Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Brand entity SEO for entrepreneurs. Today I'm joined with Jason Barnard from Calic Cube and I've actually Jason I'm going to start off by I've got a question from one of the community that says Jason you built your own personal brand from zero in 2012 to knowledge panel to having Google and chat GPT and other AI platforms actually advocating for you. That's massive. And what does that bring to your business, Cali Cube?

Jason Barnard: Right, lovely question. What it brings to my business at Cali Cube is a lot of revenue. Um, my personal brand is hugely valuable to Cali Cube. It's one of Cali Cub's biggest assets. People come to Cali Cube and work with Cali Cube and hire Cali Cube because of my personal brand 80% of the time. So what I've learned is it's taken me a long time, 13 years, but it's the biggest revenue driver for Cali Cube today.

James Dooley: So with regards to that, I'm let's say I'm a business owner and I've got I've been going for 5 years. I've got a successful business and I'm a successful business owner. Neither one of us have really got strong we haven't got a KGM ID. Where would I start first? Would I try to optimize my personal brand or my business brand first?

Jason Barnard: Well, I would often or tend to say personal brand. Obviously, it depends on the case. Sometimes that wouldn't be the case, but you can generally take a take a step back and say, okay, would my personal brand drive revenue in the way that Jason Barard's personal brand drives revenue for Cali Cube? Not necessarily 80%, but would it drive revenue? If the answer is yes, focusing on your personal brand first is a good idea. People do business with people. So, if you're going to be in any way the face of your business, this is almost going to be an absolute no-brainer. Work on my personal brand. The other thing is building a personal brand online is significantly easier than building a corporate brand online. So, you have people do business with people. Personal brands are much easier to build than corporate brands and faster to build than corporate brands. And your personal brand can drive revenue for your business faster than if you focus on a corporate brand first.

James Dooley: So let's say I go down the route of going, okay, I'm going to do my personal brand first. I'm going to do going to go all in on getting my personal brand out there. What's the relationship between me as being the founder and the company that it's attached to?

Jason Barnard: Lovely question because all of these machines are looking for relationships that are close, strong, and long. And I talk about this all the time in the knowledge panel course that you've done. The most important relationships that the that any AI is looking for is close, strong, and long relationships. Now, close founder. I'm the founder of the company. Me and the company are very close. Strong, you can't get stronger than the founder of the company. And long, it's infinite. You're always going to be the founder of the company. CEO of the company would be less long because it has a time limit either because you get fired or because you leave or because you die. So the founder relationship with the com company is the strongest possible relationship for the company.

James Dooley: Yeah, makes sense. And on this now, because we're talking about entrepreneurs, I've got an interesting one here, right? An entrepreneur generally takes risks, right? Which then means that they're going to probably be involved in multiple businesses. Not just going to be a business owner. For any business owner watching this who's involved in one business, check out the link in the description where we talk about brand density SEO specifically just for business owners. But as an entrepreneur, guess what happens? you end up investing in different businesses, right? So, I've got a business and sorry, I've got a a knowledge panel that I'm a a local plumber and I go and decide that during my time as being a local plumber, I've got this other company down the road who's a brilliant company. I'm going to invest in them and they're a roofer and everything on my personal branding is related to being a plumber, but I want know the connection. I've just bought this new business. How do I change and pivot my personal brand from something that it knows me about into something new? Can I can I change it slightly that I'm interested in both or not?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And it's a great example because the two are related. So that's a much easier pivot than if you were suddenly investing in a football team, let's say. Um but yes, people are multifaceted. We have multiple companies. We have multiple activities in our lives. And the machines understand that. Their problem is figuring out who's who. And there are two problems of ambiguity. One is you do multiple things. And how does it know it's not multiple people with the same name and you share your name with multiple people who do different things. So you might share your name with somebody who is a footballer, let's say, or a famous historical figure. It's difficult for the machines to understand which is which. So you've got those two ambiguity problems and it all comes back to exactly the same thing we've been talking about in multiple episodes in this series. Create your entity home, the place where the algorithms can look where you explain who you are. And on that entity home, you would create one page for companies, a dedicated page where you list the companies and you say, "I'm a founder of this company. I'm an investor in this company." And then you link through to a dedicated page for each company that explains what it does. But on the companies page, it this is the claim frame prove part. What you need to do is look at the companies you're investing in and you founded and that you have um a relationship with and write a text that brings them all together in one framing that makes sense of why all of those companies go together under your uh one roof. why it makes sense and try to frame it so that it brings advantage, brings a positive um signal to all of the different companies because as we said those companies have a close relationship to you and any authority signals that you can bring will apply to the company and that writing that framing text is incredibly important and I'll give you the example is I founded a record company in the 1990s and then an edtech company in the in 2000 and now Cali cube. I need to write a text that brings those three together. So that the fact that I did a deal with Warner Chapel, I was doing deals with EMI in the 1990s and I was doing deals with Disney and Samsung in the year 2000. That means that at Cali cube I'm a more valuable authoritative entrepreneur because I did those deals in those two completely different industries. So I minimize the difference in the industries in my framing and I maximize the relationships with big big big companies

