AI Marketing Blueprint To Make You Rich (Full Tutorial)

I'm going to give you a couple things that are practical to grow your business, and I'm not just talking about generative AI stuff. I want to give you practical things that you can actually use. We'll talk about agentic workflows. We'll share some prompts as well, and we might share some new tools that we found maybe in the last week or two. So first and foremost, my name is Eric Siu, and main company is an ad agency called Single Grain, and I do 2 podcasts. One's called Leveling Up, and the other one's called Marketing School, and I Did a couple of Marketing School sessions this morning with my co-host. He has now since left. He's flying back home, but these are examples of what we do with the podcast, and I'll be talking about how we leverage the podcast as well and how we actually combine AI from an SEO standpoint and also from a repurposing standpoint. There's also a free thing that you can use there that I think will help you with repurposing, so if you stick till the end, we'll get there. And I think Maybe for starters, I do want to talk about how this one quote from Sam Altman, and he said that 95% of marketing work or creative work is— AI is going to handle most of it. I don't know if I agree with 95%, but I think a good chunk of it's going to be handled by AI. Not sure I agree with that, but he does say another thing. He does think that in-person communities such as this, right? You guys are all at Inbound. will become way more valuable in the next 5 to 10 years or so, and I tend to agree with that, and there's also an SEO angle with that too, and we'll get to that in a second. So first and foremost, I'm gonna just put some structure on this. I'm gonna talk about how we've been increasing our traffic and conversions, and we'll start with SEO first. So one thing I've been talking about quite a bit for maybe the last 12 months or so is this whole concept of programmatic SEO, and a lot of people that have been doing it They got torched, meaning that they lost their traffic. They went a little too aggressively. They created a lot of these pages for SEO purposes and Google caught on and they torched their websites. They lost all that traffic. Sites that would go from zero to millions or hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. They weren't paying attention to the quality and that's why everything fell apart. This right here, if you look at the top right, maybe you can't read the stats, but this is TripAdvisor. They get about 131 million visitors per month, give or take, just from SEO, and they would be paying Google about $66 million a month for that traffic. That's according to Ahrefs, and they rank for 24 million organic keywords. Now am I saying that's possible for you? I don't think we need to go for 24 million keywords. I think even if you rank for 1,000 or 100,000 or so, you'll probably be in a good spot. I think what's worth calling out is The whole idea of programmatic SEO. They rank for things to do in Seattle, things to do in Japan, fun attractions in Kyoto. I'm going to Japan in 2 weeks, so I'm thinking about it quite a bit. They have a lot of these location-based or geographically based pages, but if you're an agency here, how many of you are agencies over here? A good chunk of you. You can create agency pages, Boston digital marketing agency, Boston SEO agency. You have a lot of permutations that you can create. So if you're a location-based company or if you have a lot of different products or services, then you can create a lot of programmatic content. But the problem with it, if you see this graph over here, is we shot up into the right initially. This is just for one section on our website. We shot up and we didn't push as hard as we could have, and you can see towards the end of this that the graph starts to stagnate. And if we go a little more in detail here, it's like, oh, whoa. In the very beginning, it's like, We should have bet harder. We should have pressed harder when we had the advantage. If I go over here, you can see that we got hit by a Google core update because we published too many pages that weren't high quality. I'm going to talk about how we recovered too and now everything's just kind of shooting up into the right. Now some of you that are SEOs can argue that it's just all coming from that recent Google algorithm update and everyone's shooting up into the right. That could be the case, but we like to think that we focus a lot on content and quality, and that's one of the reasons why we shot up. So one of the core lessons that we learned here is that when it comes to content, yes, you need to update your content. Yes, you need to prune your content. Yes, you need to consolidate your content, and I'll put a pin in the consolidation piece because I'll come back to that in a second. I'll show you what we're doing with workflows so you don't have to do that on your own manually. So if you stay till the end, we'll get there, but you can see here, look on the left side. Slow start, and then a Google update happens. We start moving down and to the right. I'm like, oh