Jana Radojcic Podcast Transcript

Jana Radojcic Podcast Transcript

Jana Radojcic joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.

Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Jana Radojcic. Jana Radojcic is a recognized leader in organic marketing for fintech and SaaS brands, specifically in authority building and SEO. As Director of Organic Growth at Alpha Market Flow and Co-Founder of GetStuffDigital, she helps companies grow through PR intelligence, strategic link-building, digital PR, and full-stack SEO. 

Her expertise sits at the intersection of off-page SEO, on-page strategy, reputation management, and brand authority. Jana specializes in helping competitive brands build stronger backlink profiles, improve search visibility, and turn organic traffic into a reliable growth channel. Known for her practical approach to modern SEO, she focuses on sustainable authority building for trust-sensitive brands that support both traditional search rankings and visibility in evolving AI search. 

Well, good afternoon, Jana. Welcome to the show.  

Jana Radojcic: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be talking to you today.  

Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it, and gosh, we’re traversing a lot of time zones and calendars to get here, so I so much appreciate you. And I know you’re hailing near Belgrade in Serbia. 

I believe you’re near Obradovic, if I pronounced that correctly. But in any case, I just appreciate that, and I’m gonna jump into your first question. Jana, yeah, let’s start with your story. How did you find your way into organic marketing for Fintech and SaaS brands, and what led you to build your expertise, specifically around authority building and SEO? 

Jana Radojcic: Well, my career trajectory didn’t really start with marketing. I started off as an academic research writer and kind of eased my way into content writing and the off-page content specifically. So that kind of led me to link building, where I landed my first role as a link building manager, and I learned a lot there. 

I learned a lot about authority building and at that time, I was studying marketing, actually, business and marketing. One role led to another, so I didn’t really want to quit that job. I was feeling very confident in that position, doing what I love, and I just continued doing that, and I tried to, to do my best and improve in every way possible. 

And Fintech and SaaS, they were kind of, at the company I worked for previously; they were our most prominent clients. Almost my entire work experience is relevant to Fintech and SaaS brands, which is exactly where I’m at now because authority building for them, especially in B2B, is very important, and the approach is a lot more different than for business to consumer brands. 

So, a lot of reputation management is involved, a lot of digital PR, and a lot of investment in the brands themselves. So good relationships with the clients mean a lot when you know you’re on the same page. And they’re essentially always more serious when collaborating with you because they try to understand more what authority building and SEO can bring to them. 

Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I love your story. You didn’t start out in marketing, as you mentioned, you were an academic research writer, which is awesome, and I think that, as you stated, one thing led to another, and you… And of course, we know your hard work ethic has probably contributed to a majority of where you’ve gotten today, and, and that’s just awesome. 

Just shows it’s really a testimony to your work ethic and the things that you do. And your entire work experience is mainly in the fintech and SaaS brand, like you talked about. You explained your work in the B2B space is much different than B2C when managing that work and, and the client relationships, and so I appreciate the insights. 

So Jana, your PR intelligence framework is built around the idea that trust is invisible until it’s missing. Can you unpack what PR intelligence actually means and how it helps fintech companies get ahead of reputation problems instead of reacting to bad reviews?  

Jana Radojcic: Well, at Alpha Market Flow, we created the PR intelligence framework to essentially quantify your PR and to quantify the trust that potential clients can have before they even come in contact with your brand. 

So it kind of synthesizes all of the available trust signals online, and we have a scoring system to essentially place you in a trustworthy or, or not so trustworthy category. The biggest issue with brands is that they actually start trust building and reputation management when it’s too late, when they already have bad reviews, when they already have poor relationships with, let’s say, traders specifically, because our focus are prop firms and the Web3 companies. 

So the biggest issue that brands have is how do we proactively act on something that’s already happened? And so we collect all of those trust signals, may it be Trustpilot, Reddit, Discord groups, social media, even the site itself, because your s- your website, your blog, your source of truth needs to be consistent with your brand and what you’re doing. 

So all of those factors come into play when we’re doing PR intelligence, and of course, it’s always better to do it proactively, like if you’re just starting out. We currently have two pre-launch prop firms working with us, so that’s the PR intelligence is the basis of our SEO, of our content marketing, social media strategy, and community building. 

Whereas when you do it later, it’s much more difficult to, of course, repair what’s already broken, but it is possible, and that we do reactive reputation management and proactive. There’s always a solution for companies that have come into the tricky part of fixing their reputation, but it’s, it’s always manageable if you know where those poor trust signals are coming from, and that’s essentially what the PR intelligence does. 

We get to know where those signals are coming from and how to repair them from the core.  

Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jana. So you talked about the Alpha Market Flow. You offer that PR intelligence. Just I’m gonna highlight a few things. You quantify the clients, obviously their PR, by collecting trust signals from everywhere. 

