Future Proof Your Business with These Simple 2020 Growth Hacks (Neil Patel and Eric Siu)

Main one? Live one here. Got it. And that's the secondary? This is the secondary.

I'll start rolling in there.

All right, cool. We're rolling. We'll pull the comments up as we go.

Yeah, let me get those up now.

All right, guys, we are live. We are live in my home in cozy downtown LA. It's raining today, and I have a little bit of allergies. So whoever commented on me needing the— what is it, Neti Pot? Neti pot.

Neti pot, yeah.

What's a neti pot? It's basically the thing where you like spray into your nasal, like your nose to like get rid of allergies, right? But I use something called Flonase and I use 2 sprays, didn't work at all. But anyway, so what we're gonna do here is we're live on a couple of channels right now and we are gonna do our episodes for Marketing School. And then as we do the episodes, we're also gonna answer some questions as we go through it. I actually have a canker sore on my tongue too.

Yeah, that sucks. Yeah, so you bit it and you probably ate something sour after.

Yeah, I have no idea. But anyway, we're gonna do this. Doesn't matter if there's allergies, doesn't matter if there's a canker sore, doesn't matter if it's raining. We're gonna do this. All right, so, um, we are good on the first one.

Yes, we're good on the first one.

Let's do this. All right, here we go. No, we're good. We are rolling. All right, here we go. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about 7 hacks we use to perform at an elite level. Hack number 1, I'll start. I've been raving about this one. I got a lot of engagement on LinkedIn on this one. I've been— I flew over to Sydney, Australia last Monday, landed on Wednesday at 8:30 AM. I used an app called TimeShifter, and it basically gave me a— it gives me a sleeping schedule that I follow, and I literally had no jet lag. And when I got back to LA, I was only in Australia for 4 days, got back to LA on Sunday at 6:00 AM, stayed up the whole day, had no jet lag. I'm fine right now, completely fine. I mean, you know, Noah saw me go into the office on Monday, completely no jet lag. So TimeShifter, you get the first one, the first schedule for free, and it's like $30 a year or something like that. So if you find yourself traveling, that is something that you should definitely get.

So hack number 2 that I've used is live a convenient life. And here's what I mean by this. It's, you don't need a lot of money. You don't need to have all the things in the world. Optimize your life for convenience so that way you can focus on work. And here's an example of this. We're here in Eric's apartment. It's really nice, amazing view. But what you guys don't see is, He's very minimalistic. He doesn't need a lot of stuff. He doesn't need a lot of clothes. He doesn't, you know, when I open up his fridge, he keeps it super simple. There's just water in there. He gets food delivered to him that is already pre-made, right?

Mm-hmm.

And he does all of this stuff so that way he can live a very efficient life. I had another buddy years ago who told me, his name was O'Malik. He's just like, if you can't pack your bags in a carry-on suitcase or you can't pack your clothes on a carry-on suitcase, you have too many clothes. Because then it just takes you too much time to pack. It takes you too much time to figure out what you're going to wear for the day. Sure, not all of us can do the Mark Zuckerberg thing where we wear the same thing every single day, but you guys get the point. Whether you have a lot of money or you don't, you can still optimize for convenience. Whether that's getting rid of clutter and excess in your life that you don't need, so that way you can spend more time working, or whether it's— Stopping yourself from doing silly tasks that you can outsource on sites like TaskRabbit. I don't even know if they're still around today.

Yeah, they're still around.

And outsource for pennies on the dollar so that way, again, you can be efficient with your time and focus on work.

