10x Your Traffic & Revenue By Doing This

First and foremost, we're going to talk about a couple of things that really I've tested across the board, whether it's for a clientele or ourselves internally. My name is Eric Siu, and as was mentioned earlier, I have an ad agency called Single Grain, and I do a podcast called Marketing School with another marketer named Neil Patel, and another one called Leveling Up. So I have a love-hate relationship with podcasts. As a marketer, it's probably the most rewarding channel that I've ever dealt with, but it's also the hardest thing to grow. So I'm going to give you a couple of things that you can do. On the podcasting side, This is us. The numbers are a little off. May was actually about 1.7 million. I think this month we'll hit about 1.6 million in terms of monthly downloads. And this is not all to brag. I mean, in the very beginning, after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day and I was spending 6 hours a week on it. And then second year, only 30 downloads a day. And then it just starts compounding over time. And so a couple of things too, demographic-wise, and it's hard to read this, I'll share the slides afterwards, but at the very highest point, maybe in the top left, you can see we have a lot of people, like a lot of rich people that listen to podcasts, right? $250K income or more. There's $200K bracket, but you can see we're in a dark blue and we actually exceed kind of what the benchmark numbers are. And that's just to say that podcasting is great from a demographic standpoint, but also from a retention standpoint. Think about this. If people are watching a YouTube video, they're not likely to finish it. Like, I get ADD when I'm watching YouTube videos. Like, I start looking at my phone, I start doing other stuff, right? But with podcasting, you're usually doing something. You're working out or you are doing your laundry or something like that. Your retention curve is actually a lot higher. So when we look at our Apple Podcast analytics or we look at Spotify, it's actually like a flat curve. People actually— our retention is about 90% or so. Keep in mind, these are about 5-minute daily episodes versus on YouTube, I'm lucky if I get like 30, 40%. I'm not like MrBeast where I can hold people at 60% across the board. It's hard to keep people interested, but with podcasts you can actually do that. So here's how you can actually grow podcasts. This seems like a duh statement, but right now we're doing a deal with Jordan Harbinger, who has a podcast with about 5 or 6 million downloads a month. Great one to listen to. We're trading him impressions right now. So we said, hey, We'll trade you 500K impressions and he'll do the same thing. And it's pretty easy to do that. You can use different tools like Chartable. My point here is that if you're going to try to promote your podcasts, it makes a lot of sense to get onto other podcasts or buy ads on other podcasts. And there's actually a lot of ad networks that are forming right now, like podcast ad networks or just podcast networks. The HubSpot Podcast Network is a good example of this. They're all kind of cross-promoting each other. If any of you listen to My First Million, great podcast. And now we're starting to do the same thing. So hardest channel to grow, but the most rewarding from a retention standpoint, 'cause you're building trust at scale. When you get that level of retention, I just think it's really difficult to match. Another timeless test of principle, so this is actually number 1, is the law of poo-poo click-throughs. The law of shitty click-throughs, what that really means is like over time, any social channel, the click-through rate is gonna come down, right? That's kind of what the law is. Really good essay by Andrew Chen. This is LinkedIn, right? And so I'm gonna give you a list of what I think the biggest opportunities are from an organic standpoint, which I think everyone can attack. This one over here, I threw up a couple weeks ago. This one might be at like 7,000 or 8,000 likes now. 500,000 or 600,000 impressions. And all that to say is LinkedIn organic is very strong right now. And so there's a couple things that you can do. One, can you create like a group of friends that when you are posting out there, you are going to get a bunch of people to like it, right? Or a bunch of people to comment. So if you work at a company, there's a lot of companies that actually do this right now where I see them, their employee will post and a bunch of their employees will jump in. It works. Images work really well. Videos work pretty well. I would say carousels work really well too. When you compare LinkedIn versus Instagram, 87% of Instagram users actually post Instagram, okay? Whereas LinkedIn, only 1% of users post to LinkedIn. You know, for me, keep it very simple. Like the posts, you know, I'll just ask a question at the very beginning. I'll try to make it controversial. I think having a spiky point of view makes a lot of sense too. So you ideally want people disagreeing with you because then it causes more engagement. But don't say anything that you don't mean, obviously. So just be you. If you're B2B, LinkedIn to me is number one. Number 2, in my opinion, is Shorts. Any type of short form, especially YouTube Shorts, because obviously it stays on YouTube. So YouTube has really been taking off for us and What I actually thought was a little counterintuitive was running ads to my YouTube videos, right? And so recently we just started spending like $25 to $40 on any of our YouTube videos. And what's happening right now is you can see, like, I was like, okay, this is stupid. Like, it's just going to say my traffic source is coming from YouTube advertising. That's not actually the case. When I look at analytics now, the reality is YouTube's actually recommending a lot of my videos or like suggesting a lot of my videos. And so that $25 to $40 that I'm spending per video is actually a good return on investment, right? Because it's actually growing my YouTube channel across the board and it's actually— Starting to push my channel more. And obviously if you're doing Shorts, then it makes a lot of sense to hit TikTok. It makes a lot of sense to hit Reels. Believe it or not, Facebook pages organic reach is actually making a comeback because so many people have got away from it for a while and now it's, it's making a comeback, right? If you actually have a B2B Facebook page, like maybe you should dust it off, take a look at it again because it's a big opportunity. Okay, here's a little framework that you can use. Maybe this is the only like picture-worthy slide, but this is our little content sprouting process. And so what this means is that For me, if I'm doing like an interview, let's say I'm doing a fireside chat. I was just up here doing a fireside chat, right? So that might be a podcast interview. So that's the pillar piece of content. And then what happens afterwards is the post-production, right? So you have a pillar piece of content, whether it's a podcast or whether you are good at writing blog posts, whatever it is exactly. You have one pillar piece of content. That's your seed. And then you start to split it out, right? The argument here is that you can take one piece of