my God, is the site going to get torched? And then recovers. It recovers because we deleted a lot of low-quality pages and we focused a lot on the quality of the pages that we're putting out. So instead of volume, instead of quantity, it's more so quality. And it's still, even to this day, even we're talking 2 years into this ChatGPT push, too many people are focused on just, hey, let's just use AI and autopilot it. Even today, and I think that's just us being lazy people and we need to, if we can just go the extra mile a little bit, we're gonna do a lot better than most people. We're gonna do a lot better than our competitors. So just on this little experiment over here, we added, this is about a 300% ROI campaign. We invested about $26,000 or so and basically in maybe the first, I don't know, call it 6-ish months or so, $26,000 invested, $105,000 in revenue out the gate. So it's not bad for an initial test. And now we're pressing harder on it and we're trying to figure out what else we can do. So this is really just the first arc of the story. Yes, like a year ago or so we started doing programmatic SEO, but in a moment I'm going to talk about agentic workflows. I'm going to talk about programmatic CRO as well. These are all things that everyone here can do as long as you have, hopefully you have an engineer on your team, you can do all this stuff. It's not that complex. I'm going to show you a customer example. So this is one of our clients over here. They're in the wine business. Originally, they want to rank for like Pinot Grigio under $10 or Chardonnay under $50. There's a lot of programmatic opportunity here. Their average click-through rate was less than 1%. That's one initial stat. Our goal here was to scale content production while increasing conversions, and so what we did was we didn't go hardcore here. We just created 200 new pages for them programmatically, and keep in mind, this is a very small test, so I'm not gonna give you numbers in the millions. I'm trying to make this Anybody can do this, right? So 200 new pages that we created and all we did topics-wise, look, best wine type under price point. That's all we did for them, right? And those of you that like numbers, here are some numbers over here. So previously they were averaging about 3,400 clicks or so and then when we added these programmatic pages for that specific section, now they're getting 6,300 clicks per month and then 184,000 impressions. Before they're getting 100,000 impressions. So pretty significant. We're just talking basically double-ish. The click-through rate instead of 0.8% shot up to 3.4%, and it's simple because these are high-intent keywords. It makes a lot of sense for the click-through rate to go a lot higher. We added about 1,123 new keywords. Keep in mind again, small test, and about 111 of them are in the top 3 positions. These are pretty good stats for just adding 200 pages. It's actually kind of insane. Again, I think at least for me, I was trapped in the beginning saying, oh, TripAdvisor is doing millions of pages, I need to do millions of pages too. It's not the reality. In fact, 200 pages, look what you get. For us, we added some agency pages. I think we went a little too aggressively in the beginning, but it does really well for us now and you can do the same thing too. Before I move on, I just have this little QR code over here. This is our email list if you want to get on it. We just nerd out on all the marketing stuff. I'm not going to try to sell you anything. I'm going to leave it up for about 10 seconds and I'm going to move on to what we're talking about with our podcast and how we're making the most of that. All right. Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people and you're going to be hanging out with people, like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you on the other side. These are— when we think about our pillar, our content pillars, we think about how are we going to take all the content from the long-form podcasts we do for Marketing School, for Leveling Up, which are the 2 that I do. And the reason why we record video all the time is I look at social media as like a slot machine. You never know what's going to take off and sometimes the stupidest things take off. I remember Neil and I were kind of talking about this Shake Shack offer where you can get a coupon off, you get free Shake Shack on Sunday or something, and that got like 3 million views. Or another one where I talked about this discount store in Italy and that got like 6 million views or something. So you just don't know what's going to take off and some of you might be saying, okay, Eric's creating this top of funnel content. Does it drive ROI? From that one Italy discount store video that I made, I got 5 texts and one of the texts was from a CMO of a multi-billion dollar company. These were all marketing execs and founders that were texting me. You never know what's going to hit. Sometimes that's why you do top of the funnel content. We do this. There's views of 900K views, 2 million views, 142K views, and I don't say this to brag. We're getting a decent amount of views per month as a B2B company. So this is about $11 million per month. The point here, and earlier this morning we talked about SEO being search everything optimisation, not just search engine optimisation, because it's not just Google anymore. People are searching on TikTok, people are searching on YouTube, people are searching on Amazon. So it's evolving quite a bit, and if you're an SEO, you must adapt. I think the problem, coming from an SEO background, is we always think everything's about SEO. No, you got to branch out. You got to branch out or else the business is going to be in trouble. You can't put all your eggs into one basket. So our goal this year with the podcast, okay, we have the long form. Let's chop it up into short form. