#59 - The Cheap Guys Are Back (And They've Got AI)

Cheap vendors have always cut corners. What's changed is the disguise. Now they're using AI to churn out website content and HTML in a weekend, and it looks polished enough to fool business owners who don't know what to look for. In this episode, Ken breaks down why the real problem isn't the price tag, it's what's happening underneath the hull. He walks through the questions every business owner should ask before hiring anyone to build their site, why a proper game plan is the one thing cheap vendors can't fake, and how skipping the discovery process leaves you blind to what your market actually wants. If you've ever wondered what separates a real website build from a template with your name on it, this one's for you.

Transcript

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The cheap guys are back, and this time they've got a new tool to make their shortcuts look polished on this episode of Over the Bull. Thanks so much for attending. This is Ken, and I look forward to talking with you today. As you know, we have our our kind of ear to the railroad tracks, so to speak, so we can kind of detect what's going on. And this is a warning for all business owners that I strongly recommend you listen to. Okay, so here's the deal. Artificial intelligence did not create this problem that I'm going to talk to you about today. It just made it faster and harder for the average business owner to spot. These cheap guys are coming back, and this time they're just using new tools with AI to make a quick buck. Okay, now here's where this podcast started from. I was talking to one of my colleagues this week, and he said that he was looking online, and now people are giving these little micro courses on how they can pitch a business to rebuild their website. So, you know, they're charging a certain amount of money. Now, when I say this one, this particular one is about 500 bucks to rebuild a website. And the angle is they go look at websites that frankly don't look very good. And then they approach them and say, we're going to rebuild your website for 500 bucks. And then what they do is they take your content, they run it through something like ChatGPT, spit out HTML pages, and it looks clean from the outside. And so business owners like you see it, and you guys think you got a real deal and you're taking advantage of technology. Now, here's the thing. This problem has not existed just this year or this week or whatever. This problem is a problem that agencies who are really trying to do the homework have faced for some time. On the cheap end, you have these little templates that people have always used and they put content into. And then the do-it-yourself website builders joined in on it, and then they started offering where people could pick a template, add their content, and then they say things like, get found. And that's absolutely not true how it works. Never was how it worked. All they're doing is just trying to give you something that makes you think you can do something cheaper and that it's going to work. Now, regardless if it's your freelancer pulling templates and outsourcing content 20 years ago, or you're using the do-it-yourself website builders, I don't know, 10 years ago. I mean, those guys grew so big, a lot of them are showing up on like Super Bowl commercials. And now you're moving into the age where a freelancer can get something like ChatGPT or one of these AI engines and then have HTML cranked out, and then they sell it as though you're getting a deal. It's the same model, it's just the tools are different. So, what does this mean for you? So when I started a long time ago, I wrote a book back in like 2015, and one of the analogies that I used was a boat. And I think that the boat analogy is really good here. And so when you think of a boat, you know, you've got the boat itself, you know, that's got to not be leaky and things like that, but you also need a navigation system, you know, you need a, I don't know, a motor, you need um cells, you need different things in order to make the boat where it's usable. And, you know, for me, you know, if I jump analogies, if I hire a plumber, I can't really tell if that plumber knows what he's doing or not. So at some point I just look and go, yeah, but water's running. So for a business owner, when it comes to marketing and the complexities of marketing, and trust me, it's gotten really, really complex. Uh so much so that when we do plans now, there's hardly anything left to um to guess. I mean, there's pretty much just everything's objective data, and we lock it in with some very powerful tools, and we have techniques to make everything objective that we come up with. Um, let's jump back to that boat analogy. So, you know, 20 years ago, if you looked at a template, you'd go, well, that looks like a website. You know, you go do-it-yourself website builder and get your uh secretary or friend or kid or whoever it was to build your website using a do-it-yourself website builder, then you'd go, well, that looks like a really good website. Uh, then you see freelancers adopt the do-it-yourself website builders, and then they use it because they can build quicker and faster and charge you uh, they can make more money. You don't know what they charge you, but they can make more money at it, and you go, well, that looks like a website too. Well, some of that was obviously cheap looking. Like sometimes you can spot it and go, yeah, that looks like a $500 website. Well, now that we're moving into the world of artificial intelligence, the the paint on the boat, the shine on the boat looks really, really good. I mean, let's face it, there's some things that artificial intelligence is doing to revolutionize the marketing world, and it revolutionizes it for us. The moves we're making today were literally weren't here 120 days ago. I mean, we're