The Poker Mindset That Built an Agency

I asked Chris about his poker background because a lot of his friends went pro and he was very serious into it.

Chris's family plays a lot of cards. Pitch and rummy. It's the thing they would do at family reunions. His dad is a math genius. When they played games, even Yahtzee, his dad would get onto them as kids if they rolled or kept the wrong dice from a probability perspective.

It was a weird regular conversation about statistics and probability growing up.

When poker hit TV with the World Series of Poker, Chris Moneymaker, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, all these stars, they got hooked. In college, a bunch of his buddies played all the time. It felt like every day.

Everybody wanted to beat everybody. So what do you do? You obsess. Chris read all the books. Sklansky, Brunson, all of them. Phil Hellmuth's VHS, old school.

When he started doing affiliate marketing later on, the guy he lived with went a different direction. He went the poker direction even though he was doing digital marketing. Chris stayed with digital marketing.

But his roommate treated poker like a real job. "He had a mindset coach. He had a tactical hand coach."

There was one month where they reviewed 30,000 to 40,000 hands that Chris played. All of his losing sessions they reviewed. What he could have done, his bet sizing, all the different things.

"I equate that to a lifetime of education because if you play live table games at a casino, you might get 40 to 60 hands an hour. And I was getting eight to 10 minimum of that per hour. Actually probably closer to 20X because I was doing multi-table."

He got a lifetime of education versus the real players. He played a bunch of tournaments. One of them, just to go into the story, he was hungover after his roommate's birthday and they were sitting around at a coffee house.

His roommate said he'd really like to play this Sunday millionaire tournament. It was like a couple hundred bucks, but Chris was broke. His roommate said, "I'll stake you, give me 50% of the winnings."

There were 14,000 players and Chris ended up getting fourth for $224,000.

The crazy thing is this was around Black Friday for poker. Anyone that's a poker player has heard of this. It was when the federal government seized the money from Full Tilt and Party Poker.

"That money I didn't get. So it was locked up and frozen for like three years."

Thankfully it was frozen. That was a good thing because he was spending money recklessly. He actually got to use it from a more beneficial standpoint. He paid off his school loans, gave his parents some money.

Everything Successful Came From Deep Focus

I asked Chris what business lessons he's learned from poker with the context and perspective he has now.

"I'm not trying to be cliche here, but when I played poker, I played nine max, no limit. That's it. I didn't play limit. I didn't play stud and all the different variations."

He played nine max, no limit. That's all he played. You could do six people at a table. You could do heads up tournaments. You could do pot limit Omaha. It's a different betting structure, different, you got four cards instead of two.

"I played one version and I knew how to play that version."

Those 30,000 to 40,000 hands he played, he played that for 30,000 to 40,000 hands.

"Everything I've done that I've been successful at has been with focus, deep focus."

A lot of people don't know this, but Chris played a collectible card game. You've heard of Pokemon, but he played Magic the Gathering and a game called Legends of Five Rings. Legends of Five Rings was very popular when he was in high school and first couple years of college.

He was a world ranked card game player in that. At one point, he had won four state championships in a two year period and no one had done that at the time.

And where he's going with the focus is there were 12 clans that you could play, but he played one and learned how to play it very effectively.

In sports in high school, even going back further, he was very good at sports. Baseball, all of them. But he was better at basketball. Well, he quit all the other sports and focused on basketball. He held records at his high school, college recruited.

By the way, his school only had 100 people total. His graduating class was 28 people. They're beating schools much bigger and getting recruited.

"It's because of my focus on basketball and playing every Saturday and Sunday."

Everything comes to this deep focus. When things get difficult and people don't want to do that extra little thing necessary, it's very intentional, deep work, deep focus.

"That's where I've kind of benefited. It's not being the smartest. Not the whatever, but it's just been, I've been so incredibly focused and determined that it's really helped me be successful."

Why Niching Up, Not Niching Down

I asked Chris why his book is called Niching Up instead of Niching Down.

"I think when you think of down, you think of constraint and less opportunities. And I think I'm more of an abundance type, like up."

A lot of times when you focus, you're niching up to go upstream in a market. If he was a generalist, it'd be very hard for him to go talk to an Inc 100 company or go talk to Morgan & Morgan. He can text John Morgan right now. Or Sweet James and Steve Mehr. He can text these individuals.

