I think you’re, on point for how to do this, right? As a, somebody trying to make money and provide for your family and, help everybody else and just be a good person. What are some tips or some things that you’ve learned along the way? It doesn’t have to be straight marketing or applicable to digital marketing and stuff here. but to help everybody listening and managers, entrepreneurs themselves, leadership scaling kind of lessons. you learned along the way that you really feel, you want to put back out there for everybody else.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (48:02)
Yeah, I mean, I think it obviously depends on people’s DNA, you their business DNA, so to speak. But I know for me personally, I sleep better at night knowing that I have a diversity, you know, diversity in like money streams and income, right?

You know, one of that comes from running an agency with multiple clients. Unlike a day job, there’s not a single point of failure. But even in addition to that, I take a percentage of everything that I, you know, I take home, each and every month and reinvest a lot of that, know, number one, back into myself, right. with masterminds, networking groups, training materials, but beyond that, you know, looking at things like stocks and real estate.

And I’ve done that incrementally throughout the years so that if and when we face disruption, I have other things that are my safety net, right?

And I find that as, as a business owner and entrepreneur, having that safety net also allows you to not make, decisions out of desperation, right? it’s also why I suggest people that are thinking about going out on their own, maybe they have a day job, you know, have a really good nest egg, save up six months to a year of equivalent salary before you make that jump. So that when you start your, you know, your entrepreneurial adventure, to speak, you’re not going to, you know, you’re not going to be desperate to take on less than favorable clients or do things that go against your, you know, your business acumen or any of that kind of thing. Right. So I’m a big believer in diversity or diversification rather, and making money work for you. Right.

Jesse Dolan (50:00)
That provides some security. Yeah, I think you have some great points there. Whether somebody’s starting out on their own, branching off, like is it get that nest egg going, just the head space that you’re able to be in when you’re not. Every decision is critical, can we get bread this week or not. Yeah, you’re gonna plot your course and stick to it if you can kind of shed some of that stress, right, and have that perspective. I really like that. I really like that for everybody.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (50:16)
Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Thanks.

Jesse Dolan (50:27)
I think that’s about it for me, Adam, great knowledge. We kind of covered a range of topics, but really all centered around, think, digital marketing and helping people grow their business. 2025 is going to be interesting. We’re about what halfway through here. I don’t think we’re done seeing evolution in this space at all.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (50:38)
Yeah. It is. All right. No.

No. Yeah, it’s going to be wild. Try your best. And I’m speaking to myself as much as everybody else. But try your best to enjoy it, not get too anxious about it.

And yeah, just, just enjoy the ride. think, I think that’s all you can do when there, there is unknowns, right? There’s this big fear of unknown, but, also understand that, you know, with, with new challenges and problems, there are also new opportunities. And that’s, I think the thing that, keeps me going, you know, when, when things get tough or when it gets a little bit, you know, rocky as far as, what does this look like? Right. Just know that there will be.

Other opportunities out there and if you’re open to it, know, you’ll be there to embrace it

Jesse Dolan (51:39)
Yeah, somebody’s going to do it, right? Might as well be you or me or us. for sure. All right. Thanks Adam. Hope to have you on again in a future show here. Talk more about this as things will change. But in the meantime, appreciate it.

Adam Chronister – Enleaf (51:40)
Yeah, why not you, right? Yeah.

Pleasure.

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