How Blockchain is Impacting The Future of Digital Marketing

Thanks so much for the invite, Matt.

Absolutely. So basically, cryptocurrencies are actually effectively excel documents that live on the Internet that everyone can see, everyone can view. It’s fully transparent and basically, blockchain technology allows us to actually have that ledger, which is basically an Excel sheet that’s on the Internet. And there are basically different processing methods for each of the different cryptocurrencies. But the general justice is that there are trusted servers that are running in the background that process the transactions and do it securely and basically create new cryptocurrencies securely through mining and the technology allows us to actually transfer money on this completely transparent and publicly accessible Excel document, basically, which is the ledger, frankly. And so, yeah, you simply basically create a wallet using a variety of different technologies and I can send money using my wallets, which is, generally speaking, a number. And so I can send my number to you and then you can transfer money directly to me without any type of banking institution knowing about it, without having your name connected to it. Because generally speaking, it’s anonymous for the most part. I think the people’s perception of how anonymous it is probably greater than it actually is and I think as time has progressed, it went from a simple transaction for cryptocurrencies and then now we’re actually using blockchain for a variety of other purposes, like gaming, your character is actually saved on the blockchain and you can take that character and actually transfer it to another person and sell it or there’s renting capabilities where in some of our different cryptocurrencies or blockchain environments you can buy real estate or you can buy different assets and you know, there are different organizations that have structured their businesses. So, everyone owns a portion of the business based on the blockchain, and it’s all stored in general leisure that you can transfer and so on. There’s a high degree of transparency and secondly, it allows you to be anonymous to a certain extent, which is also one of its biggest benefits of it.

Yeah, it’s all a free market. So it’s simply exactly the same as when you’re buying a stock like stocks. We buy them and sometimes when someone wants to sell them, they put them up, and the software behind the scenes, whenever you’re using a stock trading software, looks at who’s the lowest bid of sell price, and they automatically buy it at that selling price. And it’s exactly the same thing for blockchain. Naturally, when you purchase it, there are a whole bunch of different companies that actually do this. But effectively they’re looking at the lowest sell price and trying to pick your back. So, if you had the money to buy 1000 blockchain or Bitcoin, for example, and there was a person selling it for 40,000 or 50,000 and then another person selling it for 70 and they’re the next to lowest prices. You’d buy a person at that low price and then a portion at the higher price. Fundamentally, it’s exactly the same methodology as stocks in the stock market. And the value is attributed in almost the same manner where you might get a tweet from a founder that people get super hopped up on and people get excited about and they buy the stock and all of a sudden the stock is overinflated or maybe some bad news heads for the company and all sudden their stock price it is lower than their actual market. Market cap is lower and so when you look at what the NFT is, it’s exactly the same thing a lot of it is certainly based on hype. You might have an influencer that might increase the value. And in the beginning, another consideration is when a lot of these different cryptocurrencies launch, the value is very low in the very beginning for the first people to buy it, and then as time progresses, the value increases, because there’s just more volume and people are actually willing to pay more. And so yeah, maybe it’s a game, this game actually comes out with more functionality, and then you’re willing to pay more because more people are using that game and the game is basically giving you more airdrops or whatever the case is.

The art market is probably the closest to the NFT market because, you know, if I’ve got a nice piece of art that has value, It’s a piece of fabric with art, with paint on it. But, if you like it and I like it and a whole bunch of other people like it, the value is going to go up. And all of a sudden it becomes a symbol and effectively NFTs for the very successful ones are the exact same thing as Lamborghinis in a garage. The difference is no one sees your Lamborghini in your garage. But everyone sees your NFT because it’s the image that you said is your social media profile.

That’s correct. Yeah, for sure. You play with cryptocurrency, but effectively NFTs are again a blockchain technology that attributes something, whether it’s a picture or a character or that kind of potentially even property to a blockchain line item, a ledger excel document.

No, no, certainly as time progressed, each of the different countries is moving forward on it. And I think most countries are either openly blocking it or openly supporting it. And I think as time progresses, things will be a bit more clear. But no, for most countries there’s definitely some ambiguity.

For sure, or in many cases, they’re actually investing in them.