"It's because I focus and I've went up in the ladder of relationships and my relationship equity and trust has facilitated that."

Also got it from Seth Godin. One of his thousand word daily blogs talked about niching up and Chris ran with that.

The Red Mage Nobody Wants to Be

I asked Chris about the importance of niching and why most people don't understand the power of this.

Chris asked me a question. Did I ever play the Nintendo game Final Fantasy Number One?

I didn't. So he explained for the audience. It's the very first RPG Nintendo game. You get out and you get to pick a character to build your party of four. They have a fighter, a thief, a white mage, a black mage, and then they have this red mage.

"The red mage is the generalist. Can kind of fight, kind of cast some spells. You don't want to be the fucking red mage. You don't want to be the generalist. You're just not good at really anything. You can't demand fees."

There's a perception of expertise when you declare a niche.

Think about it from a physician perspective. Would you think a brain surgeon would be better than a general surgeon for a brain surgery? You would think the brain surgeon. "Guess what? Every brain surgeon has their first brain surgery."

So it's a perception of expertise, but also when you do focus, it lifts your ceilings of opportunity where you understand what's possible and what's out there.

When Chris started with legal, he didn't know that personal injury law was like one of the most profitable, biggest advertisers. It makes sense now seeing them on billboards, but it's that reticular activating system, seeing the billboards because he's in the space.

You get efficiencies, you can productize your offers, you get better. It lends itself to compounding.

Chris just joined Hormozi's Skool group on his book launch. His workshop talked about you want things to compound.

"I've got a podcast about PI, I've got a book about PI, I've got a conference, we do retreats, we have a newsletter, we have a magazine that we've launched, all on this one audience. I mean, it compounds. And then I have different ways to monetize them."

Versus trying to do that for multiple audiences. By doing that, he also provides more value so he can charge higher fees.

"The people in the legal industry cannot compete with that. I don't even care if you're in the legal industry. There's just no chance because I sign a client and I can give them all these things to extend tenure, provide more value."

And that all comes from focus. You also speak to the individual and not the widget. "There's just so many advantages. Can charge more fees because you're worth more. You can provide more value. All those things, it just compounds. Everything compounds when you focus on a niche."

Product Market Fit Is Wildly Underestimated

Chris wanted to jump in with something for the audience, the agents, no matter what business you are.

"The most wildly underestimated thing is product market fit."

Some people are like, well people buy SEO, I got product market fit. No, you do not. The price points are different. The things, the amount of content, the amount of links, the things that you need to do to get results and product market fit constantly changes.

"Imagine trying to rediscover product market fit for multiple industries."

Look at what's happened right now with AI. Take personal injury law and how you manipulate discovery. Super Lawyers, AVO, Justia, it's going to be different for pest control.

"It's constant discovery of product market fit."

A lot of times people go out and try to market and sell things when they haven't discovered product market fit or try to scale a sales team. Countless agency members, "I want to build an outbound sales team. Like, what do you sell? For who? They just haven't got product market fit, so they can't do it."

How He Chose Personal Injury Law

I asked Chris how he chose his niche.

He did the affiliate marketing, got hit by that first Penguin algorithm. It nuked him down to like $2,000 a month income and he wasn't saving money and had these bills.

He got on Craigslist because that's back in the day. There wasn't Indeed. He just typed in SEO and fired off his resume. He got three interviews from agencies. They were all remote.

All three offered him the job. Most people would say, well Chris, which one did you take?

"I accepted all three."

He worked at all three because he had an affiliate team in the Philippines back in the day. It was called oDesk. Now it's Upwork. So he worked at three agencies.

One of the agencies he worked at, the most successful of the three, worked with a lot of attorneys and he saw the price points. He saw the value. He liked the relationships. So when he went out to launch his own, that was the one he focused on.

The Five Star Review Table Stakes

I asked Chris what the high level SEO game looks like. What does it look like working with these massive law firms spending six or seven figures a year?

"In the PI space, there's consolidation occurring, kind of like what happened with dental and the Aspens and the DSOs. Now you have something called an MSO."

What's happening is private equity's come in and they're breaking these law firms up into two business units. One is a legal business, requires the bar card and everything else. The marketing is separate. That's how the PE invests.

