2024 survey: Website load time patience, Premature marketing diversification pitfalls, and more

How long people wait for a website to load in 2024. So I got this from Search Engine Land. It was a survey between them and was it Forbes or Fortune? Let's see, Forbes Advisory Survey. So here's what's interesting. Less than 3 seconds, 4%. Less than, or 3 to 6 seconds, 29%. 7 to 10 seconds, 38%. More than 11 seconds, 24%. So in essence, the way you need to look at this data is, If your site takes longer than 11 seconds to load, you'll only retain 24% of the people. If your, yeah, if your site takes 11 seconds or longer to load, yeah, you end up losing 90-something percent of the people. If you're less than 3 seconds, you'll keep 96% of the people.

Yeah.

So speed does matter.

Yeah.

You just, you know, Amazon tested this and they lost, what, a billion plus in revenue they found for every like, millisecond in load time delay. They were much smaller then, but load time matters. You need to be fast. If you can't be fast, you're screwed.

So we should tell people how they can keep their website fast.

Well, first use a CDN. That helps it.

Like Cloudflare?

Uh-huh. CDN is a content delivery network. I think Cloudflare has a free plan. Cloudflare free plan. I'm Googling it. Let's see. Does it have a free plan? Yes, get started for free. So I'm assuming there is a free plan.

Mm-hmm.

The reason, what a CDN does is it puts your content, your static stuff, all over servers throughout the whole world, which means when someone from India visits your site, it'll load from a server in India versus someone in the United States who visits your site, which will load from a server in the United States. And it gets more specific because if I'm on the West Coast of the United States, you'd want to go from a server from the West Coast just due to speed. Another way to keep your site clean is just Just make sure every once in a while, every few years, you just relook at your code and you just clean things up. Because what ends up happening is you have so many developers in there or the same one modifying things over the years and things just get messy. So when you just delete a lot of stuff and you keep your code clean, what you'll find is your site loads faster.

Yeah. It's like reformatting your computer back in the day.

Exactly.

It just speeds it up.

Yeah.

And I mean, what— so I mean, you could obviously use Google PageSpeed Insights to keep tabs on how quickly things are going and that'll be a guide for you. Generally, rule of thumb, cleaning it out every couple of years is ideal.

Yeah, compression, you want to compress images, size, not the quality. Yes, that is very doable with technology in today's world, but things like that can really help your load time. And also just make sure you're on a powerful server. People forget that, but being on little dinky cheap hosting plans don't help as much when you could have something that's more robust.

If you're using WordPress, for example, WP Engine is great. No, I'm not even on WP Engine.

You're not on WP Engine?

I'm on Kinsta.

What the heck is Kinsta?

I don't know, Kinsta, it's really fast and like it's WordPress hosting and it's cheaper. So yeah, I use Kinsta. Dude, I've been on— My dev said, let's see, I just like whatever. WP Engine is great, by the way. Kinsta is also great.

I don't know how long I've been on WP Engine, but I must've been one of their earlier customers.

Do you have a, are you on a cheap plan?

No, thousands a month.

Yeah, I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post what Whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you there. See you inside. Why premature marketing diversification is a killer. So, do you remember what Bill Gross said, the investor? The Overture guy? Yeah, the Overture guy. So, he said this in like, I think, 2000s or so. What do you think the number one killer is for startups?

Funding? Not enough funding? I think that's number one reason.

That's number 2, I believe. Number one is premature scaling, right? And oftentimes premature scaling also means premature marketing. A lot of it goes into marketing, right? But also, to be more specific, it's premature marketing diversification that's a killer. When you try to do too many channels, you're listening to this podcast, you try to do 10 or 15 different things at once, you're going to end up doing nothing because you never really got good at one and then try to diversify. So the best thing to do is try to do one first before you try to do all these different things because you're going to diversify the focus of your team and your resources and you don't have a lot in the beginning and that's what's going to lead to you getting no traction on anything. Yeah.

Dude, I totally agree with that. And people believe that marketing is a holy grail. But if you have a crap product or service, marketing only gets you so far. All it does is just stretch out your death.

