Do This Instead of Making Faceless Channels | Eric Siu Reacts Pt. 1

Here's my thought around this. I've never thought that they mattered. I'm not sure I believe that they're making 500 grand a month. Hey, he's not exactly wrong. Agencies suck. For sure, they suck at the beginning. And by the way, every single business sucks, right? All right, here we go. Screenshot of one of your stories where you—

someone asked you, do hashtags improve visibility?

And you said no, not really.

Just like screenshot of that. So anytime a brand's like, can we do the hashtag? I'd be like, here's the man telling you.

Yeah, yeah.

No need.

We should get a domain that's like dohashtagshelpreach.com and then we can just put a—

Just put no.

The canonical. No, just a big no.

Just a no, that's it.

Just a big no.

All right, so this is the head of Instagram saying that hashtags don't matter for reach and he's getting interviewed by MKHB. And here's my thought around this. I've never thought that they mattered and all that matters at the end of the day is do you have a really good hook? Do you have really good title packaging? Do you really have good content packaging at the end of the day? And if you don't, then the content's just not going to perform. And I'll give you another example. So I have a— I have one guy that worked with me. He had one video that had 500 views and another video that got 30 million views. And what was the only difference between the two? One was an image with no text on it, which was the thumbnail. The other image, the thumbnail for a Short, it had text overlay and that was the hook. And that is the difference between 500 views versus 30 million views. So instead of thinking about, oh my God, I'm obsessing over these 30 hashtags, Just think about delivering something that's great, packaging it well, and you'll get the views that you need.

What did you guys do to make 6 figures a month? What do you do? So, we do Snapchat and it's a very unorthodox thing.

Not a lot of people know about it, but we got onto it early and we basically produce content on the platform. We run a bunch of accounts and yeah.

The overarching theme is it's content automation. So, we run faceless channels and we will either run voiceovers on them or if it's a compilation show, we do it across YouTube. A lot of our money's made on Snapchat. And it's basically just, we take brands with no face on them and we only make money through ad revenue through pulling views on the faceless channels.

So making $500 grand a month with faceless channels. So I'm not sure if I necessarily believe these guys that are— I don't believe— I'm not sure I believe that they're making $500 grand a month. That being said, I think both of these guys are— they seem like they're really smart. They're obviously very young. And what I would say is instead of trying to make these faceless channels Why don't you instead focus on taking that attention and maybe instead of selling ads, maybe try to sell a product or service because you're going to have a higher LTV, a higher lifetime value, and that's going to lead to a larger business. And you're going to build something that's more sustainable. Because the problem with these faceless channels is you're not really building any brand equity. And I've seen a lot of these faceless channels. I enjoy following a lot with different interests, right? And they can get a lot of reach, but you really have no defensible moat at the end of the day because no one really knows who you are. So I would rather instead focus on building something that has longevity. Maybe it's your brand, or maybe it's some type of talent, and then focus on selling some type of product or service, and you're going to make a lot more money that way. And these guys, I think they're going to make a lot more if they're able to do that because they're really sharp. I wanted to take a second to talk about today's sponsor, Ahrefs. Ahrefs is my favorite SEO tool. In fact, we use it at my ad agency, Single Grain, for internal uses and also for clients, and we've been using it for years and years. And the cool thing is they have a great academy that you can go to if you're looking to just learn SEO. And they have a free offering if you just search for ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools. My favorite feature with Ahrefs, it's a sneaky feature here, but I'm just looking at zapier.com. And what I'm doing is I'm looking at, oh wow, they got 10 million visits in the last, I don't know, 6 months or so compared to the previous 6 months. Well, okay, how are they doing it? I can look at their site structure. So if I click on site structure, I can see that their blog has driven the vast majority of it. And it was a 5 million, a +5 million change, right? So basically what I can do is I can look at the pages that are driving that traffic, and now I have a sense for what they're doing in terms of strategy. So I can look at competitors. I can also look at our own stuff too, to figure out how we can optimize our own website. So you can just check out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. That's completely free. Or you can go to the Ahrefs Academy. That's also free as well to learn more. And that being said, back to the video.

