Experiments we are running and Tools we are using

Neil, we haven't done this in a while. We haven't talked about experiments that we're running right now that are working. So I think going back to the old marketing school days, we're going to share some stuff that's working for us. We might share some tools that we like. You guys always like the tool episodes, and we'll make it a little classic in the beginning before we start to go into the typical new stuff.

Okay.

So yeah, let's start it off. What are some cool experiments that we're running right now?

So, um, one thing that we're doing is We're taking ChatGPT. Okay, well, technically, first we do competitor audits, we see their most popular pages, and then we take ChatGPT or Gemini, you can pick your AI poison, take their most popular articles, have it summarize it in a data format, then put it into any AI visual editor tool and pop out an infographic, and then start emailing out all those people. and trying to build backlinks. When we do this manually, the success rate is pretty good. You know, like if you pick a really popular article that has hundreds of backlinks, we typically can generate at least like 15 to 20% of their backlinks by outreaching to the sites that are linking to them. And when I say 15 to 20% of their backlinks, I'm talking about the real backlinks. We don't just look at total backlink count because some of the sites are just scraper sites or Just dud sites that are just copying articles or plagiarizing. So we exclude those, right?

Wait, clarifying question. So you take, let's say I wrote a really good article. So you would make my really good article into infographic and you reach out to me for a link?

No, we reach out to all the people that are linking to you.

Oh, got it. Because you made a different format.

Correct. And then you got to cite your sources, of course. But we're seeing the success rate pretty decent when you do it manually. When we're doing it through AI, Almost roughly half of what we're doing through manual. And the main reason being is the quality isn't there yet. But it's still, it's efficient, you're building some links. Ideally, what we need to be doing is having a human go in there and just adjust the visuals. But we're finding it's almost the same amount of effort as modifying to just creating it from scratch.

That's interesting, because it's still Very early right now, you're seeing success already. It's only going to get more. Once you feel like you've nailed it from a manual standpoint, you automate it a lot more and you should be able to scale it well. You know what's interesting? Similar to this, what we're doing right now is we're looking at sending 1,000 to 2,000 emails per day. And where I got this from was someone was sending 2,000 emails a day for his B2B freemium product. And 2,000 emails a day, he was getting about 32 conversions for the freemium project. product, and that's about a 1.6% conversion rate. And the way they're doing it is they're using different— they're using this product called SalesLead.ai, and it's like an Outreach competitor. So Outreach, by the way, last valuation was, I think, over $1 billion. From what I'm hearing now, SalesLead is like the new Outreach. Basically, it'll help you rotate a bunch of email boxes, a bunch of different domains, and warm them up. That way, none of your domains get flagged. And so it's working really well for him. I'm like, oh, okay, interesting. So we're starting to test this out now and I'll report back on the results in a couple weeks. But this might actually play in well with your outreach for link building as an example.

Yeah, another thing that we've been doing is, and I talked about this on a past episode, I think it's called HyperFury.

HypeFury, HypeFury.

Is it HypeFury?

Without the R.

Yeah, there you go, HypeFury. So when I leave a post on X, it automatically leaves a comment and we've tested out different variations. We're struggling with it. And the main reason being is HypeFury does not leave a response right away.

Mm-hmm.

So if we set it to like, hey, when something gets 5 or 10 likes or views, it's either based on views or likes or maybe a combination of both. I'll get the likes within a few minutes at the latest, right? If not a few seconds. And a lot of times it takes HypeFury 8, 9, 10 hours to just leave a comment. We're like, what the heck? By that point, 2/3 of the views are already gone.

Yeah.

So that's one thing that, and even with that, we're collecting leads from it. The results in 5 days were 49 leads, 11 to the United States, 38 to international divisions. But keep in mind, I think that number would triple automatically if we were posting it right when the post got posted on X. So instead of it taking like 8 or 9 or 10 hours to post the comment, It would post it right away. And then the other issue is, is they've tested sending people to a landing page for a consulting request and sending people to an ebook page or a webinar page. The ebooks and the webinars convert way better. So I think if we remove the direct consulting page ones, we probably can get like maybe another 30-40% lift on top of that.

Neil's team, if you watch this, What you should do for Neil is every single week for all the new resources you have, just gift wrap it into one notebook and send it to him and he'll just pull from those. But if he doesn't get it, he's just not going to do it.

That's the way to do it.