James Dooley: on that. Do you know if like you've done lots of different so you've been a musician and there's lots of other things of what you what you've done but let's say myself I'm I'm in 2026 now and I'm looking I'm an entrepreneur and I'm looking to improve my knowledge panel me personally I don't care about what you did 20 years ago. No. Can there be sometimes too much noise being shared about your past that you you're concentrating on your past too much that you're not I'm a branding expert. I can help you with your branding as an entrepreneur and this is what I'm going to talk about as opposed to things I did 15 20 years ago or does the LLMs and Google knowledge graph like historical things of what you've done over the time but it does that not move you away from what you are now today? Does that make sense?

Jason Barnard: Yeah, it does. And you got to be really careful. And if you do it badly, it will simply confuse things. So placing things in their temporal context is incredibly important. So I would I would just say I signed a deal with Samsung and I wouldn't put a date on it because signing a deal with Samsung is super impressive. I was a musician in a punk folk band in 1992 pushes it right back to the past. So they understand that it's not relevant today. Um so that that's the trick is you need to make the chronological context incredibly clear when you went want something to be pushed into the background into the past and they won't focus on it because they know that it's in the past. But if it has beneficial effects for you today in terms of authority, talk about it. And Samsung is a good example. But then for example, EMI, uh, Warner Chapel, uh, Disney also great examples. And I can actually hook them into up to 10 Limited in 2000 and WTPL music in the 1990s by saying I signed those deals whilst I was at those companies. Therefore, I'm a really good entrepreneur and a good business person and a good salesperson. Therefore, Cali cube is a more respectable business.

James Dooley: With regards to So, this episode here is about brand density SEO for entrepreneurs, right? With regards to entrepreneurs, you've worked with so many different entrepreneurs that have got the entrepreneurial mindset. They want to they want to grow. They want the best knowledge panel that there is. two side by side two entrepreneurs both of them get the KGM ID the knowledge graph machine ID what differentiates entity like entrepreneur number one with entrepreneur number two one successful and one plateaus out what what is the diff why why is one plateauing and why is one ridiculously successful what's the difference when you're seeing two different clients that you're working with

Jason Barnard: well if they've plateaued within the sphere of Google and AI, it's because they're not leveraging the assets, the digital assets that they have. And that's what we do at Cali Cube is we take the digital assets you have and we will leverage them for their maximum value. Um and that's actually as you said you got got two people who have very similar authority authority signals but they simply one of them simply hasn't leveraged them into the AI and we talked a lot about educating the AI and that's what it is. I say that I'm an amazing entrepreneur. Can I prove it? and I need to prove it visibly online on thirdparty websites and one one kind of interesting thing which is within the SEO industry authoritas recently did a study of which figures in the SEO industry dominate when you ask who is the world's leading expert in generative engine optimization who is the world's leading expert in answer engine optimization who is the world's leading expert in uh modern SEO whatever you want to call it so we did 10 phrases is sorry, authoritized 10 phrases and I came out top every single time. I dominated and I don't dominate because I'm better than any of the other experts and I don't dominate because I'm more famous than any of the experts because honestly they're all more famous than I am. I dominate because I leverage my assets better.

