Chase Bank enters the advertising game, Top SEO sites post-AI Google update, & more

Chase Bank has entered the advertising game. So I don't know if you know this, Neil, but Chase has 80 million American customers, 40% of US adults, $1.5 trillion in credit debit spend, and $8.5 billion in Chase Offers revenue in 2023. So think about it this way. This is called Chase Media Solutions. If you're logging into your Chase dashboard or maybe your app and you buy a lot of beauty products or you buy a lot of, I don't know, entertainment stuff or stuff for your kids, Those are the types of ads that you might see, right? So they're going to roll out, they have a lot of first-party data. And this could be, this could be really interesting. I mean, it's another channel to go after and iOS, Apple, they can't do anything about this. So this tweet came from Jonathan Snow. And I think it's interesting. We'll see if it's going to be, you know, more of a, you know, auction-based model where you can bid on CPM or CPC, or if it's going to be more of an affiliate model, which is a kind of performance-based play.

So when Chase is going into marketing, are they just trying to shove banner ads? Or is it more of like doing what— I don't have a Chase card. But you know, I know you have American Express, you know, when you log into your Amex, if you scroll to the bottom of like deals of the week or month, and you just click add, add, add, yeah, and you get—

So that's like an affiliate, that could be an affiliate model, right? So yeah, I see it being a combination. And they haven't disclosed yet. But it could be a combination of both the affiliate model that you're talking about, Neil, and also banners too.

Huh.

Yeah. So it's like, why would we not look at this? You know?

Yeah, that's true.

All right, real quick, I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, we have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency. And And you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video.

Speaking of big corporations, did you hear how Apple's, uh, they stopped their car division?

Yep.

And then they shifted focus to Robots.

Robots?

Oh yeah, they're gonna build robots for homes now. That's a rumor.

That makes sense. This is why it's gonna get— Tesla's a robot company, so is Figure, and then Apple. Yeah, so it's gonna be interesting to see where things go.

But all right, so I know you're a Tesla fan, and I have one, or I will have one in a month or so. Would you buy a Tesla robot for your house or Apple robot?

It's tough. I think right now, this very moment, yeah, I'd buy a Tesla one. Now, if you say in 5, 10 years, I'd buy an Apple one.

So, why would you buy a Tesla one right now?

Because they're way further along, I believe. They've had robots and then they just— they're further along from a product development standpoint. Yeah. But I do believe Apple has some of the best people in the world working on it. I think they'll catch up, if not make it even. And we'll see what happens.

So for me, I would buy an Apple robot. I do think they're going to be leading the game.

Hey, what happened to your Vision Pro?

The Vision Pro I gave back. It was no good.

You gave back or you returned it?

Returned it back. I didn't give it back. I returned it. I got my money back. The problem with the Vision Pro is I think it's amazing technology, amazing device. It's too heavy. It gives me headaches. I think I'm the right buyer for version 3 or version 4. I love it. It's just like to travel with it, it's bigger than my backpack. I can't even put it in my backpack. The case is that—

That's how I saw it. I had no idea because you're very thoughtful with how you take risks. And I'm just like, yeah, I'll probably buy Vision version 3 or 4. But you went for the first one.

But it was cheap. It was only like $2,000, $3,000.

Guys, you can clip that.

No, no, I don't mean it that way. But for the technology you're getting, it's not expensive.

Yeah. It's like a computer. Exactly.

That's how I looked at it. And I'm like, well, if you use it for a year or 2 years, and I don't really buy stuff, right? Other than You know, I don't even know what I buy. I don't even buy clothes these days.

Okay, look, Tesla's, uh, their robots, they can— they— there's a video of a robot walking around the entire factory. And they can— I think they can dance, they can move around, and they can— there's more stuff they can do versus like a Figure robot right now. I don't know if you've heard of Figure.

I have—

Figure's another robotics company. Um, but like, look, we are going to go into a future where we're going to all have robots.

So I would buy Apple, Apple robot for 2 reasons. The first reason is the ecosystem. So when you're thinking about just general use case, if it can plug in with my phone, it can plug in with my computer, it can plug in with my TV and all the other stuff I do, which Apple already has a lot of devices that people use, it just makes life easier. The second reason that I would buy an Apple robot over a Tesla one is I think they'll make the user interface Better and more usable.

Yeah, I mean, this is why we're both with Apple devices in front of us. It's just a better experience.

It is like, dude, so when I test drove the Model 3 for the very first time, I know I bought it—

You drove it?

I drove it.

You? Yeah. You?

Yes.

Why you?

Oh, I was buying the Model 3. It was meant for me to drive.

Neil's a bad driver, that's why. That's why I bought it.