full-time building, adopting, changing, and growing because the technology is moving at an exponential rate. If you're using the same techniques or your marketing person using the same techniques that they were doing back in uh, I don't know, the end of 2025, January 2026, um there's some problems. The world's changing. I mean, Google just released recently, for example, how um certain things in branding standards are going to affect visibility on search engines. We just got through integrating that into our model, I don't know, two weeks ago. So, anyway, you see a pretty boat. You see it looks really good. Now, just like I can't look under the house and see if the plumbler's done a good job, it's hard for you to go in and go, well, did that $500 website or that $2,000 website don't go based on price, does it have a navigation system? Does it have a motor? Does it have the cell? Does it have the things that makes a boat a boat? Or is it just really pretty from the outside and it's really not functioning? You see, this is the problem. And it's always been the problem. Okay, so here's where your blind spot's going to be when you use something like this. The bottom line is even if you're only getting 20 or 50 visitors a month, I mean, no traffic at all, basically, this broken site is going to keep you perpetually blind. You're really never going to know what your your market, when I say your market, that's a fancy way to say the people that you want to do business with. Uh you're not going to know what they actually want because you're only seeing whatever washes up on the shore beside the boat that does not actually go anywhere. And so a properly built site's going to tell you something. These kind of websites tell you nothing. And you just get basically washed up. So then you do the old, uh, really an old problem. And that old problem is you you kind of start with the website, and then once you get the website up, then you go, okay, now how do I market and get people to it? Now, if that's your mindset, that is absolutely the wrong way to do it. We never build websites with aesthetics. We never build websites when we're thinking about the design first. We never build it without building a comprehensive plan up front. Just like you don't build a house by going down to uh your favorite hardware store and grabbing a bunch of two by fours and start nailing, you start with the blueprint. The blueprint's where the magic's at. And you can't do a good blueprint for 500 bucks. Bottom line. So here we go. How do we, you know, one of the problems that I've had, and let's be fair here. One of the problems that I've always had on Over the Bull is giving you advice on how to spot this stuff. Because it's hard. Because you see the shiny, you see the sales pitch, and people are using big words, and some of these words just sound like they know what they're talking about. You know, well, the the SEO and the HTML and the CSS isn't in alignment with your H1 tag. You know, you hear all this gobbledygoo. And even used out of context, like I just used it right there, it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. The problem is that they're speaking a foreign language and you have no idea if it's good or not. Like, for example, when I was in high school, I took two years of French. Literally, I know a few words. One of them I know is Jeanne Papa Francais. Sounds great. But basically just said, I don't speak French. Now, that doesn't make me a translator. So the problem is they're learning the language. They they're learning how to pitch you, they're learning what to say to you, but it's really kind of hard for you to detect if they're actually going to put a navigation system on your boat or not. That's tricky, isn't it? And I've really had a hard time doing that because frankly, at some point, I have to trust the plumber. Frankly, at some point, you got to trust the person you're hiring. So, how do you turn the corner and get it where you're not just reinventing your website every year or every other year just to put money in a vendor's pocket because they tell you you need to reinvent your website? Now, I can tell you, truth be known, because of all the poor techniques and building websites that's out there, not just the AI stuff that's coming down the pike, but all the junk that's out there. Legitimately, there's a big reason a lot of people do need to rebuild their website. Now, there's also legitimate reasons too. Like, for example, there's a piece of technology that we use that they went into maintenance mode since 2022. And we're letting go of that software because frankly, 2022, that may as well be software from 1997. I mean, it's just, you can't do that. And uh, so some of that has to be decommissioned and restructured, and that's just life. That's just technology, and that works in pretty much any industry. But when they when websites are built using these templates and these poor systems, that's incredibly different. That means that there was no blueprint. That means you've got a house with no foundation. Uh, you're not built to code, you're uh whatever you want to do, you know, you're not 16 inches on the center, you know, whatever the case may be. All you builders probably are tracking with me. Um, so anyway, there's some problems here. Okay, so how do you not be low-hanging fruit when one of these guys comes knocking at your door and they say, Let me rebuild your website, or you get those stupid emails. I was just looking over your website and I happened to notice that you've got some real problems. And I can give you a free blah, blah, blah, or here's an attachment with the blah, blah, blah. You know what I'm talking about. You don't fall for those, do you? I mean, those are all just games. There is no good Samaritan just throwing around free advice. These are hooks. And the truth be known is websites always need to have