Everything You Knew About Paid Traffic Doesn't Work Anymore

Everyone already knows, and we talk about this a lot, AI is changing marketing. What are you shifting your marketing spend to in 2026, or what are you doing with your marketing spend in 2026? And some of it could be the same old, but I'm just curious what it is, and we can go back and forth on this based on everything that's happening in AI.

Yeah, so I'll tell you what we're doing right now. I do think we're going to spend more on tokens. I do think we're going to— you and I are going to buy local infrastructure. Let's just start there. And people might be thinking, how does that tie into marketing? In my mind, it does, because we're buying intelligence to do more marketing tasks, right? We're getting a lot more inquiries for the agent stuff that we have, right? And so next week we should be able to get up our MVP version of our site, Single Brain. Finally, we're getting that up now. So if people want our agents or AI transformation, we're going to go straight for that just because that's where I've kind of forced my organization into. So we're going way harder on that cold email infrastructure. So because my agents build out all the cold email infrastructure, now we're sending way more cold emails and it's constantly tweaking the offers and all that too. So I think we're going to go harder on that, but that costs tokens too. That means we're going to be spending more on Apollo API credits or maybe just build our own eventually. Yeah. So I think it's spending more on tokens. The offer that we have is moving more on the AI side, and that's maybe a good starting point and we can go back and forth.

Yeah, so before I get into my, the number 2, right? Eric just gave us number 1. A quick thing, I'm in an email group with a lot of entrepreneurs who have been using AI for sending mass cold emails, and we would call these marketing emails. The reason I wouldn't call them sales emails is you then get the lead, once they're warmed up, then it goes to the salesperson. Almost everyone in the group is seeing a similar pattern in which when it first started, it was kind of effective. Now people are getting bombarded way too much with cold emails from AI and it's just degrading response rates and it's almost not effective anymore.

Our positive reply rates so far, I want to say, is about 1% or so, which is decent. Like usually you want your positive reply rate anywhere from like 1 to 3% or so for positive reply on cold email. So it's not bad right now, but I can see it going in a direction where it's like, it's not hard to build this infrastructure, you know?

Yeah. And when I'm talking about the numbers, I'm not talking about the reply rate. I'm talking about from sending the email to then getting the reply to setting up a call to then going through the pitch process and then closing a deal.

Wait, but all the people in your email group, what kind of businesses do they have?

They're all B2B. B2B, like what are they? B2B enterprise.

Okay.

So some of them are software, some of them are services. It's actually only one of those other 2. It's either they're software or they're services. We don't have like manufacturing or anything in the email group. There's only like 11 or 12 of us. And if you look at the whole, if you look at it from a funnel perspective, we're still getting opens, we're still getting responses. The open rates are drastically decreasing. I think the average open rate decrease has been a little bit more than 40% in the group. group from end of last year to roughly end of Q1 now. So people are just getting overwhelmed and the close rates are just getting in the— just going down the drain. So it's getting to a point where some of the companies in the group out of 11 or 12 are actually considering shutting it off altogether.

Oh, they should shut it down. Good for them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I was like, and we're seeing the same thing, at least for let's say influencer marketing. And I know you and I talked about this in the past, We have a spreadsheet that tracks, or Marina on my end, I think you know Marina, tracks how many influencer outreach emails we get per week. Okay. We were getting on average 2 to 3 good ones per week and we were getting, call it another 3 to 4-ish junk ones.

Yeah. What qualifies as a good one?

Good one means is they have the budget, it's a reputable company, we like their product, we would consider repping them. You get the point.

And this is for you?

This is just for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we usually ignore almost all of them, even the 3 to 4, but we still keep track of them because that metric, whether we choose to engage or not, it tells us if we're doing okay on social media and our brand is growing enough where people want to work with us or they don't want to work with us outside of follower account, right? When someone's willing to give you money, it shows if they value what you've built or not. If that number keeps going down over time, that means you may not be doing something as valuable Or it may be something else, who knows? But that's why we actually track it. We don't track it from a revenue standpoint. Now, guess how many emails I'm getting a day?

Good ones?

Just—

Overall?

Overall.

Wait, what was it before? You said 3 good ones a week, but what—

2 to 3 good ones a week. Uh-huh. And then around 4 crap ones.

4 crap ones.

So call it 7.

Oh, you're probably— 7?

7 a week.

Okay. Let's say I think you've probably 10x the crap ones per week.

Similar or close enough. We're getting 5 to 6 emails a day right now. I don't know what portion's good or crap.

That's funny.

It's AI.