Number 3. So I am going to continue down the theme around sleep. So when I think about sleep, when I look at my room, and we'll probably do a video on this later, but my room, You know, there's this book called Why We Sleep. You can watch a TED Talk on it from Matthew Walker, but it's a great talk because it talks about how sleep is the biggest superpower that you can have. And basically what we— not, not, I say what we as if Neil and I sleep together, but we don't. What I do on my end is I try to sleep at the same time. And I'm not gonna say I'm like the most optimized sleeper, but I do try to do as much as I can. So I sleep with the room at 68 degrees. And I have an Oura Ring, O-U-R-A, and that tracks my sleep and tracks kind of where things are good, where things are bad. So for example, last night, I don't drink much alcohol, but last night I drank a little, my heart rate spikes. Usually my resting heart rate—

Ah, this explains the allergies.

Oh yeah.

You know?

Maybe, yeah. But my heart rate is usually, resting heart rate's usually about 42 or so. So it's a little on the lower side, but when I drink, it spikes up to 60, which is pretty crazy. So that does affect my sleep quite a bit. So I'm just saying, You know, track your sleep and do what you can to optimize your sleep. And then definitely watch that TED Talk.

All right. Another thing that I want you guys to all test out is use a to-do list. So break down your day on what you need to achieve in that day before you go to sleep. And break down those tasks where they can be done well within an hour. So like ideally 15-minute chunks, 30-minute chunks at the biggest. And if you do that, what you'll find is you know what you need to accomplish each and every single day to start hitting your goals versus being like, oh, I got this big goal that I want to hit next quarter or next year. Well, if you don't break it down in literally bite-sized increments like tasks, I'm not talking about big tasks, I'm talking about things that you can literally do within 15, 30 minutes, it's very unlikely that you're actually going to hit the goal. And that's one of the biggest things that I've done in my life that helps me achieve a lot. And you can ask anyone that knows me for a very long time, like Eric, I'm an amazing executor. And I'm an amazing executor because I'm breaking everything down in such small bite-sized chunks. I don't sleep until I get them all done.

This is true. Number 5, number 5, number 5 is, I actually got this from a guy that runs a company called Petra. His name's Andy. And my nose is running a little bit, so I'm going to stuff my nose. As we're live right now. So yeah, okay. So there's this thing called the 10-10-10 model. So basically the way this is set up is you spend 10 minutes on meditation, 10 minutes on journaling, and 10 minutes on reading, right? I kind of modified it a little bit. I'm calling this kind of the, the 5 through 30 model. And I've been, I've been starting to do this this week, but try to create your own version of this, right? So mine might be 5-minute journaling, 10-minute meditation. It might be 15 minutes of 15 minutes of just thinking, right? And then 30 minutes of like, you know, Peloton bike or training or whatever. But the whole idea here is that it's broken down into kind of similar to what Neil's saying, bite-sized chunks, right? I do like the 10-10-10 thing because it's very simple to remember. Mine's a little more complicated, but— and then what I do there is I basically track, I use an app called Way of Life, and I basically mark down whether I'm finishing the task every single day. And I'm probably gonna— it's pretty like, if I'm doing like 6 or 7 different things, I'll probably miss like one thing per day. I'm lucky enough if I can hit all of them, but that way I have that habit established. So, you know, talking about bite-sized chunks, talking about habits, that's how you can kind of combine the two together.

Number 6, wake up early. So adjust your schedule. I'm not talking about, you know, yeah, you need to optimize your sleep. Eric already covered that. I'm talking about more so start your workday at 5:00 AM. So if that means you have to wake up at 4:00 to get ready, work out, shower, et cetera, Start your workday at 5:00 AM. I start mine really early. I tend to wake up around 4:00 AM every single day. Funny enough, I do it naturally. I don't even need an alarm. Luckily I have a crying baby that helps with that one. And I found that I get way more work done because less people bug you in the morning versus if you start your workday at the same time that everyone else does, you got a shitload of people bugging you, which means that you're focusing on putting out fires, dealing with them, dealing with emails, Versus getting ahead of the day.