There's a lot of consolidation and competition due to the capital.

It's surprising, but most PI firms don't have a big marketing department. They'll have a marketing manager, maybe a CMO, maybe some support staff, but it's very rare that it's more than four or five.

There are some exceptions. Morgan & Morgan's everything's in-house. They got like 70 people on their marketing team. "But that's, you know, they spend $300 million a year in advertising."

Local, let's stick on local. "You have to get five star reviews on Google, you gotta get a bunch of them. So that's like table stakes."

That impacts your local services ads, your local SEO, the superlatives and the ability there, the words used in the reviews and around the reviews impacts your discovery.

Why Yelp Reviews Are Suddenly Critical

Where there's been a shift recently is Yelp.

"Microsoft owns Bing. Microsoft licensed to Reddit. Microsoft also utilizes Yelp for their reviews."

Apple Maps uses Yelp. Now if you look at the citations on most of these LLMs, it's going to be Yelp. You'll even see them popping up. If you do who's the best car accident lawyer in Las Vegas, you'll see a Yelp in the top five.

Because they're being cited and because where attention is, it's more important to get Yelp reviews.

Yelp reviews are tough to get to stick. "You got to get them to check in at the location. That's the key."

If you don't do the check-ins and you send them the link, first of all, you're violating their terms of service. But there's a greater emphasis on Yelp now than there has been in the past.

In order to rank on the 10 best pages, those listicles that are important now, "You gotta get 20-ish reviews in most markets on Yelp."

That emphasizes even another component of Yelp.

Now go over to Facebook. Do you recommend this business? That's the option, you don't get a rating scale. Their reviews are aggregated. Where are they aggregated? They're aggregated to Trustpilot, they're aggregated to Expertise.com.

Expertise.com has a who's the best, has a listicle. "So we're all playing these superlative listicle games on these LLMs to the most important directories right now."

Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers. "It's such a joke. It actually frustrates me."

Now you've got Justia, one of the primary legal directories. You can do a peer endorsement to be a top rated something lawyer. They've now created this new distinction on their page.

Google, Yelp, Facebook is probably number three from a legal perspective and their aggregation that impacts these other results.

"But those are some of the deeper things that, I'm trying not to be negative, my competitors are not thinking about this. They are not. But it's the reality. You gotta pay more importance and closer attention to these other sites."

What Will Still Matter in LLM Rankings

I asked Chris which of these things will actually stick and still be relevant in ranking in LLMs like ChatGPT in the next few years.

"All of those that I just mentioned."

He sees the SEO people on X complaining, like how long have they been complaining about the keywords and the name for GBP? "They're not going to change this."

Maybe they stopped licensing Reddit. So the stupid Reddit forum stops ranking number one and two on all the queries. But a lot of these other things he mentioned, they're not changing.

The Concrete Ways to Rank in LLMs

I asked Chris if there's anything concrete for ranking in LLMs. A lot of people are still saying it's kind of too early, we haven't done concrete testing.

"Those guys are just making excuses because they don't know what's going on."

Some of those listicle things and the aggregation of some of those sites and the importance of those sites, for lawyers specifically, there's a greater emphasis of case results.

"If you typed it in, I don't care what market, it's gonna say, well, they had this case result and that case result. So now you have to feature those on the website much more prominently, much more robustly."

Most of these sites, the Justia and AVOs, they allow you to list case results. Many of these sites do. So you want to aggregate these reviews out.

There's even Reddit-based strategies around this too.

Overall, that's a big one from a ranking and discovery perspective is the proof. The proof component.

"No matter what it is, it's more important to have on your bios, have on your main landing pages. I know there's been tie-ins to the EAT thing, but I think it's even more important on the discovery side from these LLMs."

The Reddit and Forum Strategy

I asked Chris if they're doing anything on Reddit and forums like Quora for their clients.

"Yeah, I mean, we have tons of user profiles."

They take an add value, no negative selling, answer questions first. Because if you're doing any type of promotion, your accounts are nuked.

"You need a certain amount of karma points before you can be a moderator and you have the trust levels to even get your stuff to stick."

So yeah, they answer questions. They provide value, simple stuff.

They do both personal profiles and company profiles. They'll have one core legal fanatic style username that's like a company one or a Rankings one. But they do both.