The topic I have over here is, did work from home destroy a generation of workers? And so this topic is from Jason Lemkin. And so Jason Lemkin says over here, working from home destroyed a generation of SaaS executives, took too many side hustles, stopped meeting customers IRL, in real life, lost a lot of peer support network. When things got harder, the fragility of the work from home rep was exposed. And you remember a couple weeks ago— oh, you're going to yawn. So, remember a couple weeks ago, we talked about how the reps, the salespeople or marketers that are always posting to LinkedIn, it's like they're focused on that. And then you have Eric Schmidt who's like, you know how Google lost its edge? It's because you can't get anywhere working one day in the office a week, right? And you can't— when you're a startup and you're fighting to survive, everyone's usually in the office and everyone's collaborating. And then on the All-In Pod, everyone was talking about how basically get back in the office, right? So I think, uh, this is a discussion we can have right now. Do we think that work from home destroyed a generation of workers?

I think work from home destroyed the younger generation who's starting to work.

Bingo. So my—

Not the older ones.

The younger people we have on, on staff, they, they actually, um— so I see my chief of staff like twice a week, right? And she's like, she's younger, and she's like She prefers being together, the camaraderie, the, hey, you know, looking over your shoulder and just being like, hey, what about this? What about this? And just, hey, let's get into office and talk about that idea, right? You just get so much done faster and you build long-term relationships. We've worked for a while, so we're kind of like, whatever, you know, you've got a family, right? So it's like, it's cool working from home. But younger people, it's probably not the best move.

The reason I say younger people struggle more is because When you're in an office, you can get up to speed quicker. You learn more, you have more mentorship, you can go to people for questions. You lose a lot of that when you're starting your career. And I feel the younger generation has lost that and it got deprived for them due to COVID. Doesn't mean it's not fixable, but it put them a little bit behind in their career because a lot of the young people that I know who have done well, they've learned from other people who have more experience. And you do that more easily in an environment where everyone's in an office together. The older generation, I found a lot of them are still very productive working from home. But again, the mentorship, the learnings, the trainings, it's just not the same virtual.

Yeah, it's your learning cycles when you're younger, especially you're coming out of college, you're motivated, you're going to work extra hard in your early 20s. Like in our 20s, all we had nothing to do, we just worked all the time, right?

I think it's different generation. The younger generation that I've seen, and I'm not trying to talk trash, I'm just telling you what I've seen and I could be totally wrong. They don't want to work as hard and they're not willing to do whatever it takes to succeed compared to our generation and our parents' generation.

You know what's funny? I was talking to my parents over this weekend, right? So we were walking the Huntington Library, Huntington Gardens, and I was like, hey, so do you think your life when you were younger was better? Yes, right? And we would say the same thing too. So basically every generation says the same thing. It's like my generation was so much better. My generation was so much better, right? And then if you relate it to this, it's like we're kind of saying the same thing. Our generation like worked harder and all that, right? I don't know if that's true necessarily because I do meet some of the people that are in their 20s, they're super hungry, super motivated, and the way they pick up things is equal or faster than like some of the best people I've seen in our 20s.

Or let me rephrase, the younger people that I've met in quantity Majority of them want to figure out how to make money and work the least amount of hours.

Yes, that is true.

Like they want to be influencers or, you know, I met someone who wants to—

Easy money.

Yeah, they want easy money. While our generation, it could be because we didn't have a lot of those options, we were willing to grind it out and go to college. I'm not saying college is good or bad, but we're willing to grind it out and do whatever it takes to climb the corporate ladder. We also had less choices. And now with technology, it's easier to create companies, easier to make money as an influencer. And I'm not joking. I get more young people hitting me up than I ever did before asking me how to make money from social media so they can travel the world and not go into an office or work.

Yeah. Well, we'll tell you this. We'll tell you this right now. This whole concept of not working and just relaxing, it becomes very boring very quickly. We actually get a lot of energy. I'm speaking for Neil right now, by the way, too. We get a lot of energy from working, waking up and feeling like we're contributing. And the puzzle, as a business grows, the problems grow too. And it gets— it's a tougher puzzle to solve and it's fun and you get a lot of energy from that. So the whole like running away It's actually, work is actually a good thing because you're contributing to a purpose that's larger than you.

Dude, totally agree. And I believe that in life, if you don't have some sort of purpose, work doesn't mean you have to make a ton of money. Work could be volunteer at a soup kitchen or you work at a library and you do that, or you help some nonprofit out. But just doing something just keeps your mind going and keeps it sharp.