work. They're always in a state of being built if they're good websites. The bad ones are actually the ones that are just thrown up with HTML code and some generic content. Okay, so let's get moving here. Uh, the real differentiator. This is what you need to do whenever you're approached by one of these people who goes, I just looked at your website, we can redo it and make it look super fantastic with all the latest technology, technically perfect, blah, blah, blah. Before they touch your website, demand to see the game plan. Uh, how did they research your market? Why does each page exist that they're going to propose needs to exist? What's the strategy behind the structure? You can't put together a real discovery process for $500. Bottom line, you can't. I mean, when we build a game plan, we look at a lot of stuff. We have a proprietary system that's actually built using the most, I don't know, the best objective tools that are available on the market combined with 30 years of experience that went from traditional marketing to modern marketing. We tie everything in, our decision-making tree to looking at what Edward Bernays did all the way to today. I mean, we put a lot of stuff into those processes, and now we can actually uh bake into the recipe what your competitors are doing. We can bake into the recipe emotional triggers, we bake into the re before we ever lay hands on a design. You see, that's where the money's at. And that's what you can't do cheap. Now, they may get where they start whipping out some reports, and that's going to be a whole other subseries of challenges, because their reports are also going to be just as cheap and just as clumsy. Um, I can tell you that I have several clients who've come to me with a punch list of something, and you start to read it, and you know, you see the language, but then you're like, oh my goodness. Yeah, they used AI on this, I can tell. So, you know, ultimately the the way to do it is we are also paid a lot of times to go back and just read those proposals just to see if they're, you know, if they pass a smell test or not. And uh so I don't know what's going to happen when they start doing that because then the the language is going to get tougher, and if you use your your AI to test their AI, and now you're going to get into some weird stuff. But as of right now, the goal is just to set up barriers to make it more challenging. You know, it's kind of like if you've got an alarm system in your neighborhood, and you know, the the burglars are coming around, you know, the the floodlights that come on, the alarms, the the thing that stands outside saying this house is protected by a dog. Those things make you harder to get taken advantage of. And so by making people explain and show their processes and show their systems and make them earn what they're trying to get from you, that's how you're gonna know if they're gonna go to the next house and try to rob it or if they're gonna come to you or not. Now the elo-hanging fruit is, well, yeah, let's just go ahead and do it. It's only 500 bucks, let's let's take a look. But then you're just gonna get a boat, you're gonna be not able to take that boat onto the water, and all you're gonna get is whatever washes up on the shore in terms of customers, you're never gonna get anywhere with it. So a good game plan obviously considers all that. I mean, the biggest thing that your business can do, hands down, is to learn what uh your com your clients, your customers, whatever may have you, what they want, and then be able to grow in an effective way to deliver a quality product that your customers want and be able to do that in a way that makes sense, not just be the lowest price on the totem pole. Because the lowest price is not lowest price on the totem pole. Got a little wild bird in the I don't know if that's a thing. Lowest, anyway, you know what I'm saying. You don't want to be the low guy. Um a lot of people think that it all comes down to price, and in some cases, there is a case for that, but in other cases there's not. Uh depends on how you position yourself in the market that you're going after and how well you do it and how much you're learning. Learning is everything. I mean, man, uh aside from the blueprint, uh being able to do that. So the idea is these guys also want to get in and out. So when you look at you know what they're doing, you know, even ask other questions. Like, well, what happens if I want to tie that in my CRM? How often do you update this website? Not just how you're making the determination. Um, what happens if I start getting hit with a lot of spam? How are you tracking my phone calls to make sure that the phone calls are are routed and that they properly qualify? How does this tie into my overall marketing strategy? You know, ask the questions. You know, put them up, put them up to the game, and then see what they come back with. Now, I'm not going to divulge what we do primarily because I'm not giving the bad guys the ammunition. I refuse to play the game. I refuse to tell them what we do because they're just going to create a fake, like a fade diamond. You know, they they just want to know what they put into it and bake in their recipe so they can just get it over the goal and get your 500 bucks. Now, in the end, your argument may be something like this. Well, it's only 500 bucks. Let me test it and let me see what happens. But you're not just costing yourself 500 bucks. What you're costing yourself is, well, a lot of things. Your reputation online, for example. I mean, algorithms in Google do see what the revisions are going to cost. Customer confusion. You're going to cost yourself business. You're going to cost yourself perhaps the one thing it's not perhaps, man, it's like, it's the biggest thing that's out there. You know, we all think about money, we all think about all these things, but time, man, time, that's