This guy makes $200,000 per month while living at home with his parents. Now the gurus are gonna hate me for exposing this. This is the real way that they make their money that they're gatekeeping from you because you can easily copy and paste this and make a bag yourself. Here's how. So Hamza is a massive YouTuber with over 2 million subscribers, and the secret behind his success is the way that he monetized his audience. He runs paid school communities. He charges his audience for access to these communities where he hosts group calls with his audience. He has courses teaching more about self-improvement, self-development, and he has discussion tabs for his members to meet and network with other like-minded individuals. He built this community and uses it to monetize his audience. And the crazy thing is his brother is managing it completely for him while Hamza just focuses on making content and growing his audience. Now, what if I told you that you could go find one of your favorite big creators, partner with them, and help them monetize their audience on the back end without ever having to make content or show your face online for a massive split of the profits. To do this, first you need to find a creator to partner with. The good news for you is there's 200 million creators out there and most of them are broke as fuck with broke influencer syndrome. Next, you need to build a school community for them. This only takes a few hours to build out. Last, you just need to start selling the creator's audience into the community and split the profits with them. So let's say you find a creator 1/10 the size of Hamza, 200,000 followers, and you get even just 1% of their audience to join. That's 2,000 people. If you charged just $10 per month for access, that's $20K per month. And if you split it 50/50 with the creator, that's $10,000 in your pocket every single month. If you wanna learn more about how to do this yourself, drop a follow and check out my pinned videos.

Okay, so a couple thoughts here. I think that this guy is thinking more short-term here, right? So $20 grand a month, that's certainly great to start with. I would encourage you all to think bigger, right? So there's this one guy I know, he's actually working with me directly right now, and he's strictly focused on partnering up with influencers that have a decent audience, but he's building products for them because the products will last for a very long time. Let's say he's building like a software or he's maybe building a website that has a lot of different widgets and tools on them, right? And so you can certainly build a school group, but the problem with these groups is that the churn is very high. And so your churn might be— someone might only stay for 2 to 3 months or so. And churn means people, the rate of cancellation. So you have to take that into account because You also have to have a really good community. You have to have a good community manager. There's going to be some costs there. You have to sink a lot of time into it. And so there are people like Hamza, he does $200,000 a month or so, which is a lot of money, $2.4 million a year. And you have to assume most of that's profit. And there are other groups that are doing $400,000 to $500,000 a month. But the problem with these groups is that they do cap out. So maybe that's doing, you know, $2.4 to $6 million a year, which is a great outcome. But if you want to build something for the long term, which is what this other guy that's working with me, he's, he's a developer and he's building products with these influencers, you can eventually build something that's worth maybe— that's doing maybe $10, $20, $30 million a year. And if you wanted to sell it, maybe you can sell it for $200 or $300 million, and the outcome is going to be a lot bigger, right? And so I think you could certainly start with doing this, but just keep in mind that you're— it's not necessarily going to be the case that even if you're making $20,000 a month, that a creator is going to split with you 50/50, because it's not that hard to make a school group in the first place. Like, why do they need you? Unless you have a proven formula to do so. So you just got to be mindful of when you're watching people on, on TikTok or Instagram Reels or anything like that, that whatever sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But just understand that, hey, he's not exactly wrong. If you go in that direction and you just tweak the thinking a little bit and tweak it to think about how you can be more successful long term, that's how you're going to make more money and that's how you're going to be able to take care of the people that you love. I got to 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 the 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 Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post 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 inside.

Entrepreneurs actually crave to be with each other. Like, we're, we're actually pack animals.

We're better.

We don't want to do this alone. We want to be with other people, but a certain select group. It's not everybody. Yeah, where the sheep is everybody.

Yes, exactly.

But entrepreneurs, we want to stick with our pack. But if— but like, we tend to think in common culture the entrepreneur has to be the solo person out there, where it's like, you won't— a wolf who's a lone wolf is not as successful as a pack wolf. This is the main problem for a lot of entrepreneurs, is that we don't have our pack. We feel like we're by ourselves and we're fighting all these battles by ourselves, but you don't have to. Like, you got to find your group. You got to find your pack, the people that you can trust and build with that have each other's back. Like entrepreneurs, and see if you relate to this or not, it's like you are loyal. You will fight for your friends. But if like somebody is disloyal to you, they're out.

That's it.