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. Okay, what else can we do from that? We need to pump out more content. I talked to a guy, we had lunch, and for his business partner, they're getting 200 million views per month. Per month. So that's 2.4 billion views a year, and they get all their leads, all their traffic just comes from organic social. So for me, as a boring B2B marketing agency, if I can do it, I think anybody here can do it. As long as you have a point of view on something, it's worth talking about. So that's on the organic social piece. Now, how does this apply to SEO? Well, I'm glad you asked. So for SEO, this screenshot is actually a little dated. Our traffic is actually moving up and to the right. I think it's probably tripled since this graph. This is only a very small section on our website, right? And all we're doing from this is we're taking the transcript. We use riverside.fm. We're taking the transcript and we're just dumping it into ChatGPT. And then we have a human in the loop that takes on the last 40%, the last mile, right? So we're not just letting AI do everything, but this is what's happening. Initially, when we started this experiment, it wasn't really doing much, but now it's really moving up into the right. It's driving more leads. It's driving more email signups for us. It works well for us. I would say for my business at least, word of mouth is probably the number one marketing channel, but number 2, or if you want to call that a marketing channel, customer acquisition channel, number 2 would be SEO, number 3 would be webinars. Your mileage may vary, but that's what works for us. Initially with this setup, we're paying about $100 per post, which is pretty expensive. It was 5 posts per week. Originally before that, maybe a couple hundred dollars per post because because it was a fully human writer. Now we're paying about $25 per post and we're doing 25 posts per week and we're trying to make it more efficient. What we do right now, just so our writers can't go haywire, is we're actively in our internal marketing meeting every week, we're rating the post. Is this above at least 8 out of 10? Ideally, it's a 9 out of 10. If not, why isn't it? Then we take that feedback and we try to carry it over into all the AI-assisted content that we put out. So there's a certain quality bar to it. Now I talked about, okay, we went podcasts, we went to short form, we just went to SEO as well. We need to talk about how you can continue to find more efficiency when it comes to your short form content. So this is a product or a tool, whatever you want to call it. I found it about 2, 3 weeks ago. It's called Overlap and it's completely free and they're not paying me to say this. I have no equity in the company. Just go to joinoverlap.com and you can sign up for this. Again, completely free right now. And I've used tools like opus.ai. Our team has tried a lot of different things, but this is great. You can just take any YouTube video. It can be a YouTube video you made. You can take one of those videos, dump it in here, and it'll find all the clippable moments, the right moments, and it'll also give you the right title tags as well. Pretty good title tags. It makes me want to click too. And we've just been randomly throwing this on my YouTube channel, and some of these videos will get a good chunk of views. And so you can see I did this interview with Gary Vee over here, and what do we pull? I can't even read that, my eyes are so bad, but I think they're pretty good. We posted a couple of them. And so if you're looking, one of the biggest challenges we have when it comes to producing short-form content or just clips in general is finding a clip coordinator, finding someone that has taste, that understands the right moments, right? It's really hard to outsource that. You have to find someone that's cultured, that has taste. Well, thankfully this AI is getting a little closer to it. And I've been talking to the founder and they've been talking about, hey, actually helping you with that component, right? Again, completely free right now. So that's a little bonus. So, so far we've talked about PSEO, we've talked about short-form content, we've talked about AI-assisted content. And then if I talked about PSEO, I should probably talk about PCRO as well. Because if you're going to produce hundreds of pages