So up till now, I think as time has kind of progressed, we’ve had traditional marketing evolving from print to radio to TV to online. At least my viewpoint is, ultimately blockchain is basically going to add another element and be that kind of in the next migration for traditional marketing. I think the transparency of blockchain allows people to actually have a lot more potentially even transparency over their supply chain. I mean, you could have a product and use the blockchain to actually prove that your product is organic or you might have a product that’s made in the USA or Canada and prove that it’s actually made through the blockchain because you could literally have all of your suppliers updating the blockchain with their parts and then having the parts actually roll up into that product. And you’d have a full blockchain of that. You can prove that it’s vegan and you could prove that it’s made without child labor or something like that. So, I think there’s a lot of benefit in the context of supply chain management. Secondly, I think the way that traditional marketing worked initially was they knew your address. They shipped you a postcard and it had a little deal in it. And you would basically phone up and they’d say, you’d like to place your order. And they’d take your address, they’d take your phone number, and then take your email address. They might figure out that you’re male or female or whatever like all the different Mediterranea blockchain is different. I mean, most marketing campaigns and blockchain, start with that potential discord where you have no way of connecting that to a person, a disk, or a handle or account. A Twitter account, which is also difficult to connect to a person, and then you’ve got obviously the wallet, which is the end transaction, where they buy something where again, you don’t know who that person is and so it shifts that focus from being from having those master data fields that help you to actually improve your marketing, changing it to a much more anonymous method. Meaning that because you don’t have all these other contributors, social media marketing becomes a lot more influential. You know, the news sites and the crypto marketing sites that are not crypto marketing sites, but crypto news sites become a lot more influential. And so that shift to a push to more of allowing customers to actually pull data, I think is the shift and then using influencer marketing is becoming a lot more prevalent frankly, which is happening in traditional media as well and for marketing as well. But yeah, it’s definitely a shift because you’ve got a lot less data and then there are more people that are seeking to be…

Precisely. Yeah. I was going to say non-amenity, but I would say yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s amazing.

It’s very mature.

While the IP address allows you to provide a ton of different data that you can leverage. But I think generally speaking. The areas that the customers of the crypto market are Twitter and discord, and as time progresses more and more people will invest in it. TikTok and YouTube becomes more prevalent. But certainly, from a targeting perspective, the discord and twitter population are the crypto market right now.

Yeah, they’re the primary by far.

I think it’s because that’s where the communities are. And secondly, I think that people that are into crypto are looking for news on the latest this and that, and Twitter is a great source for that. It’s designed for their instantaneous news versus like Pinterest, where it’s a search engine, where all the functions are published on Pinterest and you can look through and when you’re searching, you find all of the historic stuff and that’s what you want. But, Twitter is instantaneous. And in the same way is your Facebook feed, like if you post an article and if the time that you posted isn’t in the mornings, you know, say if you late at night, most people won’t even see it because by the time that they get in the morning, the feeds are already moved down. Right.

Yeah. and which is what people want. But you have to be thoughtful about the times. I think posting times are really important.

I think that NFTs are causing a shift in the marketing efforts because there’s a lot of competition number one in the NFT space. And I guess your question is more specific to how NFTs are changing marketing or more about how NFTs are requiring different kinds of marketing?

Yeah. So NFTs naturally, there are so many of them that I think they require different kinds of marketing, and right now, for the most part, most NFTs projects aren’t doing a lot of ads. They’re doing basically influencer marketing, which is not necessarily successful or greatly successful. But, certainly, the Twitter discord communities are really key. So I think most of the projects if they’ll look immediately at how many different Twitter followers are actually people who are actually watching a Twitter account. Suddenly next thing they do is actually check out discord and actually see if there are any active community postings. If those two things are actually checked off and certainly start looking at the roadmap, consider the different functions that the entity is actually planning. And then you look at the artwork and you know, do I like the artwork. So my personal artwork pics aren’t always the best because you know, sometimes I like, oh, the artwork is amazing and the project doesn’t do well. You do have to be careful with Twitter and discord in that there are certainly ways that you can artificially manipulate the accounts, by bots. So, it’s more of that act of engagement and secondly, looking at discord to see, are these actually like real people or is it just people that are like GM, GM, GM, GM, like meaning good morning.

Yeah. And then some of the more established projects then they branch into Facebook and YouTube, and you can check out their medium posts, which almost all NFT projects do. As I say that I’m always not super supportive of that. You’re basically giving your content to a medium, which increases their value.

That’s right. Yeah, exactly.

No, I think it’s too late. And I think, generally speaking, the three large social media platforms, you need so much investment, so much technology investment that I don’t think it would ever be an open source solution and I don’t think that they would move, they’re so established and they’re so large that you definitely can buy or invest in cryptocurrency and actually buy a cryptocurrency and get a share of the profits through cryptocurrencies, certainly. But you know, for Facebook, I mean, you could just buy stock. It’d be the same thing.