It has a lot of guardrails. It tells me when I'm about to hit a bumper. I was like, oh, this is great. I could be a bad driver. So when I was driving the Model 3, I'm like looking at the dash right there above the steering wheel. There's no speedometer. And then I look at the windshield because the windshield on certain cars, you know, like my wife's car, it shows you the speed on the windshield. Like it reflects it up so you can look straight. I'm like, oh yeah, that would be convenient. Nope, not there. It's on the computer screen on the right side. I'm supposed to be looking at the road. I'm not supposed to be looking at the right side to figure out how fast I'm going in the car.

So what's your complaint is it's not user-friendly?

It's not as user-friendly as it should be. I don't think you'll have those issues with Apple. They're slower typically to market. But when they come to market, they think— Typically the best user experience. Yes.

Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We did this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more and we'll see you inside. By the way, do you know which sites are actually not getting hit too hard by Google's updates?

I'm going to go with Quora and Reddit because we talked about this earlier.

Yeah, Quora and Reddit are fine, but those are more UGC websites. So yeah, that's, that's actually a fair categorization. But Lily Ray tweeted this. So she said, looking at niche travel sites, I think it is fair to say that the recent updates have been brutal for many of these sites. But there are some interesting examples of small travel blogs that didn't get hit by the helpful content update. And so here's what these sites seem to be doing. So these are the trends that we can explore here. They've been travel blogging for a really long time. 2, they seem to be doing an exceptional job writing firsthand experiences. So double E-A-T, experiences in one of those.

It's experience expertise, not experience expertise.

I feel like experience and expertise are like the same thing. But, um, no.

So here's a great example for this. Um, I hope no one has cancer, but let's say someone has cancer and they're breaking down their experience going through chemo. That's you breaking down experience. Yeah.

Expertise is oncologist.

Yes. Talking about how chemo and how it's working.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Good, good.

Thanks for calling that out. Okay, so, and only— so they're sharing firsthand experiences and only sharing highly opinionated pieces about places they have been. With original photography. There's no mystery about who these bloggers are. They are well known in the space and have a big following. These sites appear to be much less SEO-forward, which is like hyper-optimized for SEO, and use less overly optimized titles, headlines, etc., than some of the travel blogs that were hit. So what does this all say? If I'm consolidating these points over here, they're just writing naturally. They're writing because it seems like they enjoy it, and they're not writing just for SEO purposes. That's at least what this takeaway is. And there's 2 graphs here that we'll pull up for the screen. But Neil, you can see this green graph over here. Those are the sites that are like after the update starting to do well. And then these are the sites that got hit.

Dude, and speaking of not optimizing titles and stuff for SEO, the same goes with social media. The other day I put on Twitter, one of my teams sent it to me, they even came up with the headline. It was, head of Instagram reveals the truth about follower count. That's like catchy, it's clickbaity, right? And it wasn't like clickbait where you're deceiving.

This is the Adam one that you were talking about earlier? Yeah.

And that post on my Twitter got 3,900 views, all right? And then I noticed it wasn't doing well, so the same day I put out my own tweet that my team didn't send me, and I put, my favorite marketing strategy still to this day is giving away something for free. Not freemium, not a trial, but really free. And then I go on to explain. That got 31,000 views. Didn't try to optimize, didn't try to come up with a catchy headline or anything, just wrote based on What I wanted to share and I thought would be valuable to people.

How many hours— I'm sorry, how many words or how many words do you think you're writing per minute on Twitter per day?

I don't know how many words per minute I'm writing.

Not words per minute, just overall.

Maybe 200 max.

200 max. Okay. So I— and you've been doing it very consistently for the last 60, 70 days or so? 90 days.

Since October?

Oh, okay. It's been a while. And how has that gone for you?

It's gone really good.

Yeah. And that might take you like 15 to 30 minutes to write depending on how dense the topic is?

No, no, no, no. Like 4 minutes, 5 minutes.

For 200 words?

Yeah.

That's a lot in 4 minutes.

I just think of whatever's gonna come from my head and I just type. Okay.

How fast do you type per minute?

I don't know.

Anyway, okay, so I wasn't going anywhere with that question. I was just curious.

But, um, but I know I can type pretty fast per minute, but let's say something takes me 5 minutes to type out.

Yeah.

It actually takes me longer to copy and paste it from Word, paste it into Twitter, and then I go through Grammarly and I collect all my errors cuz I have terrible grammar.

Mm-hmm. So, okay. I just started this habit. So back in the day, Neil, when you, you, you blogged a lot back in the day, how many words were you trying to write per day?