or thousands of pages, Probably should be optimising them for conversions, right? So in the little orange call to action over there, it says get quality leads. Maybe it's behind me. I didn't even know it was behind me, but get quality leads. So usually on our website, the call to action, it says work with us. What we do is we basically scan the context of every page and we customise the call to action. That's awesome. You don't need to be a genius to do this. I'm going to share the prompt with you in a minute. You guys can just take a picture of it and just give it to your— have your developer deploy it and you just need OpenAI's API. It's not that difficult to do this. What this has done, we also customised the little pop-ups too. It says, gain better ROI. Instead of work with us, gain better ROI, and then right below it says, get more help with Google Ads, because the page is about Google Ads. Now, Just by doing this, the lift that we saw just to the clicks was about 50%. So 47.5% on the clicks for these call to actions. The conversion rate went up by about 20% or so. So give or take plus 50% and then plus 20% on conversion rates. That's pretty good for just using a prompt that I'm about to share with you. So that's you combining PSEO plus PCRO. A little disclaimer for you before, if you guys want to hit me up, that's fine, but just FYI, if you don't have strong domain authority, you cannot do PSEO because there's no votes of confidence going to your website. Your website's not strong enough. Just because you publish thousands of pages doesn't mean you deserve to rank for those. The good news is if you have some resources, you can go out there and you can go acquire a website that's in your space. That's definitely not free, but at least that's something you can do. That's something that's available. It's not completely shut off from you. Versus having to spend years and years building up links or building up your domain authority from scratch. The link building thing is a whole other conversation. A lot of SEOs are now saying that link building is not as effective, so that's a whole other conversation, but I don't think we have time for that. Here's an example of a prompt that you can use, and this prompt over here improves the headline, the call to action, and the form subtitle. This is a prompt for that. And I'm going to have a more detailed one I can share in a moment, but I'll give you about 10 seconds to scan this or take a picture of it, and then I'll move on. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so, I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So, we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. We're building products that will automatically optimize. Your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. The next part that I want to talk about might get a little complex, but I don't think it should be too crazy. But all of you or some of you have probably heard that Mark Zuckerberg's talking about agents all the time, right? Satya Nadella is talking about agents all the time. Everyone's big on agents, right? I think one of the higher-ups at OpenAI, he went off and started a— or sorry, no, no. Previous CTO, I think Brett Taylor maybe, he went to go start an agent company, right? So agents are going to become a lot bigger. The one thing I tell my team every single week is, guys, We can only afford to hire the top 5 to 10% of talent. We need to have an unreasonably high talent bar because in 5, 10 years, you're going to have 10,000, 100,000, maybe millions of agents working for you and implementing your strategies because you're really smart and there's no time to be held back, right? And that's scary for some people to hear, but it actually— I see it motivating the team. So we have an initiative that we're running right now called AI Workforce, right? So when we think about the jobs to be done for an agent, so an agent basically will automate a lot of the jobs to be done for your organization. So we got to think about the jobs to be done for an SEO manager. An SEO manager has to do keyword research. They have to do— they have to figure out the right titles to update, internal linking. They also have to figure out technical SEO. There's all these things they have to figure out. It's a thankless job, right? And I think most jobs are pretty tough to do. And there's a lot of tedious work to be done. So our first thing here before we build an agent or an agentic workflow is we need to figure out what are all the jobs to be done and which one should we prioritize first? So there's a method to this. That's the first thing we need to do. Now, the second thing we need to do is, okay, earlier I talked about you need to update your content, you need to delete your content, you need to consolidate your content. This is an AI consolidation agent. And what it does, if you start from the top left and you work your way to the bottom right, What does it say? It says, okay, first it goes into Google Search Console and then as it continues on, it's like, okay, let's figure out the vectors that are similar. Let's figure out what we need to