the asset. I mean, you know as well as I do. There's never enough hours in the day. There's nothing that makes up for time. And when you build the proper blueprint for your website, and then you build the proper plan with the right objectives, and then you test it and adjust it and change it, because those things happen even with the best laid plans. Over time, you start building a machine. You can't make up the time. You can't do it. And so once you launch this $500 website, how long are you going to give it? What are going to be the metrics you're going to tell if it's successful or not? What are the the criteria on which you're going to make that decision other than let me put it out there and let's just see what happens? And it should never be what people think of my new website. That should never be what the case may be. One of the things I love to do with clients is, you know, I talk to them about what they want to have aesthetically on their website, and then you say, well, what if that doesn't work? What if you need this really ugly website? What if you need to present yourself in this way? What if this really ugly website brought you all the business that you want? But that really pretty website that you like and your friends like and you get all the compliments on, what if that website generates nothing? But the other one generates everything. Which one do you go with as the owner of a business? Now I know that sounds silly because a lot of people say, well, of course I'm going to go with whatever generates the most business. But those business owners a lot of times will cave. I mean, the secretary comes in and goes, I just cannot believe this website. It is so ugly. It does not work. And they cave to it. I mean, I had a guy who was a type A years ago. I'll never forget it. He says, I'm a numbers guy. I'm an analytics guy. All I care about is this. And we're working on a branding plan with him. And he had this horrible abstract logo for his business. He was a bathroom, uh, he renovated bathrooms. It was such a horrible branding concept. And he brought it and we created uh variations. And he goes, nope, he goes, I really think this is the one. Now, the one he created was, I believe, created by someone that was close to him that he just trusted or liked, or who who knows what the case was. And I knew it was a bad move. So what I did on our dime, I got a focus group together, and I basically randomized a test, and I questioned which logo, which messaging, whatever, and I, you know, sent it out and I got the data back. And the logo that he liked, his people, the one that they liked, was the last one that his target audience and focus group wanted. He was the opposite. So I presented him the data. I said, I did this free of charge to help you out. And you know what he did? He went with what he had. The type A went against the data. The type A Went with a model that frankly alienated his audience. And so it happens a lot. It's actually harder to resist that sometimes. Now, the reality is ugly websites in that context, it's hyperbole, you know, it's just it's just a story to make you think it's not really true. We don't build ugly websites, but we do make decisions based upon what the your customer wants, not based upon what we think looks good or whatever chat thinks would be a good uh messaging to put in the header. Because there are ways you can actually find every bit of that data out objectively and work it into your system and then tie that in with your business. So, guys, this is a big problem. This is a really big problem, and it's getting to be a bigger, bigger problem because the outside of the boats are looking better and better all the time, and the inside, it's simply a ghost ship. So I hope this helps you. I hope this equips you because what's coming down the line for you is, well, everything. I mean, on one side, you're gonna have automations, you're gonna have people that are creating content with artificial intelligence, you're gonna have people who are using tools improperly and making it look like it. You're gonna have people using language, you're gonna have these zombie people who are putting things together and it's going to look, smell, taste great, and you're gonna think maybe this is the solution. On the other side, you have the real work. You have the people who are instituting the right principles, such as EEAT. They're gonna challenge you to be interactive with your company. It's not going to be on autopilot. And being on autopilot is one of those things that um will bite you. Because, I mean, I just told you, you know, if I wanted the house, is that plumbing set up right? I have no idea. Would a plumber want me writing his content? Would a plumber want to trust artificial intelligence to make up the guidelines and what tools they use and how they do it and the processes that they use and what makes them particularly different than anyone else? No. No. Now, I can look at competitor data, I can look at different things, and I can come up with objective beginning uh content and data and what should go in it, but that has to be audited by the owner of the business because they need to say, you know what, we don't do that. Or that's not true with how it happens in the state of North Carolina versus other places. Or this isn't what we need, and this is not what our customers want. Then you start to get into it. Now you've got the business owner, you've got objective data, and now you've got this beautiful marriage. It crescendos into something amazing. That's what gets me ramped up. Well, what gets me frustrated, obviously, are the uh the gamers. Um I think I shared with you, uh, man, this was I'll give you an idea how far back this goes. Uh one of my dear friends long since uh retired, he retired five or six years ago. And he's a he's just an incredible guy, and he was a client. And he