Uh, there wasn't a specific word count. I would just blog. Same with like Twitter. When I look at like my word counts, I'm looking at one right now, like what I posted today. I know it didn't take me more than 5 minutes, but this is looking like it's more like 120 words than 200. I just—

So back in the day, it really doesn't— like Neil has his habit. It's not so much based on word count or whatever. He just goes, right? Goes with the flow. And that works for some people. I just used to have a habit where this is probably when I first met you online. I was writing 500 words per day, 500 words per day. And it was a good habit. I just stopped doing it. And so, on the Sunday, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, tweeted that, looking for accountability partner to write 500 words a day or like, you know, 30 minutes of writing per day. And then, a bunch of people responded. I came out, I was like, hey, I'm in. And then, he ends up texting me and okay, we're each other's accountability buddies. So, each day what we're doing is he's writing for 30 minutes, I'm writing 500 words. And then, he'll text me and show what he wrote and I might give some feedback on it or whatever. But the whole thing is this accountability thing. It's embarrassing if you fail. So, I'm actually behind right now by 500 words. I need to write 1,000 words after we record today. But the fact of the matter is I think this habit's going to continue to compound because I think some of my better writing has happened this week and it's doing better too. It's not going viral by any means, but at least I'm getting my thoughts out. And writing forces clear thinking. And what I end up doing for my company after I write these is I end up converting a lot of these into memos. And I send them to my team and then ultimately that gets my team to take action on these things.

So. Dude, see, like I look at writing for me just in general, it comes natural and it's not hard. I think about most things in life, it's like if you really want to do it, you'll do it and you don't need pressure. Like I know you have accountability buddy, but you don't need it. Look at your workout routine. I, I, you and I talk quite often early in the mornings. Mm-hmm. You like going to Equinox at 6 or 7:00 AM. I forgot when they open.

7 on weekends, 5 AM on the weekdays.

And you're consistent almost every single day, correct?

Uh-huh.

At least when you're here, you're there. When you're traveling, it's a different story, but—

Traveling, at least I still try to run in the morning.

Yeah. So it's consistent. You don't need accountability, buddy. If you want to do something like write, I've seen you create content, you'll create it. It's a question of is, do you think it's worth the time? I think that's the biggest thing for most people. It's not about having someone who's accountable. It's, Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is whatever you're doing worth it for you? If you feel value in it, you'll do it.

You can look at it both ways. So you can look at it that way, um, and you could also look at it— you can combine it with this way. The way I see it is like, it's an experiment to see if I like this habit again. And as I start doing it again, I was like, oh, I like this. And so you can actually— you can make the argument that I don't need to do this accountability thing anymore, but it's like, you know, writing on the internet has been a net positive for both of us, and Really, the high level, what we're saying is creating content on the internet has been a net positive to us. Yeah. And writing, I think, is one of the best ways to express yourself. And I just lost that over a period of time. But you, you kind of— you've been blogging, but I feel like the Twitter thing is reviving some of your energy with writing. That's how I feel.

When I blog, it's really easy because my Twitter or X is the start of my blog post. And then I go in and modify whatever I need and expand upon it. Like when I write a blog post, no joke, So it takes less than an hour.

Wow. And this is like your 2,000-word posts back in the day?

Uh, no, my blog posts are typically around 1,000 words.

Okay.

Yeah, so it's just— It's less than an hour.

Yeah.

I take Twitter, um, then I go and read through it, correct any errors, post it on WordPress, correct errors through Grammarly, because Microsoft Word versus Grammarly, they check spelling quite a bit differently. And I use the app for Word. I don't use the online version, if there even is an online version.

Yep.

And, uh, from there I message Saf on my team and I say, add an image at the top. So he'll create an image. And I say, wherever I put insert graph.

Yeah.

I'm like, insert the graphs for the area. Just read it. You'll know which graphs I'm talking about. 'Cause we have so many, uh, graphs within our corporation.

Mm-hmm.

And then I tell him, just publish the post, but I've already saved it as a draft. I already switched up the URL or created my own custom URL, picked the category. Fine-tuned it. So all he has to do is just add the graphs, add the image at the top, click publish, and then I just go double-check it and then I'll schedule out an email blast that I write.

Yeah, that makes sense. And actually, if you think about it, so as you're giving me the number, so 1,000 words takes you an hour. For about 500 words, it takes me about, call it 25 to 30 minutes. So it's the same thing. Anyway, that's it for today. Let us know what you think about this longer episode. We'll probably chop it up a little bit for, for YouTube. And that is it for today. And also don't forget, go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. That's where we help agency owners grow. And hopefully we get it to a place where we don't need to have ads on this podcast anymore. So yeah, there's that for you. Goodbye.

Goodbye.