James Dooley: Yeah, that makes sense. And a big one that you always talk about to me is that I've got some books, I've got some podcasts, um I've got several different companies, and obviously I've got my own KGM ID for myself, my own knowledge panel. And you always talk about that if I can improve the um entity of my book that I'm the author of indirectly or directly, sorry, it improves me. And if I improve my podcast which is directed through to me, it improves me. If I improve me as being a person, it improves my businesses on my business KGM ideas.

Jason Barnard: Lovely.

James Dooley: So everything's kind of a rising tide lifts all ship so to speak. So for an entrepreneur watching this that now understands that personal branding and a personal KGM ID and by them improving their own knowledge panel will improve their businesses. If they've only got 10 hours to work on a month, where does that 10 hours go into? What should you be telling an entrepreneur now for brand entity SEO in 2026 to do with 10 hours a month?

Jason Barnard: Well, the first thing is the book is if you just publish a book and hope you will do what a lot of people do, which is duplicate yourself. By by default, the machines will all think it's two different people. So the authority you think you're getting in the minds of the machines, you're not getting at all because it thinks it's somebody else. So your first step is to publish your book, right? And on on our website, cycube.com, you can find information about that or you work with us and we'll tell you how to do it, help you to do it. So make sure that any asset you create is explicitly linked to you or it will not help your tide rise as you said earlier on. Yeah. So that's the first big big mistake people make is they don't realize that an asset existing doesn't necessarily mean that it's attached to you. And if it's not attached to you, you don't get the value you think you're getting from it. But if you're going to spend 10 hours a week on your personal brand building that up, make sure you've got your website and make sure that your book, your podcast, your podcast appearances are all on that website and that you link out to the resources that demonstrate it's you to Amazon for the book, to your podcast website if you've got one, or if you're publishing on something like Spotify, it links out to Spotify. So that these assets that you're building are beneficial to you because the machines understand clearly that it is indeed you. And that ambiguity of your name we're talking about earlier on is really really foundational here because if you do a podcast appearance, how on earth does the machine know it's you and not somebody else with the same name? If you link to it from your website, it explicitly knows that is you. And

James Dooley: how important if you're doing a lot of different podcasts episodes, how important is it to you're telling me there right every are you saying every single episode of a podcast should become a URL a page on your entity home website?

Jason Barnard: Yes. If you really want to do the job properly, that's how you should do it. Because when you publish it on your website, you publish it on a page, you can put the transcript, you can hand correct the transcript. Really important thing to do because auto transcripts get it wrong all the time, misspell names. Uh you can also correct it so that instead of having the M and the R that people say all the time, you remove those and you change sentences that people don't finish to become complete sentences. Then the AI will understand it. So you can re reframe a little bit. You obviously can't rewrite the entire thing. Transcript very important. Also, you can publish your perspective on what was said, which isn't the same thing as the show notes and the perspective of the the the podcast publisher, which allows the machine to understand what your perspective of that was. It remains third party corroboration, and they're vouching for you, but you get to give your side of the story. Now, you said 10 hours. If I don't have enough time in those 10 hours to publish one page, do the transcript and I don't have anybody who can do it for me. Second best is to have one long page with sections with an H2 for each one in reverse chronological order with just a little paragraph about your perspective on that particular podcast episode. That's going to be enough. and and if you was to do the one page and a H2 for every episode um and let's say there was 200 episodes, would you in each H2 section, let's say on that podcast, if there was um an Apple, an Amazon, um a Spotify, um an IMDb, would you for every single H2 section link to each one of the episode URLs?

Jason Barnard: Um there are so many platforms. No. is the answer. There comes a point when you end up with too many links on your page. So, you would pick three or four platforms and link to them systematically. Uh my recommendation would be Apple, um Spotify, Amazon, IMDb, and IMDb is a special case because it adds some extra work for you. But my perspective is it's definitely worth the effort.

James Dooley: Right. Sounds good. So, anyone who's watching this with regards to being an entrepreneur, have you got the entrepreneurial spirit to go and build your own personal brand, Jason Barard at Cali Cuba spoke about brand entity SEO specifically for entrepreneurs. If you're a local tradesman or high net worth individual, make sure you check out the links. This is part five in a whole playlist series all related to branding and entity SEO in 2026. Jason, it's been a pleasure.

Jason Barnard: Thank you, James.