AI, SEO, and the Future of Solo Entrepreneurship with Bill Widmer

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net slash studio. That's marketingpodcasts.net slash studio. you're listening to entrepreneurs enigma a podcast about the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey every week your host seth goldstein interviews entrepreneurs from all walks of life about their entrepreneurial journeys.

From store owners to Fortune 500 CEOs, we all have stories to tell. So sit back and join us for the next 20 or so minutes while we explore the entrepreneurial world. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Entrepreneurs Enigma podcast.

I am your host, as always, Seth with Podcast Mastery and Goldstein Media. Today I have a good buddy of mine, Bill Widmer. He is an SEO, AEO, AEI, EIO, Old MacDonald, How to Farm, you know, all that stuff, expert. He is an ADHD coach.

He is an ADHD-er, so he's part of the club. And he's done a lot. He is an SEO veteran with over a decade of experience, including building and selling a high-traffic travel blog, writing content for B2B SaaS companies like AHREFs. I think it's just AHREFs, right?

It's not AHREFs. It's AHREFs that like to make things difficult by putting an A in the front because technically, if you know the code, it is AHREFs, but whatever. SEMrush, Monday, and more. These days, he's obsessed with AI to augment SEO, so growing SaaS companies can show up in the AI results without the giant agency price tag.

That's what everyone's trying to do right now is figure out how to get into the AI, but also not break the bank and go out of business before you get the benefits of being in AI. Bill is also the founder of the Momentum Lab, where he coaches ADHD solopreneurs out of overwhelm and into actual shipping their work. which if you're not nor a spicy like us you won't be able to understand that but like it can be a struggle at times kind of getting things going and staying on track of things or in my case I put the systems in place but now I'm so upset I have so much anxiety that I get things done I don't have procrastination I'm the opposite which is very bizarre for me so Bill how you doing buddy you're in Austin right now you're a former not Philadelphia you're more you're more a Poconos boy right?

Poconos yep. Poconos yeah well I'm a Philly boy so I won't hold it against you. It's prettier up there less traffic actually not anymore traffic trying to get to Tannersville to go to like to Camelback is insane. Yeah.

It used to be easy to get up there and it used to be able to say like not that much traffic compared to Philadelphia but eh not so much so bill how'd this all get started what's your origin story my friend yeah um origin story i am a boy who grew up in the woods in the middle of nowhere and uh just i i guess the very first thing that kicked off my entrepreneurial journey was i was working at dollar general right after i got high school and absolutely hated it was so miserable working there and at a certain point I just broke down I was like I cannot do this anymore and decided at that point to go to college and just change everything and just do whatever I could not have to work another job like that again and in college I had some professors who helped me to start my first business which was a promotional products company oh wow yeah I had two customers, my professor and my mom.

Hey, go knock it. Yeah Yeah But it got my feet in the door and then I really enjoyed it Um and then from there I did a whole bunch of things I did everything I could pretty much I sold these wooden frames with melted down glass beer bottles on them that I found at a thrift store. I bought like a hundred of them off of this woman. And then I used like a burner, a wood burner, to carve people's initials and little messages and stuff into them.

And I resold them at other flea markets and on Etsy and stuff. Oh, wow. So, yeah, I've drop shipped stuff from China. I did social media marketing.

I did copywriting. But copywriting and SEO was really the first one that I was like, okay, I can actually make good money doing this. And you found your niche. You found that you're passionate about it.

You like it. Because everyone who knows with ADHD, if you're not passionate about it, oh, it is a struggle. but if you love it you can do it like it's like i don't even have to take my medicine one to do this stuff this is this is incredible this is like i can just go go go go go so it's amazing that way so and so then left college and then was it did you ever work for the for the man for the woman for the person or did you just kind of do the freelance you know thing i pretty much just went straight freelance my last real job was uh working at starbucks in college so it's a free free coffee yeah yeah uh so that wasn't the last real job i had but i also did other things like i sold phones for verizon and um sold kitchen knives cutco door to door oh you're one of those guys yeah but i don't consider those a real job because it was like they're like paid they're more pay the bill things like oh my main hustle is like not bringing the money in all right go work for Verizon for a little bit.

I did Circuit City. I did journalism, then I did Circuit City for a while. I sold Connex boxes, those big construction boxes, like shipping containers to construction sites. Oh, wow.

