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Greg Heilers talks with Jason Barnard about authority building secrets.
Authority Building Secrets! Greg Heilers—co-founder of Jolly SEO, and digital authority strategist who has secured media placements for countless C-suite executives since 2017—reveals the insider system for transforming unknown entrepreneurs into recognized industry authorities. Drawing from extensive experience in journalist outreach platforms and performance-based PR strategies, Greg breaks down his proven methodology for earning high-quality media mentions that build genuine credibility and thought leadership without relying on paid shortcuts or gimmicky tactics.
Get ready for a deep dive on:
– The journalist outreach platform strategy: How to leverage platforms like HARO, Featured.com, and others to secure expert citations in top-tier publications
– The numbers game decoded: Realistic conversion rates, platform differences, and why premium vs. free platforms matter for your success rate
– Quality over quantity approach: Why a mention in a niche-relevant publication can be more valuable than a major outlet placement
– The co-citation power play: How being mentioned alongside established authorities amplifies your credibility in AI-powered search
– Beyond traditional link building: Why brand mentions without links are now equally powerful for building digital authority
– The listicle comeback strategy: How smart brands are leveraging collaborative content placements to boost AI visibility
– Performance-based PR secrets: The “pay for wins only” model that ensures accountability and measurable results
This episode delivers proven, accessible strategies for entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders ready to build authentic authority through strategic media positioning and expert citations.
#AuthorityBuilding #PR #MediaMentions #PersonalBranding #EntrepreneurAuthority #DigitalPR #ExpertPositioning #FastlaneFounders #GregHeilers #JournalistOutreach #BrandBuilding #ThoughtLeadership #BusinessGrowth #SEOStrategy #EntrepreneurTips
What you’ll learn from Greg Heilers
This episode was recorded live on video September 9th 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.theseoshow.co/episode/127
https://majestic.com/seo-in-2025/additional-insights/greg-heilers
https://backlinko.com/haro-alternatives
Greg Heilers
Transcript from Greg Heilers with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Authority Building Secrets
[00:00:00] Greg Heilers: In the journalist outreach ecosystem, as it were, there are limitations. There’s only so many publications. So if you only want new wins, for example, it’s not super scalable because the same publications are coming again and again. But for the person who wants to stay relevant, stay top of mind, to both algorithms and human readers, yeah, we have clients who are with us for years. And we’re just doing something like 5 or maybe 10 wins per month, month after month after month. Now we don’t count the syndicated stuff. So there’s way more in terms of syndicated content out there that definitely builds and it scales. But I’m just talking purely about the one-to-one wins that we’ve built.
[00:00:51] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy? A legacy we’re proud of.
Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:20] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello, and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Greg Heilers.
[00:01:33] Greg Heilers: Awesome to be here, Jason. Thank you.
[00:01:35] Jason Barnard: Brilliant, lovely. We’re working to talking about Authority Building Secrets for entrepreneurs, and this is hugely close to my heart.
You build authority, you get the PR. At Kalicube®, we leverage that and amplify it in Google and AI. So I think we’re gonna have a really great conversation. Now, the first thing I always do is analyze people’s Brand SERPs. And this is what comes up for you. You’ve got a small Knowledge Panel. That’s a tiny Knowledge Panel with your name, a tiny photo, Facebook.
Obviously, you are thinking about or working on building that out to something that looks more like this. Scott Duffy, Kalicube®’s favorite client of the moment. We’ve built this lovely Knowledge Panel for him. He’s been with us for five years, managing his personal brand in Google and AI, and that makes him look like a superstar.
And he is, he sold a company to Richard Branson, so he is a superstar. He deserves that positioning. And then I looked in ChatGPT for you. I got a really, really lovely description. Co-founder of Jolly SEO, founded in 2017, and so AI is doing this summary job directly in the chat, and it generally gets it pretty good.
I was really impressed by what you’ve got there. Have you done any work on the AI aspect of your personal brand?
[00:02:58] Greg Heilers: I haven’t done a lot intentionally, I should say. So what we have learned in the last year or so is that brand mentions carry a lot of weight right now as of mid 2025. So unintentionally, yeah, I’ve done a lot, but it wasn’t intentional, I’ll be honest.