Schema 1000% Works

I asked Chris about schema because I've been seeing some controversy around it. A lot of people are saying it actually still doesn't do much.

"I saw an individual say that the other day. Like this has been misproven. Like what study are you looking at? Because it works."

FAQ schema works. He actually likes a lot of that person's content, but he was like, no, that's completely wrong.

"I think a lot of times it's the, we're doing this from an application perspective. We have 900 locations."

The amount of content and things they have, they have anecdotal proof that it is working. Maybe he should put a study out or something.

"The FAQ schema stuff, 100% works. Structuring your titles from a discovery perspective also works."

You start putting things in a site wide location in your footer or in your header that incorporates these superlatives also gets referenced.

"Yeah, I mean schema 1000% works."

They even have a custom GPT that incorporates this. When they put their content into it and structure it a certain way, they have seen significantly more AI overviews.

Tracking AI and LLM Performance

I asked Chris if they have any particular way to track this. Some people have created their own dashboards.

This is a challenge they're trying to solve too. Everybody's got the Ahrefs and SEMrush stuff on the citations and what's good and what's there.

They're using some tools. The one he was referring to that they're using is called PromptWatch right now.

None of them are perfect, but at least it gives you some information. Even Gext has an AI audit score, a visibility score.

Those are good as a baseline from a lead magnet or a marketing perspective more so than existing clientele, but not enough.

Title Tags Need EEAT and Conversion Elements

I asked Chris about implementing EEAT in title tags instead of just keyword stuffing.

"We're absolutely doing that."

Attorneys have advertising ethics and restrictions on the use of superlatives. You can't do it from the bar, but you can say things like if you get an award, that's top rated, you could say top rated by or rated Best Lawyer.

"So then you get the best and the top in the title tag."

Which is super annoying that you got to do that, but those are some things that can make an impact. A lot of times the consumer and you look at these long tails, they're going to use best.

"Who's the best car accident lawyer near me? You're gonna say best."

That's why Super Lawyers and Justia and Best Lawyers, all these are more important. Even the words that are used, when you're coaching up your customers to leave that phrasing into the reviews themselves, incredibly important.

Chris's Message: Keep Improving

I asked Chris for his message to local business owners and local marketers.

"I would just say, be intentional about improving, consistent improvement."

A lot of times individuals self-sabotage themselves. You stop, you quit learning, you don't improve.

Michael Dell talks about this after 40 something plus years in business. You'll sell your business. You won't keep growing. You'll hit these friction points, but as long as you go through the pain, try to fix your mistakes and learn from them, that's the best advice he could give.

He gave a perfect example for himself. They had their first event last year called PIMCon. He didn't save any money for this. "It was like $1.6 million that I had to just figure out."

They had a decent amount of sponsorships and ticket sales. They had to give a lot of tickets away to get people there. Okay, year one, then it's okay, well, I could have sold the tickets at a little bit more. I could have added three more sponsors.

"Now this year it's like $300,000 more. Well now next year we've even found how to get another $100,000 or $200,000 out of it. And it's just because I stuck with it."

He didn't make much money. In fact, he lost money year one. "But it's just sticking with it and just learning from your mistakes."

My Main Takeaway

This conversation with Chris completely changed how I think about focus and LLM optimization. The biggest insight is everything successful came from deep focus. Chris didn't play multiple poker variations. He didn't play multiple card games at a high level. He played one thing and mastered it.

The Yelp revelation is huge. Most people are still focused only on Google reviews, but Yelp is being cited by LLMs, used by Microsoft, powering Apple Maps. You need 20-ish reviews on Yelp in most markets just to rank on the listicles that matter.

And the schema debate is settled. It 1000% works. FAQ schema works. Title tag structure works. Site-wide superlatives get referenced. Chris has 900 locations worth of data proving this.

But what resonated most was the product market fit point. Most agencies are trying to scale sales teams without discovering product market fit first. They're trying to serve multiple industries without realizing product market fit constantly changes and they have to rediscover it for each industry.

Thanks for reading, and if you found this valuable, make sure to check out the full podcast episode. Chris drops even more tactical SEO and LLM strategies that I couldn't fit into this recap.

You can find Chris most active on LinkedIn or email him directly at chris@rankings.io. Make sure to grab his books Niching Up and Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing to go deeper on focus and legal marketing strategies.