Yeah. So entrepreneurship is one of the loneliest games that you can play. I also think it's the best game that you can play. And so what Evan Carmichael here is saying is when you get to the top, as you continue to climb the mountain, the air starts to get thinner. And there's no good— there's nobody that's going to be there to pat you on the back. And if you don't have a partner, if you're really soloing it, all the people problems, the problems that other people don't want to deal with, you're gonna have to deal with them. So you're not only the janitor, but you might be the coder sometimes, you might be the product person, you might be the customer service person, you're going to be the salesperson, the marketer, and you're going to do all the things. And that's why I respect entrepreneurship so much because The people that have been through it, there's a shared understanding of suffering. And most entrepreneurs, the ones that are successful, they know that the price that you have to pay is extremely high. And that's why there's groups out there like YPO and there's groups out there like EO. So Young Presidents Organization, Entrepreneurs Organization. These are all groups. These are peer groups. And these groups have, you know, 30,000 people worldwide, 40,000 people worldwide. And you do these events and you meet with people once a month. You talk through your problems, the 5% of things that you can't share with your spouse, that you can't share with your friends, you can't share with your business partner. When you have that community, you're traveling around the world doing these events, eventually what happens to you is not only do you make a group of friends, but you're going to get more business from it at the end of the day. And I'll give you an example. When I traveled to Japan, I had this guy that ran a $200 million a year agency and he only met with me because I was in the same group that he was in. At the time, I was in a group called Entrepreneurs Organization. And, you know, he took care of me. And he took me to the fish market at 3:30 in the morning. And he eventually— he also, he took me to like a bunch of omakase, like really fancy sushi spots too. Eventually hired his daughter as an intern. She was fantastic. She just— work was amazing, worked really hard. And that is the power of relationships. So he did me a favor. I did him a favor at the end of the day. There's a shared understanding too when you're in groups like this that people Well, they'll say, hey, don't stay in a hotel. Come stay at my house. And some— in some cases, I've heard of people getting invited to stay at someone else's palace in India, for example, just because they're in a group like YPO. So, is entrepreneurship a pack? Do we crave— are we lone wolves? Do we crave a pack? Absolutely. And to do it alone is to— that's just going to make it tougher for you. So, absolutely, go find your pack. 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, 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.

My second successful business was a social media marketing agency, and I was making $30,000 per month when I decided to shut it down. So first of all, proof that the business was doing $30K per month. So here's why I decided to shut it down. The way that it worked was I would charge clients anywhere from $2,500 per month to $5,000 per month to make TikToks for them and also run ads for them. First, to succeed, you have to be in what I call outreach hell. To get more clients and make more money, you have to compete in a saturated market, sending hundreds of DMs per day and hundreds of emails just to get clients so you can grow the business. No one enjoys outreach and running a business that solely depends on it sucks. Second, dealing with 10 clients is a headache. To make decent amount of money with my agency, I had to keep signing clients. And once you get to the point where you have 10 clients, you have to report back to all of them and it feels like you have a boss. And I got into business in the first place to be my own boss and have freedom. And it just didn't really make sense to be a slave to my clients. When we hit $30K with the agency, we had a whole team built out and $30K revenue turned into actually $10,000 in profit. Even if that, which is why I decided to shut down my agency and instead start Growth Operating, where I only need to sign one client to make $10,000 per month, and I don't need to do outreach hell forever. You don't get stuck in outreach hell, and then every single dollar that you bring in working with this creator is basically 100% profit. And if you want to learn more about Growth Operating, the business that I run now that makes me over $100,000 profit per month, I made a free guide breaking down how it works. Just DM me the word guide on IG and I'll send it to you for free.

It depends on what you're looking for at the end of the day. So Myself, you know, my podcast co-host. So 8, 9-figure agencies. And you are certainly in outreach hell in the very beginning and you're doing all the work. You have to clean up, you have to clean up the trash too, right? You're the janitor and agencies suck for sure. They suck in the beginning. And by the way, every single business sucks, right? So what this guy is saying over here, he has a business that's doing $100,000 a month, right? Sounds like he's doing some type of coaching thing. And that's great if that's what he wants for his lifestyle. He wants to make $100,000 a month and maybe a lot of that's profit, more power to him, right? But there's going to be a limit to that scale. In everything, there's no solutions necessarily. There's only trade-offs. Now, when we think about agencies, you have agencies out there doing hundreds of millions, billions a year, and $4 billion plus a year, right? And so how did they get there initially? Like, yes, they had to slog through it. That's the first level. But the second level, as you start to get bigger and bigger, now $30K is nothing to scoff at. But it's also not enough to make good hires. You've $30K, you're probably hiring people that are a lot of offshore, nearshore. You're probably doing a lot of the work yourself. You're not hiring A+ talent. You've got to get bigger than that to afford the talent and you got to continue to get bigger and bigger. And what happens eventually is if you want the agency to grow, you got to hire people that have been there, done that. And they often have a Rolodex of clients. They also have a Rolodex of people that they can bring in. And it becomes this, this scenario where you're just hiring people that have been there, done that, and they'll bring people with them, they'll bring clients with them, and the agency gets bigger and bigger. And so that's how you get to 8 figures, 9 figures, 10 figures or so. But again, if you're just optimizing for yourself and you don't necessarily want to have the headache of building a company with a lot of people because you could have people problems, then it's fine. You can totally go the coaching route, right? But you just have to understand that the trade-offs that you're willing to make. So one's not necessarily worse or better than the other one. It just is.