How Mike Munter keeps reputation management affordable
Mike Munter is Owner of Mike Munter LLC, which offers affordable reputation management services and guarantees the first month. The company says it buries negative search results for under $1,000 per month while keeping overhead low. This interview explains why the business still relies on organic search and video for leads, and why AI is used selectively.
Organic search and short videos still drive incoming leads for this low-overhead reputation management firm. AI can speed drafting for some content, but it has not replaced human-written how-to posts that require screenshots and detailed explanation.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started my search engine optimization business in 2011 and discovered online reputation management a year later. ORM seemed easier than SEO, but I noticed all of the companies providing that service was charging hefty fees and requiring year-long contracts. Since I didn’t have corporate overhead, I thought I could do it cheaper and deliver first class results. I remember being shocked that affordablereputationmanagement.com was available as a domain, so I pounced. I started adding content and every lead we’ve ever gotten has come from someone finding us in a Google search. Our overhead remains very low today and we continue to provide the best reputation management services at monthly prices less than half of the big firms you see paying for ads on Google.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
It comes from Google organic search and our YouTube videos. It’d be cool if someone said, "Hey, ChatGPT recommended you," but so far that hasn’t happened. We’re working on it 🙂
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Definitely blog posts. I hoped I could train ChatGPT to write like me, but it just can’t. Plus, the majority of the posts I write are "how to" type stuff and to do that well, you need to use screenshots and really explain things. AI can’t do that—yet.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
I don’t think we’re getting found much, if at all, on ChatGPT. That LLM seems trained on Reddit and the major pay-to-play review sites like Clutch, G2, etc. I’m not willing to pay for ads, so we’ll have to wait for the LLMs to get more savvy before we begin to get inbound leads from them.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Well, if you have the VC backing, you could pay to invest in all of the places I mentioned above in order to influence ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others. But I’m at the other end of that. I love getting leads from people who say, "I read your website or I saw your video." So, I’d say to answer your question, just get yourself a domain and start cracking on a great blog that covers the topics and FAQs in your niche.
Thank you to Mike Munter and the team at Mike Munter LLC for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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