Yeah, number 7 is to batch your day. So not even batch, so Neil talking about batching up little tasks, but I'm talking about batching your days. So, you know, typically, I mean, we have Thanksgiving this week. So typically on Thursdays, those are the days I try to record content. So video content, podcast content, and then, you know, whenever Neil and I have time, we'll try to do this podcast. But Thursdays, I try to make them content days. So I put a theme around it. Mondays are all my meetings. So usually by Mondays, I'm completely blasted by the end of the day, which is why I don't like to talk to anybody after Monday. And then, you know, Tuesday I try to focus on ClickFlow, which is a software company. Same thing with Wednesday as well. Friday, I try to keep it completely blocked off to meetings. And, you know, that's when I get time to kind of, you know, if I want to go think, like I'll spend time to think. But now I have this new thing where I spend time to think every single day. So that helps a lot. So batch out your days, have a theme for each day if you can. I think if you're starting out your business, you probably can't do that. You don't have that luxury. But as you get the leverage of having capital, people around you, you have the leverage of code as well, you are going to be able to do that. So you want to be able to protect your time because that's the only thing that you have. So anyway, that is it for today. You want to close it out?

Yeah, if you guys want more help on being efficient and also growing your business and performing at an elite level and learning from other entrepreneurs as well as Eric and I, who are all doing well into the millions, Check out marketingschool.io/live.

Yeah.

See you tomorrow.

Cool. A lot of questions, guys. Keep the questions coming. I think we're going to do one more episode and then we'll answer some questions. So I see Margaret saying starting at 4:30 with morning pages. Great. Evelio. Divesh, that's a new way. That's I haven't seen that spelling before for divesh on the left side, right? Divesh, divesh.

I don't know how to say it.

Divesh.

I should because I'm Indian.

Happy Thanksgiving, Austin.

Thank you guys all for joining. I know it's getting close to the holidays, at least here in the U.S., so we do appreciate your guys's time listening in live and asking us.

Andy Mackinson, gross dude. Achoo. All right, on to the next one.

Noah, could I ever record from my iPad? Can I ever record from my iPad in high quality or no?

No, no. You see the thing we're using over there? That's what makes the quality sound better too.

So it has nothing to do with my microphone?

Well, you have to have a mic that's plugged into that.

But does that plug into my laptop?

Yeah.

Through USB?

Yeah. Actually, I have one here. I should just give it to him, so, and I'll get another one. Yeah. Anyway, next one. Good rolling? We are rolling. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about 7 lessons you can learn from Sam Ovens' $36 million a year business. Neil, you're going first.

All right. So Sam has an amazing business and we had an in-person event where People got to learn from a lot of successful marketers, entrepreneurs. Like we had one of the founders of Activision Blizzard, that $30+ billion company come. And if you want to be there next time, go to marketingschool.io/live and just put in your details and maybe you'll be there next time as well. So Sam gave a talk and he was breaking down some of the things that helped him scale to $36 million a year. And he has some interesting thoughts. And one of the things that he does, and I'm a big believer in this, Eric's a bit more opposite on me on this one. I'm more like Sam, and there's not necessarily a right or wrong approach. It's to each their own. I don't network much. I don't go out to a lot of events. Sam, you know, he was just like, yeah, I only go out once a year.

And his once a year was— I think it was our event.

It was our event. And, you know, Eric and I have known Sam for a while now. But the beautiful part is if you sit down and focus on your core business, like when I was younger, I would always try to go to all these meetings and be like, oh, let me go to the next conference and network. And don't get me wrong, networking's great, but you can do a lot of that online these days or over the phone or through Zoom or Skype. I just sit down and focus on growing my business. And that's a big mistake that people make in which they don't have that laser focus. So networking, you know, all these other ideas that you may have, if it doesn't help your core business grow, then you shouldn't do it. And you should have extreme laser focus on one thing until you get the results that you're looking for.