Yeah. That's if they watch it. You know, you could— I wonder if you can use— this is a matter of the features and the tools, but HypeFury is one, but I use Typefully. And I think Typefully actually gives you the option to post it immediately, but I don't think it lets you rotate like that. So, you know, who knows? You'll have to figure it out. But one thing that we're doing right now, so I've talked a lot about programmatic SEO, but with programmatic CRO, what we're doing is, let's say you have 1,000 pages on your website. Basically, we'll analyze the content on the page and then we will craft a call to action that's custom to that page based on the content. So instead of saying, get a free consultation, the call to action might say, optimize your conversions. And we can see it in 59% lift on those, on button clicks there. And that's pretty significant if you're doing that. And just think about how you can optimize your site and your call to actions, also your testimonials, whatever you have. How do you optimize those at scale? This is how you can do it by having a really good prompt. And that's how you do it. So, 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 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 could 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 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 You can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video.

The other thing that we've been testing, we don't do this in the United States, but if you are a global company or you have divisions outside of the US, we've been testing WhatsApp call buttons on our website to generate leads. And we've been testing in different regions and A/B testing to see with it, do we generate total more leads or do we generate less leads by having it? Because there's cannibalization, right? If you have a WhatsApp button, sure, you may get some leads through the WhatsApp button, But some of them may have already became a lead or would have became a lead through your contact page or your opt-in page or whatever it may be. But so far the tests have been going quite well. We're seeing a 12 to 13% lift in leads by adding that. And we're in the B2B space, enterprise.

Let me give you the prompt for the, a potential prompt for PCRO if you want to do it.

So the prompt would start, just for open rewind, you want to explain to people what PCRO is?

PCRO is programmatic CRO. I just talked about it.

I understand, but when you say the acronyms—

I thought I said it already, but maybe I didn't. So for PCRO, what you would put is, you are the world's best conversion rate optimizer. So you start it off with that. So you give the AI a role. And you say, okay, analyze the content on this page and come up with the best possible call to action. It will be no longer than 6 tokens. So basically the length of the call to action. And then You can have something like that and you can just continue to fine-tune it. You can continue to optimize it. But that's one way you can go about doing that. You can have your developer do it. But going back to experiments that we're running, I'll give you one more and then we can move on and you can add one more if you want. But there is— I invested in a company called Skool, skool.com.

Sam Ovens?

Sam Ovens, yeah. So, 2 years ago invested and it's doing pretty well right now. Valuation has gone up. So yeah, congratulations. My safe note activated. But anyway, so whether it's Circle, whether using Circle, whether using School, any of these community platforms, I think there's an argument that communities are going to become even more valuable in the future because people are missing connection. People want to hang out with like-minded people, which is why you see, you know, groups like YPO, EO, Hampton, whatever. And so even though we have an Agency Owners Association group, which is continuing to grow, I actually want to put— we're about to do this. We're going to put a school group on my thank you page. And usually the conversion rates from people that go on from your thank you page to converting into your, like, a free group, for example, is about 30%. And so the thing we want to do here is build a really strong, vibrant group of free, like a free marketing group, and just continue to, continue to build something where we can continue to add value to the group, people can add value to each other, and then we can also push different offers when we want. And that's something that if you do it right, it'll last for a long time. If you do it poorly, it'll die very quickly.

So you're getting a 30% conversion from people opting into a lead or some form field, then your thank you page, you send them to a community.

That's— no, the thank you page would convert at 30% to community.

But before that, they're already putting in their information on your website, right? Okay, and then the thank you page, they have to click a button and then they go to the school website?

Correct.

And do they have to register there?

Yeah, they have to register and fill in more, but usually it's about 30% from what I've seen.

Have you seen if you can put the forms on your website and auto-populate? API?

Yeah, no, no, I don't think Sam allows that yet. I'm sure he'll open it up at some— I don't think there's an API for school yet.

Yeah, that could probably boost your numbers quite a bit.

For sure, yeah. Anything else before we move on?

Now let's move on to the next topic.

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/aoa. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency, 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. How about tools? People love tools. All right.

What do you want to talk about with tools?

What do you got? What's some new tools? I shared one, saleslead.ai. Go check that out. It's funny because Earlier today, it's not really funny, but it's today I was on a call and then they're like, oh, have you heard of Salesly.ai? And then I literally heard about it the first time last week. So it's starting to grow. And I, again, Outreach is valued at over $1 billion. If this thing's the next Outreach, it'll be valued at a lot of money.

Yeah.

So yeah.

I love MyGen. Have you used MyGen?

Is that like one of those AI gen—

Dubbing.

Dubbing? Yeah. No, I haven't used it.

It works so well.

Does it do the lips too?

I don't know if it's doing—

Oh, for audio only?

Audio and video. No, no, it does both. Um, they could say— I don't know if they claim it does lips or not, but my lips aren't really matched up perfectly. Yeah, so I'm gonna guess that's a no, but you know, they may say it does or doesn't. I don't know if they actually claim it does, but, um, my lips are off.