That was an experience. You know you're liked when they curse you out. They're like, what the F do you want? How the F are you, man?

F you, F this. I'm like, oh, no, we like you, man. You're a good dude. You're a good dude.

F you. And I'm like, what? It was very bizarre. Very bizarre times.

So now you go ahead. My dad and my stepdad are both in construction. So you're used to that kind of saltiness. Yeah, I get it.

You get exactly where I'm coming from. So then you did a travel blog. Tell me a little bit about that. What was that all about?

Yeah. So after college, I didn't know where I wanted to live. I knew I didn't want to live in Pennsylvania. It was way too old.

And also the Poconos, because you're at higher elevation than Philly, so it's cold up there. Yeah, yeah, cold and cloudy most of the time. But I'd never really left Pennsylvania, and I didn't know where I would want to go. So me and my partner at the time decided to buy an RV and go travel the country and just live out of it.

Oh, that's fun. And so how many states have you been to? I don't know the exact number, most of them. oh wow and then you settled out you eventually made your way to austin which is talk about a quirky town it's a little blue dot in a sea of red and it is a quirky fun town never been i want to go to austin so bad you should but it's yeah yeah you'll say hey bill i'm coming to austin show me around because i hear austin's like it's such a quirky interesting town which is fun so and so And then how did you find your way into SEO?

I mean that's kind of the question everyone is - no one really knows how they fall into it. They kind of just end up in it. But do you know how you fell into it? Oh, yeah.

So like I said, I started a bunch of different companies. I started stuff on Shopify. And writing content was the first thing that I made money on that didn't also cost me anything. So it was just a net revenue gain right from the very first article I wrote.

and the first article i wrote i still remember it was an article about insurance it was terrible to write it took me like eight or nine hours and i got paid five dollars for it and for whatever reason my brain goes wow i can make money doing something i enjoy like writing i'm gonna 20 cents an hour for that yeah i made like a dollar an hour basically that's awesome hey whatever whatever floats the boat got you started yeah so for whatever reason my brain latched onto that and i was like okay if they'll pay me five dollars i can find somebody they'll pay me fifty dollars or a hundred dollars a little higher and i just like worked my way up i started at like you know one penny per word or something like that and moved myself up to three cents a word five cents a word 10 15 eventually worked my way up to like a dollar So I was was getting paid thousands of dollars Money money Yeah That awesome I mean you written for Ahrefs SEMrush Monday So these are not small companies.

And they have very powerful blogs. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them, their blog is their main revenue engine. Isn't that funny?

Yeah. Yeah. I know. Ahrefs blog is incredible.

and then there's Moz. Have you written for Moz before? Haven't written for Moz, no. Moz is hard to get into but their blog is literally gold and then Rand moved off and did Spartoro everywhere he goes Rand Fishkin, he makes gold everywhere he goes so now you're running the Momentum Lab so you're helping us ADHD solopreneurs kind of get out of the weeds and figure out a plan of attack and all that stuff when when do you start that up yeah so that started about a little over a month ago that i officially launched that yeah um and it is uh it's not my my main focus at the moment um i'm definitely i'm loving working with everybody and helping everybody out my main focus is still seo for b2b sas companies but But that's an interesting story all behind that because what you know is the Founders Guild used to be called Focus Founders.

I think you found us when we were called Focus Founders. Somehow I found you. I think I found you through Ed Oyama who was in that group. And I was like, oh, I'm ADD, ADHD.

Let me go hang out with these other Norse Spices. It's always fun. Squirrel! You know, that kind of stuff.

For sure. So what was Focus Founders became the Founders Guild. And that was because my partner Rex and I split up. So there's a whole backstory there.

But essentially we wanted two different things for the company. He took the name Focus Founders. I continued on with the community. And the Momentum Lab was my first launch by myself without Rex because we had before that the Focus Founders Accelerator, which was a very high level, um, like three month container that we did for entrepreneurs versus the momentum lab is a much lower ticket.

It was, you know, the accelerator costs $3,200 to get into versus momentum lab. I launched it at $99 a month. Um, the reason I did that is because I wanted it to be more accessible because I found that, you know, our communities over 1100 people and yeah, the vast majority of them just aren't at the stage where they're ready to make a $3,600 investment. And so that...