Number 2. So what I really loved about Sam Ovens, this is funny because I just drank alcohol last night, but you and I, we don't really drink that much. But he said the number one thing that took his business from $1 million to $18 million a year was quitting alcohol. Now I'm not sure if it's just that one thing, I doubt it's that one thing, but it does help. But the point is, he had this one chart that showed negative $100 an hour tasks, there's breakeven tasks, and then there's like $100,000 an hour tasks, right? So that could be like negotiating a big deal, mergers and acquisitions, all the way to negative $100 an hour tasks could be like doing drugs or drinking alcohol, right? Like, it's, you know, not everyone necessarily agreed with that. You know, people are like, oh my God, that's over-optimizing, whatever. But point is, I think you have to define what's negative $100 an hour task to you and then define like, you know, what's good and then focus on those things, right? I think that kind of goes back to Neil's point around focusing.

Number 3. So the other thing that Sam does, and I'm a big believer in this as well, try just eating a vegetarian-based diet. So like cut out meat, try to eat all organic, non-processed food. I kid you not, it gives you so much more energy. People take it for granted. Try it. Every once in a while, I will eat chicken and turkey because I'm left with no options when I'm traveling or at certain places. But like 99% of the time, I only eat plant-based foods that are not processed. And what I do on top of that is I do intermittent fasting. So I'll eat between 12 and 6. And you're just like, oh, that's crazy. But try it out. You'll also find that it gives you more energy. The intermittent fasting Sam doesn't do. He does a plant-based diet. But try the intermittent fasting on top of the plant-based.

Dude, I've been doing intermittent fasting since I was 28, so it's been like— it's been like 5 years. I only do it because I'm lazy.

But you break it. You don't do intermittent fasting consistently every day for like a whole month, right?

I rarely— I might break it like once or twice a month.

What times do you eat by?

So I eat from— so usually I'll eat dinner at 5 PM or 6 PM, and then that means I can eat at 9 or 10 AM the next day.

So yeah, you're good.

Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's what I do.

He does it naturally. That's, that's really good. Andy, who's actually listening live from Snack Nation, uh, he started doing it, you know, created a lot of energy for him and he also lost, I think, 10, 15 pounds. So good for you, Andy.

Yeah. Andy, uh, leave a comment if you're still here. Uh, anyway, so what, what is this? Number 4? Number 4, actually similar to what Neil is saying around, um, the food aspect. So what, Sam does. He keeps it really simple. He actually uses a service called thistle.co, and they basically will ship you food. And he actually has taken it to the next level where he ships his entire company food. Basically, when you do something like that, it's to help productivity in the office so your team doesn't need to think about— I'm looking at the TV, I should be looking over there. But basically, he's constantly buying coffee for his team, he's buying food for his team, keeps his team productive. They don't need to think about where to get food. You know, they're getting back to work faster. So it's probably more productive for the business as well. But it's really like, sure, like I have someone that ships me food all the time, but sometimes I've actually used services like Thistle in the past. So if you have like a food delivery service that you can use and the food's not bad, honestly, food to me, I think it's the same thing for Neil, it's just fuel, eat it, get on with your day.

Yeah, number 5, and all you marketers will love this one. Obsess about fine-tuning whatever campaign is working. So Sam generates a lot of his revenue from webinars, and he'll obsess about it. Like if you listen to some of his webinars, sometimes he has the Game of Thrones music or like intro music before he starts a webinar, because he's found that by doing that one little thing, it helps people actually stick around and watch more of the webinar. He'll even at the beginning talk about how he has something for you at the end of the webinar, so it keeps people people sticking around. He'll even send you text reminders to join the webinar. See, it's not one thing that has helped him get to a $36 million a year business. It's fine-tuning every little thing that helps him build up to that multimillion-dollar mark. So don't think about, hey, this is my business, you got something working, what's the next thing I can do? What's the next silver bullet? That usually doesn't exist. But finding that channel that's already working for you, that tactic, and then going in there and spending months and months just obsessing on ways to figure out how to fine-tune and make it better, that's how you grow. And it's a lot of little things that'll add up that'll give you the results.