[00:03:17] Jason Barnard: Right. And podcast guest appearances are great because you get brand mentions and you also get co-cited. In AI, co-citation is really important. So being co-cited with Jason Barnard helps Greg, and being co-cited with Greg Heilers helps Jason Barnard. So explain to me what Jolly SEO does, because my approach to all of this is saying, well, I’m gonna take what you’ve got already, so don’t bother doing anything else.
And I will package it for the machines and amplify it through Google and AI. And if you think about Google and AI, it’s trillions of conversations with billions of people every day. The people trust them to recommend the best solution. And if we can amplify you there, we’re amplifying you through the biggest influences in the world.
But we can always have more press PR mentions, how do you do it?
[00:04:04] Greg Heilers: So what we do is actually very accessible to founders listening to your podcast, Jason. We use these journalist outreach platforms they’re called. The old school one, Help A Reporter Out. It’s helpareporter.com. There’s lots of others now, featured.com, you gotta pay for a subscription, but really easy to get a win on there and several others.
All you’re doing here is a reporter working on an upcoming article says, I need an expert on personal branding. For example, you chime in with three sentences, maybe 10 sentences, nothing more. You’re not writing the whole article and then you sit and wait and hope you get picked up. It’s a numbers game to that extent.
But in a nutshell, that’s what we do for clients.
[00:04:52] Jason Barnard: And you mentioned numbers game. I mean, what are the numbers? What’s the probability? I would say, what’s the probability for somebody who’s just giving it a go like I might? And the probability for somebody who knows what they’re doing, like you?
[00:05:04] Greg Heilers: Yeah. And that’s really important because you’re an expert at what you do.
And that’s the most important part. Obviously, having some writing skill is important, but it doesn’t have to be perfect grammar, doesn’t have to be perfect punctuation. To answer your question super directly though, every platform has its own conversion ratio, we call it. Some of these platforms, you can expect maybe for every 10 pitches you send, you get a win, a published link somewhere or your name mentioned. Some of the platforms are harder and some are easier. So you can rig this in your favor by paying a premium to platforms that filters out a lot of people who aren’t really invested.
But there’s plenty of free options that you just need to write a little bit more. Again, just quick reminder, you’re not writing a whole article, you’re just writing a two paragraph pitch.
[00:05:59] Jason Barnard: Right, now, i’m coming back to that is number one, great advice. You’re not writing the whole article. I think we would all go in there thinking I’m gonna answer the entire question.
It’s one point that helps the journalist move their article forward. And I’m sure a lot of people listening to this contribute to Forbes. And Forbes have that expert panel where they limit you to 400 characters. Is 400 characters a good idea?
[00:06:24] Greg Heilers: Yeah, it’s somewhere around there. We have it pegged per platform, how many words you need.
And so while I don’t have it in characters, it seems like it’d be somewhere around there. It’s around a hundred words. If we were to average it across them all. So, it’s pretty succinct.
[00:06:40] Jason Barnard: Okay. And on these platforms, so you’re saying that some of them have a premium service where the people who are just playing around get filtered out?
So the idea is it’s free for anybody and a lot of people sign up for the free one and they just really don’t take it seriously. The ones who pay a premium are the ones that are being pushed.
[00:07:03] Greg Heilers: Well, perhaps I misspoke. I mean that there are both premium and free platforms. And some of the platforms do have premium versions, but if you wanna save time and spend a little money, for example, Qwoted, Q-W-O-T-E-D has very high quality publications and you’ll convert pretty well because it costs quite a bit of money to use.
And then, there are free like helpab2bwriter.com, just marketing and business opportunities. Pretty decent conversion. Maybe like one in 12 ish you could expect, but you’re not paying any money, so you’re gonna pay with your time writing.
[00:07:44] Jason Barnard: Right. Which is great. So how many platforms of like this are there out there?