I'm going to read this J. Paul Getty quote because I just finished the book, by the way. So it says over here, J. Paul Getty, just so everyone knows, I mean, he was, The richest man in the world when he was alive. So, he says this in his book and the book is called How to Be Rich. So, I found that to establish his identity, to feel he is fully participating, a fully participating member of society, an individual must have purpose and feel that what he does has some enduring value well beyond the limits of his own personal interests. So, it talks about just doing something bigger than yourself. That's what it is at the end of the day.

So yeah, everyone needs a sense of purpose. And that purpose also gives you passion and just keeps you moving.

The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. So let's talk about this next one and then we'll move over to one of yours. So there's this astrology app that gets 50 million views per month on TikTok with this simple strategy. This is the stats of one of their accounts. So basically they just do these slideshow posts, right? 385 slideshows in 105 days. So this is what a slide— these are the slideshows, right? When they post them.

So they're posting videos?

Yeah, they're like video slides basically.

So it's just text that is like a PowerPoint that you read and it just is a video and it changes automatically.

So they got 12 with over 1 million views and then 36 with over 350K views, and median is 37K views. They have 9 accounts performing as well. So Astro App is a basic astrology app which isn't even ranking among the top players. So Co-Star, The Pattern, Moonly. When it comes to dating, these apps are always mentioned all the time. But they have an insane— Wait, how do you know?

From the girls you date?

I just know, okay? So, but they have an insane top-of-funnel strategy generating 50 million views a month. They found a slideshow strategy with text-heavy slides that work incredibly well for engagement. The ones about love, dating, flirting, girlfriend, boyfriend, and compatibility are the ones working best. In many niches, if you can create content around those topics, go ahead. These accounts are sometimes posting 5 times a day. And again, basically they have 9 different accounts. And I'm not going to go into too much details here. I'll just end it up with this. 2 months ago, they created 7 different language accounts for PL, NL, PT, ES, France, Italy, Denmark, or sorry, Germany. And each one of them is destroying. So they instantly 5x their views just by scaling using internationalization. So what can we, what can we deduce from this?

Internationalization for the win. But I've been doing that for a long time.

Yep. And this slide, I mean, also the topics too, the top, like everyone loves these topics on social. Everyone loves to share these, repost. This stuff gets reshared a lot. Let's just put it that way.

Dude, I don't have the data in front of me, but for shits and giggles, I went through the Fortune 500. and I looked up each company, technically I had someone on my team look up each company and looked to see which ones operate globally versus just within the United States, right? Because Fortune 500 is for US companies. A lot of them are, almost majority of them are global companies.

Mm-hmm.

There's some that are not global, like JPMorgan Chase is a US company. Yes, you can do banking in other countries through JP Morgan Chase, but they have partnerships with other banks and a lot of it's white label, but they're regulated here in the US. I would consider them a US company, right? But like an Apple is considered global. You can buy their products in Mexico or in China or anywhere else. Same with Microsoft and the list goes on and on. But most big companies make their money not from one country, but from pretty much The whole world.

I gotta go home and set up my new Apple computer.

Oh, you just bought a new Apple computer?

Yeah, it's, uh, so Yaniv has this too. It's the Studio Display and you have a Mac Studio.

What the heck is the Studio Display? I'm gonna Google this now. Apple Studio Display. Oh, I'll send you the specs after.

You should just get one.

Yeah.

The Studio Display, it's like a—

Oh, it's a monitor.

No, but then when you combine it with the computer, the computer is super crazy. Um, and then Yaniv's like, it's heaven when he works.

Why not just use an iPad?

No, dude, it's impossible. Like, okay, it's possible, but it's like when you're on desktop, you feel like you're— it's, it's like Godly work style.

So I, funny enough, use the iPad probably for 98% of my work each week.

Wow. Well, see, remember when we were hanging out with Yaniv and he was back on his laptop? He's like, there's too much stuff. That's wrong right now. Yeah, so I gotta work on the computer. So the more stuff you deal with, I guess the, the higher the computer level.

Yeah, when I'm dealing with stuff like finances, I cannot do that on an iPad. It's It's too hard. Like just crunching numbers.

You're basically working on an iPhone.

It's the same thing. Bigger screen, but yeah, it does not work out well.

All right, guys, that is it for today. Please go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow. Please help us balance out the, the people that don't like the new format. Tell us you like the new format. Alright, we'll see you guys later. Bye.