What languages are you dubbing? Hindi?

Hindi, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese. I think that's it in our tests.

How's it converting?

We're not getting the views that we want. But when we started running some ads and testing, it's starting to build up much faster. But we have to kickstart it. It's not doing well, even though we already naturally have traffic in those regions. What we're finding is a lot of people in those regions prefer to watch— like, we talked to a lot of people in Brazil, right? Portuguese. And a lot of them still said they prefer the original version in English just with subtitles.

You know what's interesting? So you don't watch anime, right?

No.

Okay, so I watch anime. So when you watch anime, I like, I prefer the Japanese version. I don't speak Japanese, but I'll read the subtitles. You prefer it because it's organic. It sounds like it's normal. Like English is your normal language, right? It's my normal language. And so it sounds a lot more natural. There's no like weird, like I'm sure if they're dubbing it, there's a lot of cultural Nuances that they're missing right now. And so maybe that's why it doesn't do as well.

For sure, dude. Totally. There's no way that it's perfect because AI itself isn't perfect yet. It'll take some time to improve. But yeah, that's the biggest complaint we're getting is people just prefer the English version with subtitles. And we're seeing that in most regions where they're just saying, ah, can you— we'd just rather see the English version. Yeah.

So, okay, you use MyGen for that. Earlier, I just shared Skool, skool.com, for community. So if you want to go build a community, there's a lot of people, especially in the internet marketing space. After Alex Hormozi put in a check, he started promoting Skool. I see ads. I don't know if you see Alex Hormozi ads for Skool now. His whole thing, I think that what he's promoting along with Sam Ovens is, hey guys, the new funnel is build a community funnel. And that's like the new offer.

Dude, I've seen him with the Skool hat. Yeah.

Yeah. So he wears a school hat and then there's him, he's like promoting school games. I don't even know what that is, but yeah.

No. What's funny is, dude, I was just watching one of his videos or his wife's videos, Leila, and she was walking in front of their building, acquisition.com, and she's just like, you know, this is a huge accomplishment. You know, it's a great feeling. I'm paraphrasing here, to have a building with your logo. And I'm like, congrats. That's awesome how you guys have your own building.

Yeah. They've had that. You know, they have a giant gym in there. That's all I know.

Dude, Alex told me he has a gym and I was like, why don't you just go to like 24 Hour Fitness or whatever it is in their local community? And he was saying that the cool part about having a gym in your own building is once you set your weights to whatever it is, you don't have to rack them back. Yeah, you don't have to rack them back and it's just set to where you want them to be each and every time.

Yep. So, okay, we— you got one more tool in there?

Funny enough, I've actually been cutting back on tools. I've been seeing a trend where everyone's like, hey, check out this tool, check out this tool. This does this with AI, or this does this with video editing. And what we've seen, at least in our team, because we do time tracking, a lot of people are starting to use too many tools. And when you look at how long it takes them to complete the task without the tools, and it doesn't help with output. Yeah, it doesn't help with output. We're actually seeing it slow it down. So we're cutting back on just using all these tools.

You see a lot of money too.

Dude, so much. So when we talked about HypeFury right now, I messaged Salo in the email.

It's $11.

Yeah, yeah, because I haven't seen the comments on HypeFury anymore. So I messaged him, no joke, we still paying for it? I don't see the comments anymore. Right? Like HypeFury is not actually putting out comments for us. I don't know if he stopped, but if he stopped or it's not working, I'm like, I don't want to pay for it anymore.

Yep, makes sense. So there's 2 things there. One, if you do an overabundance of tools, it starts to get overwhelming. And then what happens is you end up just getting charged left and right for these SaaS subscriptions. And because the cost is so low, sometimes it's $5, $10, $15, you don't really pay attention. I might look at like a notification and just like, whatever, right? But then it's death by a thousand paper cuts. So that's why you have to make sure that you cull your subscriptions ideally once a quarter, if not once a month, if you're getting bigger and bigger.

Dude, what's that company that just analyzes your credit card statements and starts canceling things? Truebill? Truebill. Yeah, something like that. I think it's Truebill.

Truebill will analyze all your credit card statements, all your subscriptions, and then they will easily help you cancel them at scale if you want. And they'll even help you renegotiate them, I believe.

But they— I think they take a cut of what they save you.

They do take a— but it's worth it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How's someone managing—

Exactly, exactly. We're going to end it. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's the community that Neil and I have. We're like, community is everything. We We think it's the next funnel, the next way of growing your audience, your community. Check it out. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Let us know what you continue to think about these long-form episodes, and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.