introduced me to this one guy, and I remember we met at a Denny's on Patton Avenue in the state of North Carolina in Asheville. And we're sitting down there, that was a weird way to say that, wasn't it? Why didn't I say Asheville? I don't know. You know, sometimes you start talking, you go, wow, that was like a long way to get around that. Anyway, so I'm sitting here and he wanted me to meet this guy. She's like, you know what? This guy's in the marketing and advertising, and you know, he wants to meet, maybe you guys can team up and learn something from each other, but he really sounds like he knows what he's doing. Long story short, I'm sitting down there listening to this guy, and he goes, Okay, here's my process. And I mean, he's happy about this. We go out, we get this cheap hosting, and um, then what we do is we we get templates, we stick it on WordPress, I go down to this cheap freelance website, I get some people to write some content, we put it all together, and we give it to the client with some stock photography. Now, this was 15, 20 years ago. And even then, I'm like, well, you know that's why most businesses fail from that exact same recipe you're giving, right? Without missing a beat. He goes, Well, how else can you make $2,000 this fast? He goes, I'm selling these things for two to three, four thousand bucks. And the overhead's almost nothing. He didn't care what happened to the owner of the business. He was looking at the money that goes into his pocket. The thing is, is you can operate ethically and honestly, but man, it takes a lot of tools. I mean, the overhead for our business right now to use the tools is really pricey. Um, and so you got to be careful, guys. You got to be careful. These guys are out there and they're looking for the quick buck. So make it hard for them. Ask them a lot of questions. Ask them how they come up with it, ask them, ask them the game plan, ask to see the blueprint before they uh lay down the first aesthetic. Challenge them to prove to you that they know what they're doing, not just in terms of throwing together HTML, but how do they build the game plan? How do they give you the blueprint? I understand you got a hammer, and that hammer may be able to nail in the perfect nail, but how does that fit into the big picture? Because after all, the website is just a piece of the puzzle. It's a tool. It's not the end. It's somewhere in the middle. The end is getting people to want to do business with you and earning their trust and giving them what they want and being able to compete against your competitors. That's the battle. It's not having a website no more than it's having a business card. All right, guys, I know I got a little got a little hot on this subject today, but this is one that kind of hits near and dear to me. Um, we care a lot about the people that we work with. We care a lot about trying to operate as ethically as we can operate. And when you see these kind of systems come in place and you see these guys treating it like it's some kind of game to uh get a business to give you a couple hundred bucks in order to move, you know, to put money in your pocket and move on to the next one. And then they treat it like they've got some kind of you know magical recipe that's going to help businesses out. Uh, it's very frustrating for a guy like me. And it's very frustrating to see what I know goes into a business owner's decisions, and I see what they sacrifice in terms of their family time, their life, their finances, their stress, which is their health, in order to try to grow. And you see someone take this as a shortcut, an angle to produce something to make a quick buck. That's a thing that gets me. Okay, guys, hopefully this will help you out and this will give you a little more power as you're moving through this brave new world of artificial intelligence. Uh, on a side note, you really uh I really recommend you go back and look at some of the older podcasts, my say older, like last three, four weeks, and start to understand more about artificial intelligence. Um, I love this saying, uh artificial intelligence will be the best assistant you'll ever have, but it'll be the worst boss you've ever had. And that's legitimately true. And, you know, if you go back in and look at some of the previous podcasts, you're seeing all kinds of stuff. The doomsday are saying AI is going to end everything, and you have the utopian saying it's going to solve everything, and you're going to be able to sit by a beach and drink a cold ice drink as some robot does all your work for you, and you get a check in the mail, and you can now focus on other things, you know. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. Um, go back and check out those podcasts. The the, for example, when you look at that particular, you know, is it going to be a dystopian or utopian future? It really comes down to what you program the goal for artificial intelligence to be. Just like when you're talking about this, you can use AI and you can make it uh equipped with some of the best tools that you have, and then you can inject human thought into those results that take a while to just do the homework on. And uh you can produce something good, or you can say, go produce me this HTML using this guy's website and some other content and throw it together and let me use that. See, that's malicious, just like AI can be used malicious in other ways. Thank you so much, guys. This is me shooting the bull. This is a bit of a rant. I've not had a rant in a podcast in a while, but this one deserves a rant. I hope it helps you out. I hope it helps you navigate the waters, and I hope you're you're able to move in a way that makes you more successful, provides for your family and friends, and helps you um make a difference in the world and makes the world a little bit better place. Until we meet again, this is Ken with Over the Bull.