And you mentioned just a slew of different platforms where you can actually collect that information. But brands, as you mentioned, typically start to try and fix their reputation when it’s too late. You do offer that proactive and reactive solution, so no matter where that client is in their journey through brand reputation, you’re able to assist them, so thank you. 

Jana, AI search is reshaping discoverability with engines deciding which sources they trust enough to cite rather than just ranking ten links. How does your approach to authority building support visibility in AI-driven search, and what are you doing differently because of that?  

Jana Radojcic: Well, up until recently, before the AI overviews and AI search took over, the main focus was exactly that, ranking in the top ten and the building authority as a metric. 

Right now, that’s still important, but we approach authority building a different way, where it’s more leaning into pure digital PR and how your brand is mentioned across media, not just across high DR publishers. Like, if your brand is mentioned in Forbes, for example, that doesn’t matter so much anymore. 

AI search engines, just like the common trader, treat your brand based on how much they can trust you. So AI needs to trust you, and for AI to trust you, a lot of people should be talking a lot of good things about you. And link building is now definitely authority building, and guest posts or the different types of authority building strategies have now switched to more of authority posts that we’re doing, where essentially you focus on brand mentions and how your brand is associated with what people are searching for because people go to AI search engines with higher intent to convert. 

So they have very elaborate queries, very elaborate questions, very elaborate problems they put into the AI, and it’s very different from Google Search because in Google, you might not even get a full sentence in search. And here you have to be very specific in how you solve a problem for a potential client, and that’s what we’re doing. 

We’re doing authority building that explicitly focuses on bottom of the funnel queries that people might be looking up in AI. So when you nail that stance, when you nail the intent behind what potential customers are searching for, you can have amazing results, and we’ve had amazing results with the AI search clicks increasing. 

I wouldn’t say it’s the same as we’ve been doing it for the past five to ten years. But it’s more elaborate and more, more about making your brand omnipresent, even as far as building a good LinkedIn, building a good presence online apart from your site. So I’d say it’s really just become more complex but in a good way. 

Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate you unpacking all that. I’m just gonna highlight some things, Jana, that you stated. Prior to AI search, the traditional SEO in a ranking, right, that was kind of the big thing, which was important for authority building at the time, but the focus now is more on the AI searches, and you talked about that, where trust is important and how does your brand show up in AI? 

Link building is authority building still, but at the end of the day, users are going into AI searches and they’re looking for your brand with that high intent to convert, and I thought that was interesting. So thank you. And Jana, last question of the day, as we look ahead to the future, how do you see the relationship between traditional search, link building, and AI search evolving over the next couple of years, and how should brands position themselves now to stay visible and credible as the landscape shifts? 

Jana Radojcic: Well, m-my last LinkedIn post that I did on Get Stuff Digital was essentially about that, and it’s the most boring suggestion of all when it comes to SEO and AI search and everything. It’s to actually build a real brand. A lot of brands start out without knowing what their ICP requires. So their ideal customer, they don’t even know their ideal customer, and if you don’t go from a standpoint of those who search for you and those who look up to find your solutions, you can’t really do anything, not even SEO or authority building will matter because a good brand is one you can trust, and a good brand is one that has repeat customers and people who are talking well about you. 

So AI search will only disregard the brands that aren’t doing anything to solve problems and that aren’t doing anything well. So the main focus for business owners should be to nail their ICP, to actually try to understand their customers in every possible way, to try to solve all of their problems, and to really talk to people because you can’t know how to word those queries for AI search engines. 

For example, if my customer wants to know, let’s say, “What are the best prop firms?” You wouldn’t do an article about the prop trading space or something very top of the funnel like that. You would actually give them an answer about the best prop firms you can trade with are A, B, C, and that’s the whole point because bottom of the funnel content marketing is essentially you providing solutions, and that’s what AI is prioritizing contrary to the top of the funnel content that used to perform well in search. 

And it’s no longer so important to rank if you don’t convert. And if you get AI clicks, there’s a higher chance of converting just because the people who are searching in AI have higher intent, and they’re actually looking for you to solve their problems.  

Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Talked about this, your latest LinkedIn post shares some insights on the future of AI search, which I recommend everybody go out to your LinkedIn for sure and, and check that out. 

A good brand is, is a brand really you can trust, right? Your brand should obviously nail your ideal customer profile, understand their customers, truly solve their problems, and as you know, Google is doing the same thing. They’re prioritizing content that helps the people that are searching for answers. 

And one last thing I’d, I’d like to highlight that you talked about is bottom of the content funnel is really what AI is looking for. And you said earlier that high intent, right, those searches- Yep … coming through AI is really what’s gonna be more likely to convert, so I think that’s amazing. So thank you for your insights. 

Yana, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.  

Jana Radojcic: Likewise. It was a pleasure to me as well, and I enjoyed our conversation.  

Brian Thomas: Bye for now. 

Jana Radojcic Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.