[00:07:50] Greg Heilers: We use seven right now. But there are more. And for your audience who’s located in either Great Britain or Australia, there are platforms that have heavy concentration of publications in those regions. We are US-based and a lot of our clients like US publications, so I’m most familiar with the US based ones, but there are more.
[00:08:15] Jason Barnard: No, no. Our audience is US and our clientele is mostly US. So Kalicube® is very much a US-focused company. So in the US, the platforms you’ve been talking about are the ones that my audience will be using. But then you say as well, Australia, Britain, there are specific platforms for them or just within the platforms you have, there are specific media outlets?
[00:08:40] Greg Heilers: Absolutely. Australia has SourceBottle, has a lot of Australian publications. And the UK, I apologize to the UK listener, I’m blanking right now. We can follow up on that one. There’s a very popular one they use. The UK, also to give you something to use to the UK listener, X, Twitter is still heavy on hashtag journo requests.
We don’t use that very much because it’s a lot of UK journalists who use that.
[00:09:08] Jason Barnard: Oh wow, okay. Didn’t know that. And very helpful piece of information. So if I just turn up and write my 400 characters, 100 words, 50 words, whatever it is, the probability of being picked up is relatively low compared to if you do it.
What’s the difference between you guys doing it and me doing it?
[00:09:24] Greg Heilers: Yeah. Fair question. I’ll just start with the negative. The negative is you are the subject matter expert. We have writers who have been doing this for years, steeped in knowledge. They’re somewhat of subject matter, but not experts, knowledgeable.
So that’s the negative, right? You know best and you know yourself and your company best. So you have to be comfortable with a ghost writer, we call ourselves. And for some people, that’s a definite no-go. So that’s the negative in outsourcing to an agency like Jolly SEO. But what’s great about working with us is that just to state the truth, but a plug for us is that we’re performance based.
We don’t charge for time or effort. You’re just paying for wins. And I would recommend anyone who’s going to find a freelancer, find someone who’s that confident in their skill that they’re just charging you for the wins. Because if you’ve been at this long enough like we have, we should be able to promise you that we can get the win or you don’t need to pay us. So that to me is the real trade off here. You kind of 80-20 at knowing we’re not you. It’s not gonna be a hundred percent, but you’re not gonna spend all your time on this endeavor.
[00:10:39] Jason Barnard: Right, which is an incredibly important point. So how does this scale, for example, overtime? Are we just building and building and building very gradually?
Does it scale quickly? Is there a major win once you’ve been published a few times that people start to recognize it?
[00:10:58] Greg Heilers: Wow. Great question. In the journalist outreach ecosystem, as it were, there are limitations. There’s only so many publications. So if you only want new wins for example, it’s not super scalable because the same publications are coming again and again.
But for the person who wants to stay relevant, stay top of mind, to both algorithms and human readers, yeah, we have clients who are with us for years. And we’re just doing something like five or maybe 10 wins per month, month after month after month. Now we don’t count the syndicated stuff. So there’s way more in terms of syndicated content out there that definitely builds and it scales. But I’m just talking purely about the one-to-one wins that we’ve built. We’re typically the lower volume player and they’re doing other things for really to push a lot of volume.
[00:11:57] Jason Barnard: Right. And the syndication point is something I think really important to bring up. I’ve looked at PR companies who say, your potential reach was 50 million people. Here are all the places that picked it up, and a lot of the places that picked it up are simply duplicates of whatever it was within a network of sites that just copy each other, and the content then gets deleted after a few days.
So they show you the win and then it disappears. The search engines are not looking at it, the AI isn’t looking at it. And they’re attributing, for example, Hungarian MSN at 50 million when Hungarian MSN gets 500,000.
[00:12:38] Greg Heilers: Yeah, for the listener, it’s super easy to see you just right click View Page Source and do a CTRL+F for the word canonical.
Every article will tell you what the original article was. You can see what the original was. And to your point, Jason, there are whole agencies built around this transparently, and then there are also whole agencies monetizing this, not very transparently. To each their own, we just decided those are freebies.
That’s for the customer to decide what the value is, and we just charge for the one win.