Yes, Twofold. The first is focusing on the brand names. So ultimately, if someone searches for your project’s brand name, the website’s got to come up. And ideally, it’s got to come up first. And, certainly, there’s a lot of competition in the context of NFT brand names because often the brand names overlap with real-world names. So I’ve had that in quite a few cases where because the real-world brand is actually more common and established, the NFTs get pushed down in the case of gaming as an example where an NFT can actually be created of an existing and traditional game that happens all the time and another user.

Yeah yeah. For sure, because really it’s a game, you know, it’s just your characters are actually on the blockchain, they’re stored on the blockchain so that you can actually sell them and trade them. But, I mean, the NFT games are actually like games like any other. They just have a different place where they store the character instead of their own database storing it on the blockchain.

Yeah, that’s right.

It does. Yeah. Well, back in the days in 2001 or 2002, there was this game called Star Wars Galaxies. And basically, as you would build up your character, then you could go through and sell the characters on eBay back in the day.

Yeah, that’s crazy.

If there’s an existing brand series of games and the new game comes out that actually has a character stored on the blockchain. In that case, the project that would be released would be having similar search phrases or and just, generally speaking, the world brand search phrases are actually fairly competitive meaning if you are releasing anything crypto, it’s going to be competition is fairly high. So the SEO is really pertaining to making sure that that project ranks at the top, even though that’s generally speaking competition. Secondly is branding out and say if you’re doing an NFT project and you want to attract people that are interested in player versus player blockchain game. Then you would have to think that the search raises are fairly high competition. And I was working out for one of my clients and so yeah, I mean you have to really start with your brand and then secondly, look at the highly intense search phrases that you want to target in the same manner that we do for any other traditional business. Build content on those search phrases, and do your keyword research, no sense in building a whole bunch of blog content on your NFT project if no one’s searching for it, you know. And secondly, if it doesn’t create that semantic word cloud around your site of the words that basically you want Google to know that you’re an authority on, so do your keyword research, build your content, and then basically posted on social media and then lastly, work with webmasters about doing outreach to create a link back to your content to increase the…

That’s right, precisely.

That’s right, Yeah. I mean, in the context of SEO, it’s very similar to how you would rank any other website. I think the marketing piece is different, focusing on different technologies.

You certainly could. But your profit and revenue from one specific cryptocurrency would be less than providing information on all of the cryptocurrencies.

So yeah, like almost all of the different tools that you use in life that, you know, whether it’s software or whether it’s referrals for a realtor, there’s different commissions that people pay for that and exactly the same thing goes for crypto. And so, if you were to build out a site like that, hypothetically, there are many different organizations that, you know, I think Crypto.com has like a 10% commission. And, you know, Paxful, if I remember correctly, has a 50% commission. And so there’s a lot of these. And in fact, we work with one of the largest org which is cryptonews.com from an SEO perspective, but there are two different thoughts. One, you need a team of writers and so to become an authority on a topic, you need a domain that is older, because certainly, age is a ranking factor in backlinks from other sites to show Google that you’re an authority on the topic, which takes investment, you have content and nonstop content potentially, maybe 15 posts per day. And so to do that level of content and it hasn’t it doesn’t mean just developing content. You also have to have the on-page optimized. Then you have to create imagery and so you need a creative team and then you need basically the writers to actually do it and they need editors to review the writer’s work and, and then a publishing mechanism to actually publish the content, not just to the website, but also to social media and then promote it. And so certainly for any business, getting visitors is a task. I always say there is no job that doesn’t take hard work in the end. The short answer is going to be lucrative. No question. What it takes is some hard work, no doubt about it. And it would take a hard time. So I think building up a site’s domain rating takes time and on most sites, you’re in a year potentially two depending on how the niche. But for a large site like that, it would take time.

And strategy and so if you got those traits and you’re good at SEO then yeah. For sure.

That’s interesting and I think it’s just that buying and selling and really, you know, back in the days, there were different groups where you would pay to like belong to that club or whatever the case was. Now you buy another Tea and you’re part of the Gary Vee circle, or there are so many now you can use to play poker. And so they do work with Colin Powell. I and you could be playing a poker game and actually do it using cryptocurrency. The use cases are really quite amazing.

I’d love to. Yeah, thanks.

For sure. Yeah, the easiest way is either to go to guruSEO.com or to look for Jesse Tutt on LinkedIn. I would love to connect.

GuruSEOservices.com.

Thanks so much, Matt. Look forward to meeting you again.