consolidate. Let's remove the other URLs. So there's a process for all this and once this finishes, we're saying, hey, we're not just going to let the AI do its thing. We still need a human in the loop to check these things. So when we do this work for clients, we're constantly checking this work and making sure that it's good before we push it live. And so once it's good, we push it live. Then it's like, okay, which agent should be running next? And you can daisy chain these agents together if you want. If this, then that. And then these agents are doing a lot of the tedious work for you and you're able to accomplish more at scale. When I talk to my SEO team, I'm like, how much faster do you feel? They're like, they feel like they're 10 times faster. Might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but that's how they feel. Now, when I talk to my developers, I'm like, how faster do you feel now? He's like, well, one of the developers, he's like, I feel 3 times faster with ChatGPT. And now that they've added cursor AI, He's like, I feel 2 times faster. He said, one workflow I had was taking 5 hours. Now it's taking me 2.5 hours. So we're cutting down the time it takes to get things done. And one little bonus I want to share with you that's not in these slides is I was in a group chat with a couple of friends this week and they shared a new tool, Kyle, called tryprofound.com. So T-R-Y, the word profound, P-R-O-F-O-U-N-D.com. And what it does is it helps you with generative engine optimization. So optimizing for Gemini, optimizing for ChatGPT, and it shows you brand sentiment. It shows you how your brand's just scored overall on these generative engines, and it's something cool that you can test out. So we've talked about Cursor AI, we've talked about Profound. If you're not technical, by the way, you can use Replit. Replit helps you, anybody here, anybody here can code a version of Angry Birds or Flappy Birds, right? So people that are non-technical can now code. And I think they just, they raised quite a bit of money. I was just talking to Neil about it this morning. So sky's the limit with what you can do. I think there's no excuses now. Even if you don't have any resources, you should be playing with Replit, right? And here are some examples. There's another, I guess I'll give you another product that we use for agentic workflows. We use Airops. So that's airops.com. What is that? And these are a couple of workflows that we built inside of Airops. So once you're aware of this, I think you have a 1 to 2 year head start before everyone starts doing this stuff. It's not just for SEO, it's for really anything that you want to figure out that you really want to automate. So you can use Airops. These are just some examples of agentic workflows that we built inside of it. And then as we work towards my other slides, we're actually going to have some more prompts. So get your phones ready for that. Thank you. Here's another example. This is not exactly a prompt, but the example that my team wanted to show here was that when we update meta information at scale, so title tags and meta descriptions, when it comes to SEO, you're going to get a higher click-through rate, right? Because if you have a really good title that hooks them in, they're bound to click, and marketing is all about bringing people to the point of sale. At the end of the day, if you're in SEO, you don't want to spend all that time, but it's really important. To me, it's like conversion rate optimisation for the search engine result pages, but someone needs to be doing it and that someone should be a robot doing it for you. Here's a prompt for programmatic SEO. I'll let you guys take a picture of that. So this is again what TripAdvisor does. Fun things to do in Japan, fun things to do in Rome, digital agency in Boston. Alright, waiting for the cameras to come down. Okay, cool. This is another example of what we're doing with PCRO. So we have a page called CRO services. You can see it says optimise your conversions. It doesn't say work with us. Optimise your conversions. And what we do, we're not necessarily doing it on this page, but we If it says ecommerce CRO services, all those logos that you see below will change to ecommerce logos that we've worked with. If it's SaaS CRO services, they will all change to SaaS logos, and so that should help a little bit with conversion rates. Whatever we can do, can we add a relevant marketing school podcast that's related to the topic on the page? That helps with internal linking, that helps with building trust because it shows that we're creating content around that, So all these things come together. And so I might have started this conversation with PSEO and I went into social, I went into PCRO, I went into agentic workflows, but all this stuff comes together and I think we're really just scratching the surface of it right now. And so I think, yes, it's cool that people talk about Midjourney. It's cool that people are talking about Suno. These are all cool things, but what's actually going to drive revenue for your business at the end of the day? It's the