A very active community too. A lot of people struggle. I mean, I know I struggle with my community every now and then. By the way, it's picking up.

It's picking up, but the whole idea of in communities and building communities out is tough. And then you go into these communities, they build, and it's like, oh, wow. People are yapping. Oh, there's Bill.

It's yapping on their own off in the corners. It's talking. It's fantastic. It must make you feel so good that you built something that people really enjoy and there's a community there.

And then you can kind of come in when you want to come in, not because you need to come in and kick people. Come on, let's go. Let's go. Let's talk.

Let's talk. That kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, I definitely still have to be an active participant or easily fizzle out.

But it is nice to have core members who are really active and engaged for sure. I love it. So let's go into the questions. what is the best thing about being an entrepreneur i mean because you've done it your whole life yeah other than dollar general yeah the best thing about being an entrepreneur i mean the whole reason i started is the freedom yeah i don't want anybody to tell me i have to be in a certain building standing behind a counter for eight hours a day if i want to go to the bathroom i'm gonna go to the bathroom i don't need to ask to go do that like i just need it's not high school Yeah, exactly.

I'm not a great employee in terms of I don't want to just sit there and do the same thing over and over for eight hours. That was never my forte. It doesn't work with our brains either. Yeah.

It's mind melting. Yeah. I don't know that it works with anyone's brain, really. Maybe there's a small percentage of people who are actually adept at it, but I think it's just - My wife has tasks.

She's very task-oriented. and if she has tasks, she can do stuff like that. I'm like, I couldn't do that all day. I want more power to you.

So on the flip side, what keeps you up at night? What keeps me up at night? Geopolitics. We're going to take a quick break, hear from our sponsors, and get right back to the show.

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The world, the economy, AI. But that's a bit of AI. I mean, with all your SEO, AEO, all that stuff, is that does that's like that are there any worries with that like you know are you constantly kind of saying oh i can try this can try that or you simply get a baby yeah no i'm not too worried about it the reason i'm not worried about it is because the reason i created the community in the first place is because i was pivoting out of seo because i saw ai as it was gonna kill seo and like my job was gone like companies weren't gonna hire people like me anymore um but recently in the past month or so, I've gotten really deep into working with AI and creating automations.

And what I've realized is actually people are going to hire like me, hire people like me still. Yeah. And they're going to want to do better, a better job at a more affordable rate. And on top of that, AI takes away all of the stuff that I hated doing.

And I can do it now. So it's like, now i'm just trying to do what i love and you know ai does the grunt work for me isn't that fun it's a we're all like oh no the world's coming to an end wait nope pause pivot no we just change the acronyms around a little bit because now it's aeo eio yeah we get the agi and all that but i'm just doing my best with where we're at i love my friend so what is the most important thing to carry with you all the time the most important thing to carry with me all the time uh i would say gratitude oh i love that yeah because you don't have gratitude you don't know how to you know say thank you and you know be really you know into it it's it's you know it's a good mantra to walk by yeah for sure the best times in my life are always when i'm the most grateful.

It seems like the more grateful I get, the better my life gets. I like that. Very good. People can find you over at the Founders Guild HQ.

com, BillWidmer.com, theblogwhisperer.com. Good domains, man.

Good domains. I like those. Yeah, that last one's my newest one. I actually made that entirely with AI in an afternoon.

I know. I saw it. It's pretty slick, buddy. In an afternoon, so how long did it take you?

um if i do it now it would probably take me about three hours because i didn't know what i was doing it took me about like seven it's not bad it's not bad to return and you kind of like now you're like i get it good yeah i mean i mean how many credits did you burn uh i don't actually know that i'm on the max plan for 100 bucks a month so you're like yeah you're like you have you have to be otherwise otherwise claude's like i need to take a nap for three hours which i always find funny.

I always find funny. You need a break. Take a break. So if you get the max plan, I think they don't give you as many breaks or any for that matter.

I hit my token limit for the first time while building that website. That's the right bill. Calm down. Take a break.

I'll see you in three hours. Yeah, I had to go take my dog for a walk and walk away. I'm sure your dog appreciated that. Oh, yeah.

He loved it. He's like, thanks, Dad. Thanks for actually paying attention to me. I do exist.

That kind of thing. Well, Bill, this has been so much fun and we'll see everyone next week. Thanks, Seth. That was a great show.

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