[00:13:18] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. I was kind of bringing to the fore that idea of canonization, which you’ve now explained. And a canonical is the original article. And you will find a lot of these articles are simply copies of, and have no value in and of themselves.
And I think people who aren’t in the SEO industry, who don’t know what the word canonical means and don’t know how the system functions would get caught out. Either intentionally or unintentionally, and feel that they’ve got much more value for their money than they truly have. Now, the idea of journalists saying, well, I’m just gonna go to this platform.
I’m writing an article about this. I’ll ask a question, I’ll get lots of citations. Themes from the outside that the journalist is being lazy or not serious.
[00:14:12] Greg Heilers: It’s a scratch my back, scratch your back kind of relationship. If you’re new to SEO, over the last couple years, Google has codified what really humans know as a relationship.
There’s this thing called E-E-A-T. To boil it down, every article we read as consumers quotes experts, because those publications need to demonstrate that they’re not just blowing smoke, they’re not just citing themselves. They’ve got real, live external people who are almost verifying the thesis, the hypothesis of the article.
Yeah, we could say they’re being lazy, and in fact, sometimes you can tell when you’ve fed the idea of a section, an H2 section or the whole article to someone. But a lot of the times, it’s a pretty fleshed out idea they have. But they do need you. They do need an expert to say this is a supporting statement around the thesis here.
[00:15:22] Jason Barnard: Right now. The next question kind of comes on from there is traditionally, SEO has been about links and keywords. So we count the number of words in a page. We calculate how often the word appears in a page, and then we know whether or not the page is relevant. And the more links your page has, coming into it, the more authoritative it is.
How out of date date is that?
[00:15:46] Greg Heilers: I was just saying pre-recording, Jason, I really like what you did with Kalicube®. I really like how, and even in your background, you still have Google. I don’t think we are post-Google yet. I’m not one of those. I do understand the traffic has diminished for many pages and even whole websites, but I do think it’s important what you do with your website, Jason, that you mention AI in the next generation of search.
I still think they’re very much both at play right now. So links, where I frequent with expert SEOs, I’m not claiming to be one, but where I learn from them, is still very useful. They’re people who have done testing of tens, dozens, hundreds, thousands of duplicated content websites with and without links to pages, to the whole site.
And the links are still showing strong, for Google. That said, the next generation of search, you already said it better than I could, the brand mention and then being co-cited. This is with or without the link. So I think both are valid arguments, but it depends. It depends. Classic SEO phrase, right? It depends where your focus is.
[00:17:09] Jason Barnard: In fact, the it depends is something that I think we all find very annoying, no offense to you, but sometimes you have to say it. But where I was kind of leading it was what I know is that links are helpful. Traditional SEO people come in saying you have to have links. So somebody, like an entrepreneur of a company will say, I want to be cited, but I want a link. And if I don’t have a link, there’s no value. And that’s a really bad approach. If you get a link, wow. That’s a great bonus because it works in Search, as you said.
But being mentioned and co-cited is what’s most important today because all of these machines are now analyzing the content, using large language models or small language models that understand the content and understand who’s in the content. So if you have, and we can come back to this, that small Knowledge Panel, although it doesn’t look very impressive compared to our friend Scott Duffy, what that means is Google will recognize your name and who you are and be able to make what we call a linkless link back to you just by the fact that Greg Heilers is mentioned in an article.
I really wanna push on that is saying the work you are doing, getting yourself cited as an expert is already enough for the machines today. The link is a bonus.
[00:18:29] Greg Heilers: Yeah, that’s really interesting. This guy, Charlie Clark, I just spoke with a couple weeks ago from Minty Digital, he had a cute phrase. He said, think beyond the link. At Jolly SEO, we have a premium tier that people all the time come to us. I want to be in USA Today, Business Insider, Forbes. And it all has to be Dofollow. And we say, you’ve got a budge on one of those. We can get you the Dofollow, but not on those. Or we can get you on those, but it’s not gonna be Dofollow.
But you can’t have both. So we won’t be able to serve you if that is what you’re fixing on. You’re gonna have to go to a marketplace and buy those for $6,000 from a contributor. And that’s not what we do. We earn our way in. It’s just not the reality today.