content and I'm going to have my team jump on it and then we're going to make it into shorts. We're going to Probably take those little 1-minute clips. I'm gonna throw them into like a LinkedIn box video, and then I'm gonna write a little long-form piece and then try to maximize the reach. I'll talk about one of the key mistakes I made with my YouTube channel where it's finally getting back on track now. A couple years ago, I would talk about marketing as an example, and some of my videos would get, you know, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, or like 200,000, 300,000 views or so. What happened along the way was that I started talking about other stuff. I'm more than a marketer. Like, talk about investing. Talk about NFTs. There's NFTs up here, right? The problem with that is the YouTube algorithm will punish you. It punishes you for not focusing. Whereas my podcast co-host Neil, like he's got a million subs now on YouTube and all he talks about is marketing, right? We talk about a lot of other stuff on the side. We talk about investing, we talk about real estate, we talk about all this stuff. It's just like, it doesn't matter. The YouTube algorithm just wants you to stay focused. There's a reason why everyone, like every kid wants to become a YouTuber because YouTube is around for the long term. Second largest search engine in the world. And then what can you do afterwards if you're B2B? You can retarget people. And here's the thing, I don't see a lot of B2B companies that do YouTube. Pretty well for whatever reason. But when you study the best YouTubers out there, when you study a MrBeast, when you look at what's going on, I would really recommend looking at Colin and Samir. They study the top creators. Look at what they do. And even if you emulate 20 to 30% of what these top creators are doing, you're going to be better than all the B2B companies out there because people are just not doing this stuff. You know what I do with my in-person events is I start out with a little dinner. And this is when I was broke and when I was like 25 or 26, like we ate like a bag of chips at my home. So you slowly level up and you don't have to pay for everything. You get people to come over, maybe get people to bring their own food, right? And you just little mastermind. Basically, I started out with dinners and it slowly leveled up to paying for like larger dinners in private rooms, and then it started to become larger events, right? You got to think about your approach and how you deliver. And so for me, when I throw these dinners, I'm not trying to like collect leads. I'm not trying to like get clients. I'm not trying to say, hey, like, you know, how are you doing with this, right? My drug is I get a lot of value from connecting with people. Relationships are the ROI, right? Like long term, no matter what, like you, you do these things. Like I just like hosting like this dinner over here that I did in New York. This was during NFT NYC. But you know, at the end of the day, like The magic that happens from these dinners, all these collaborations that happen, it's worth it, right? Shifting your mindset instead of trying to become the most interesting person in the room, just being interested, right? And that's the quote that's always stuck with me. What do you think is the most important thing when it comes to your ads? Is it click-through rate? Is it conversion rate? Cost per click? What is it exactly? In the very top left corner, this is their Facebook ad library, right? And you can see that they're running 220 ads at any given time. This is another one of our clients called Belay Solutions. They're running 120 ads at any given time. I would challenge you to take a look at how many ad creatives you're running at any given time, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on Google, whether it's on Facebook, whatever channel. It's all about the creative, right? And I think people have gotten lazy about creative over time. Just when you're hiring them, like, hey, show me some good creative that you've done, right? Show me what you can do for us. Like, we'll pay you for this assignment. I think we forget that process when we're interviewing people. That's one of the most important things. Like, we hire a lot of doers, like a lot of tacticians, But you need the strategic thinking, you need the creativity, otherwise you're going to get the same results as everyone else and that means poor click-through rate, which affects all your down funnel conversions, affects your CPA, affects your CPC, affects all those numbers. If you can't get that part right, then it's just not going to work. Using the AIDA model, this is kind of old school copywriting, old school sales. The first thing is, what does the A stand for? It stands for attention. How can we get people's attention? How do we hook people? I didn't want to use this example, but those of you that have heard of this Andrew Tate guy, he's like growing, like, like love him or hate him, right? But this guy's a walking highlight reel because everything he says will grab your attention. And like, some people really hate him, some people really love him, right? And that's why he's more popular than I think anybody else in the world right now. If you search on Google Trends, I think what he's doing from a marketing perspective is genius. Check out what this guy is doing. I think it's interesting and I think you might become mildly entertained. Final thing, I'll leave it with this. You can still play the game of SEO because there's so many underutilized websites out there that are primed for the taking. There's a lot of these websites that are out there that list these sites available for sale, right? And my point of saying all this is that you can buy a website that's getting a good amount of traffic. They might even have an email list. They might have other assets as well, and they're generating cash flow. And you can just plug it into whatever it is that you're doing. You can basically finance these websites for almost no money down, right? I'll just give you an example here. Let's say you're a pet SaaS business and doing $3 million in ARR, and you come across a website that gets about 500,000 visits a month. So it's pretty significant and they're doing about $1 million a year in revenue and $200K in profit. So that's at the bottom right. So the way you can structure this deal is if they're doing $200K in profit, well then you can buy them for 3x profit, right? And then what you can do is you can say, hey, you know what, I'll put 10% down to buy this deal. Okay, so you put $60 grand down and the rest of it could seller finance it. You can use a loan or whatever. And you can actually defer the down payment, say, hey, I'm not going to pay you this $60,000 down payment. I'm going to wait maybe 30 to 45 days or so. And you actually end up paying $0 out of pocket, right? My point of saying all this is that, look, you don't have to be fancy. You don't— oh my God, I'm doing M&A. Like, you can do this yourself. It's practical. And as marketers, we need to start to think a little more creatively. And this is part of it. Like, creative is the one thing, right? Like, we can be creative with how we acquire more traffic. Like, we can own this traffic.