boring stuff. It's the boring blocking and tackling stuff that you're already doing, but you haven't quite figured out how to automate, right? I promised you more prompts. So this is a prompt for PCRO. And you guys are really interested in AI. It's a lot of cameras. All right. So this is an example, by the way, as I continue on here, this is This is pre-SEO, so going back to the SEO components, these are landing pages being created at scale and the copy is not necessarily the best copy in the world. Maximise Shopify store sales with the right CRO efforts, but it's pretty good. I'd say it's maybe like a 7 out of 10 or so. What we're doing now is we're focusing on levelling up the quality on all these pages. I would say this screenshot's a little more dated. I think we've upgraded it since then, but on these landing pages now, Let's change the logos, let's change the call to actions, let's change the other internal links, related content. We want to bridge everything together there, and that's how we're going to get better results. I mean, we've already seen that with the SEO side of things. Now the final thing I want to talk about is this graph over here, and those of you that were in the session this morning, I want to continue on this conversation. Because you hear a lot of people talking about community, community, community. You see a lot more results with Reddit. You see it on the search engine result pages, going back to SEO. When you search for things, you see a lot more Quora. You see a lot more Reddit. In fact, Reddit added about 700 million visitors per month. They went from about 1.6 billion to about 2.3 billion. Some can argue, oh, they did a deal and it was a deal with Google. I don't think that's the reason. It's because UGC content is even more valuable now in a world where we're seeing a lot more robotically generated content. This is a community. We're here at an in-person community, but online communities too. If you can't do an in-person community, you can at least do an online community, and you can use a platform like Skool, that's S-K-O-O-L, or you can use a platform like Circle.so. Not only are you going to drive way more organic traffic because look here, this is This is— we got Shopify in the blue, we got HubSpot, we're at a HubSpot event, they're in the black, and then Zapier, who I just saw Wade a couple minutes ago, they're at the bottom, but I don't think they focus a lot on their community, but it's all moving up into the right. And so, okay, great. You want more SEO traffic? Community, right? Oh, but how do I start a community? There are a lot of hungry community managers out there that work at companies that will gladly— I think they're all heavily underpaid. I think that's going to That's going to correct in the next couple of years, but you can find some amazing people and they will do a good job for you. I'm not going to name any companies because I— yeah, I'm not going to name any companies, but there are some good companies you can pull from. Community to me is also a retention mechanism. It keeps people together. People might buy from you, but people ultimately stay for the community. They stay for each other. And then within the community, you'll have people that will be ambassadors for you that work really— they just love working for free basically. You should probably compensate them, but you'll find those people that are engaging all the time, and those are the people that you want to hire as your ambassadors. And then they'll keep the retention, they'll keep the party going. It'll be a good thing. And that's how a community like this becomes so big over time because one, the product's great. Two, people really like connecting with each other, which is why we're here. And 3, we all need a reason to get out of the home. So you can do that and then if you want to build an in-person component, you definitely can, but I think this is the future of SEO. It's going to be a component of SEO because I don't think they're going to roll back that Reddit change and that Quora change. And to be honest, I get a lot of value from reading Reddit. And then Satya Nadella says this too, right? He's like, the future of AI is in the agents, which I talked about earlier. Mark Zuckerberg has said the same thing. So I think if there's any key takeaway from this talk, it's to get out there, to explore, and to understand that you're actually not that far behind. But if you don't get on this stuff in the next year or 2, I think you'll be pretty far behind. So I think it's worth talking to people in your space, you know, maybe getting a little AI working group going with your founder friends. I certainly do that as well, and we talk about all the new stuff that we're doing. We try to get it We do an in-person meeting once a year, but we'll get on Zoom calls every now and then, but get your peer groups together and talk about this stuff, and then you'll be ahead of the curve. So that being said, this is all my information here. You can scan that barcode again if you want, but thank you so much for your time and hope you have a good rest of your Inbound. Woo!