It's same thing for me. It's 2 to 3 good ones per week and it's about 40 to 50 garbage per week right now.

Yeah, we don't even respond to really any of them. Some we respond to, like I got hit up by Facebook and I'll jump on a call with them on Monday. But it's not about money there, it's about relationship and then what more can we do? Yeah, how can we turn that into business? But going back to your point one, Eric was saying he's spending more on tokens so that way he can have agents do more of his marketing work and other work.

By the way, my agents look at my email and then they scan for those now.

Yeah.

So it does the Marina job.

Yeah, we see a lot of people doing that.

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So I would say our number 2, which would be the first one for me, but the big change that we made in 2026, I've talked a little about this in the past. I think it's harder and harder to differentiate your offering in today's world than it was 3 years ago. And 3 years ago, it was harder to differentiate your offering than 5 years ago. And what I'm getting at is as we go forward, I think offerings are blending in more and more with each other. Technology is not a moat anymore. It's accessible to a lot of people. A lot of stuff is open source. You know, intelligence and brainpower and your offering, the question is not can someone replicate it? The question is when will they replicate it? So we're investing heavily in branding right now. What I mean by that is I'm doing more in-person speaking events with our ideal customers, holding our own internal conferences, We're doing less podcasts. I've actually seen that die down. One, the inquiries have slowed down, but two, we were denying—

Inquiries to get you onto podcasts?

Yes. And I've also, in the past, we used to— I used to accept a lot.

You accepted because you didn't think about how important your time was.

Yes. And then Eric mentioned this on a podcast episode. He's like, dude, how much time are you wasting? What's the ROI? And I was like, you know what? I should probably tell my team to be more restrictive.

You had to come into these meetings All pissed off sometimes because they would ask you stupid questions.

So now I don't even do a podcast interview a week, maybe once or twice a month. I just turn them all down or ignore them. A lot of the inquiries never came to me anyways, they were coming to my team. Now my team just doesn't bring them up to me at all because they know what I'm going to end up saying. But I am pretty sure they've died down to some extent. So when I say we've been investing more in branding, More award submissions. Like we won Ad Age's Performance Marketing Agency of the Year Award. So like we're spending more time and money on that. It costs us a lot of money on that. I'm not talking about award submissions. There may be a fee for that. I'm guessing there is. I don't know for certain, but the amount of time internally we spend to try to present and win an award is expensive. Like if I had a guess on how much we spend a year on award-related stuff, $400,000 or $500,000.

That's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. Okay.

But that's great branding for ideal customers. The in-person events that I'm talking about where we, like I was in London, did our own event. Paris, did our own event. And own event doesn't have to cost a lot. It's not like we're selling tickets.

You explained this.

Yeah.

There was the between 9 and 12, and then you occupy the time before breakfast and lunch, right? So it's not that expensive, but it's a nice hotel.

Nice hotel. We put out pastries and little bitings and things like that.

You bring pastries from the outside or you order from the hotel? You have to meet a minimum, right?

I honestly don't know what the team does. My guess is neither of our 2 events this time were in a hotel. Both of them were in coworking spaces.

Oh, you get even cheaper.

Yeah, it's getting even cheaper. So it was cost reduction. So I'm assuming in that case, the pastries came from the outside. And I know I asked in the UK, I'm like, oh, how do we get the room? He's like, oh, we pay for a membership here. We're able to just book the room. It wasn't much including food and everything. Oh, that's so good. I was like, how much was it? He's like, I don't know, $1,000-something, $2,000 max. I was like, that's great. Yeah. So I would say those are the 2 areas we've been spending more heavily on branding. And yeah, I went back to the speaking circuit. I would say that's more branding as well. Just speaking, being more pickier on the conferences. I'm doing a lot less paid speaking gigs. I'm doing a lot more free speaking gigs.

Did you pay for any this year?

Yes, I have paid to speak. So what Eric's getting at is Before I would just accept any good paid speaking gig. And when I say good paid speaking gig, I would base it on how much money they're paying for me to speak and then base it off of travel time and how convenient the flight was. Now we don't look at if it's paid, we look at in the room, is our ideal customers going to be there? And is the talk that they also want me to speak on relevant to the services we pitch and our long-term vision? So if someone's willing to pay a lot of money, but their ideal customer is not there, we will turn down the speaking event. If someone's willing to pay a lot of money and it's in a city where we operate our business, so let's say someone wants to pay me to come to Paris and it's only an hour speaking slot, I will take it because then I can meet up with all our customers in Paris, do our own event in Paris. And I got paid to do that, so I didn't have to pay for a flight and I just had to take an hour of my time. So there are circumstances where I will go and speak for money if it's convenient and it can drum up business in the same city for our current corporations by doing the stuff that we would normally do, like throwing our own events. But now we're focusing on conferences that have our ideal customers. And a lot of them don't reach out for me to be a speaker. We have to reach out to them. And some of them, very few, but some of them do ask for money to speak. And we are paying for me to speak at some of these events because we believe it'll help us pick up business in the long run.