[00:19:13] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And you mentioned E-E-A-T, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. At Kalicube®, we’ve added N at the beginning and T at the end, so it’s NEEATT.
So we’ve added notability and transparency. And today, you need to be transparent. And notability is hugely important because if you’re just credible, I call it credibility. E-E-A-T is just credibility under a fancy name, broken down into nice parts: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. That’s credibility.
If you are credible and you are notable, you’ll always be top of the list. If you’re not notable, you’ll be further down the list. That’s just logic.
[00:19:54] Greg Heilers: I love it.
[00:19:54] Jason Barnard: So you need to build that credibility and you need to start building notability and what you are doing with those citations and the mentions within articles, big websites or small websites is hugely important for notability. Because it builds that end. It keeps building it, but it also builds the credibility part. And you’re talking about USA Today. Brilliant. Love to get into USA Today. Great article, makes me feel really important. My ego takes this huge boost. Maybe I get a link, maybe I don’t.
But at the end of the day, that mention is gonna be very powerful. But if I’m a dog hairdresser in Paris, getting a mention on the poodle parlors of Paris website is just as powerful because it’s localized, it’s specialized, and it’s vouching for me from an expert. Would you agree with that?
[00:20:49] Greg Heilers: I would. I would credit my co-founder Morgan, who’s really pushed relevancy way more than myself over the years.
And I would say, one downside to the journalist outreach platform space I was talking about earlier in our conversation, it can be very challenging for the dog groomer to enter if relevancy is your focus.
[00:21:10] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:21:11] Greg Heilers: So you want to maybe approach your outreach differently, more direct once you’ve identified those targets.
[00:21:19] Jason Barnard: You would do both? But I’m gonna quote you on that. It’s challenging for a dog groomer in Paris to get press mentions.
[00:21:28] Greg Heilers: Is that your side hustle?
[00:21:29] Jason Barnard: That’s a delightful one. No, I just like poodle parlors of Paris because it’s got that PPP. And it actually came up, I was doing an interview with somebody and I was trying to think of an example, and I was sitting in Paris.
I looked out the window and this is what we do a lot of the time. You look out the window, I saw a dog grooming parlor opposite the coworking where I was sitting. I just thought poodle parlors of Paris and I’ve been using it ever since.
[00:21:55] Greg Heilers: That’s awesome.
[00:21:55] Jason Barnard: So have you got any last words of wisdom before we close out that I haven’t asked you that you really think is important for entrepreneurs trying to get those citations and get that PR?
[00:22:06] Greg Heilers: Just two things. One thing I didn’t mention, going back to what, Jason, you said about co-citations, what’s really hot right now, the biggest brands in SEO that we are serving, they are commissioning listicle, believe it or not. Listicle placements are getting popular again. So product, but most importantly, getting your brand in there.
And again, they don’t even care if there’s a link or not. They just want their brand alongside other brands. And again, something else you said, Jason, it’s not about USA Today. They’re going for all tiers of websites right now, which is something I did not predict coming, but it is. Currently, what the LLMs are showing are listicles as cited sources for the output and your brand being in those is very important. And the second thing is, I’m kind of repeating, but just to say, you don’t need to work with a Jolly SEO if you want to make your own personal brand bigger using the tactic I mentioned. We do have a free guide on our website, but you don’t even need to look at that.
Just try one of these out, featured.com, helpareporter.com, they’re very accessible. It’s a daily digest. Just whip out a pitch. It takes maybe seven to 10 minutes, especially you as a subject matter expert. I’d give it a try and I’ll be quiet after this. But most importantly, patience, it takes an average of 32 days between your successful pitch and a live article, so don’t give up on it on day seven. Just chip away at it and see what comes of it.
[00:23:42] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I was gonna say something else, but that’s the perfect end to the episode. The best piece of advice. Be patient, keep at it. Thank you so much, Greg. That was brilliant. Thank you, everyone, for watching. You get the outro song.
A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Greg.
[00:23:59] Greg Heilers: Jason, thank you so much.
[00:24:00] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.
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