And how much are you paying to speak at these?

It ranges. Some of them are like $15,000 to $30,000 for me to speak, I would say.

And you have to pay for travel and all that too.

Yeah, airfare is so expensive.

Now it is.

Dude, I'm like spending like $12,000 for a business class ticket.

And just so context for everyone, it used to be around $7,000. Yeah.

And I was like, $5,000. You know, $5,000, $6,000. I'm like, what the heck is this? Like, prices are obscene.

Yeah. But that's, you know, that's geopolitical. So to continue on this topic, so Neil just brought up a lot of in-person. So I think whether you're doing dinners or small conferences or even meetups, in my case, like if I do, if I'm doing a meetup on talking about this Claw stuff, you get the right people in there depending on the type of meetup that you throw. But, and then also What we're talking about too, the moats you really have are, we're talking brand, we're talking about relationships. Brand and relationships, I think, kind of go hand in hand a little bit. And horsepower. And what I mean by horsepower is intellectual horsepower because you need the intellectual horsepower to coordinate the tokens that you're paying for.

Yes.

Because the tokens are, that's intellect that you're paying for. But if I am a dumb-dumb, I will not know how to use the tokens. I'll use them in a dumb way. I'll still spend 500 grand, Right? But I might use, use 'em in a smart way. So, um, the final thing I'll say from my side for now, it, it's all the things that we're talking about. Um, but it is used just to go a little deeper on tokens. It is building these agents. So for example, um, we have these, uh, these, I, I shared before, we have these agents that will help ingest all of my content, put the social posts out there. It writes in my voice. Now it's doing it across the board. Um, and so it's not only doing that to help with the marketing piece, cuz organic reach is, it's still very real, but you need smart people who know how to manage these agents for you, like the agent fleet for you. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it. But there's a lot of stuff that hasn't died yet. Webinars haven't died. Events really haven't died. And doing this, by the way, the only time I'm going to accept a podcast is when someone invites me and it's in person and there's a nice shot because then I can use it for social clips. That's the only time I'm going to do it, right?

Or they're really good at asking questions and you can tell them you can just—

It makes you look smart too.

And then you can just chop it up and reuse it.

Yes.

Yes. But that's another thing that we're spending a lot of money on in 2026 is content production. So we're doubling down on content. We have been this year. We keep pushing on that narrative. It's actually worked out really well for us. And when I say we're doubling down, we're taking a little bit of an opposite approach that you are with like OpenClaw and your X-Posts. We're doing a lot more stuff manually with content creation. We found that it performs better. I don't know if it was on this podcast. Did we end up breaking down the LinkedIn stat of how much content is being produced by AI now?

I know it's exceeding humans by a lot.

By far. And have you seen the engagement numbers? I don't know if it was on this podcast.

I think you shared a graph or a chart, one of those charts.

I think it was on one of my webinars or I forgot where I got it from or who presented it to me. But the numbers for people producing content through AI for X, LinkedIn, and a lot of these social networks is just skyrocketed. It's more than human-based content. And if you look at the engagement numbers, they're plummeting like really, Terrible.

Yeah.

The only time we're seeing engagement numbers go up for a lot of this AI content, at least in B2B, B2C, in most cases we're just seeing the, the numbers plummet. But in B2B, it works out well if you're using AI to write content and you're talking about AI like Claude or OpenCLAW or anything like that. We're seeing the engagement numbers extremely high, but the moment you're not talking about AI solutions, in almost all cases, the engagement numbers are terrible.

When you're not talking about AI solutions?

Yeah, so if you're using AI to create content and you're not talking about AI, we're not seeing the content do as well.

Yeah.

We're seeing anyone talk about the hot AI topics, like if you, Eric, wrote an article on X or LinkedIn about OpenClaw, whether it was written by a human or AI, the chances are it's going to do well.

But if it's—

if you're using AI to write content on just anything, we're seeing the engagement in general just not be that great.

Yeah. Yeah.

You may get some hits every once in a while, but majority of the time we're not seeing engagement be that great.

Yeah. Anyway, guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.