All right, number 6. I'm holding back a sneeze right now, but number 6 is, think about, when I think about what Sam does, is doing right now, he's looking at the future. He is working on a product right now. It's probably gonna be released in the next 1 year or 2 years or so. Hopefully in the next year, I would hope so. And so, you know, he understands that, sure, he's doing $36 million a year. He is at the— he's basically kind of at the top when it comes to, you know, we're talking about the education space, the info space, right? But he understands if he wants to build to $100 million a year, he cannot continue to do that. He cannot just be the course guy, right? The consulting.com guy. He wants to go beyond that. And I think, I don't think there's anything wrong with, you know, this, you know, online education, the courses aspect. But, you know, especially in the internet marketing space, you know, when you're just a course person, I think you're setting limits on yourself. So he wants to shoot beyond that because he has bigger goals than that. But also because he understands that there's a limit on what you can do there. So understand that, like, think about the future. And he's also a very deep thinker too. He's really observing You know, the Jeff Bezos of the world. He's looking at the, you know, annual investors' letters, right? He's— the shareholder letters. He's reading stuff from Warren Buffett. He's constantly looking around him to see how he can be better. And he's constantly transcending, you know, the other people in just the market in general.

Number 7, last but not least, get your customers to give you testimonials. And Sam's taking this to a whole new level, and this helps with sales drastically, but I've never seen anyone do this. other than Sam to this level. Go to consulting.com/reviews. Again, that's consulting.com/reviews. Currently, as we're recording this podcast, he has 3,686 customer love stories, as he puts it, 4.9 stars.

Wow.

And when he's saying this, these reviews, they're not testimonials like text-based testimonials. He has 3,686 video testimonials. Of people recording videos, non-edited, not fancy green screen or any of that kind of stuff. People just busting out their phones, leaving a testimonial. Some of them are 30 seconds, some of them are an hour. And it breaks it all down to, from people leaving 5-star reviews, 4-star, 3-star, 2-star, 1-star. The results based on 7 figures in earnings, 6 figures, 5 figures, all the categories like health and wellness, marketing, education, other. Finance, legal, even he breaks it down by location like North America, Europe, Latin America, et cetera. He's gone so far to break down how much people love his product, his courses, the results they're getting. It's super effective because when you see 3,686 video testimonials and he breaks down even how 22% of the reviews include the word love, it just shows you that people are extremely ecstatic with the work that he's producing, and this helps him generate a lot more signups. The proof is really there, right? So make sure you test out video testimonials, not 1 or 2 or 5 or 10, not professionally made, just in mass quantity because it shows it's real and authentic.

All right, that is it for today. But before we go, don't forget to check out marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to learn about the Growth Accelerator Mastermind that Neil and I do. We do these three times a year. We just did our first one in Beverly Hills. The rating was a 9.1, and you're going to learn from amazing people. We had founder of Activision there and a lot of amazing other people too. So that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Let's answer some questions.

Yeah, Armando. Hello. Someone asked if Neil, you've been to India.

I've been to India.

Neil, what's your what's your child? Your child's name.

My child's name is Emma. Oh, I'm like, where are the questions?

I'm like, right inside the website. Yeah.

So Eric, how do you optimize your site for more direct traffic?

Dude, I'm like blowing my nose.

Okay, I'll answer it. The way I optimize my site for more direct traffic is, I try to control my destiny. I'm a big believer in the rule of 7. So once someone sees or interacts with your brand or your website 7 times, or hears about you 7 times, they're much more likely to keep coming back and you're going to build a solid brand. So to get more direct traffic, I do things like use push notifications, collect emails, do email blasts, create videos everywhere, publish that, do podcasting with Eric. And you're thinking about that like, Neil, how does this increase your direct traffic? It's getting my brand out there. And that's causing a lot more direct traffic. I get around 140,000 visitors a month of people just coming, going to Google and Googling the term Neil Patel and then landing on my site. I get even more traffic of people just coming direct because it's easier to come direct than probably it is to go to Google and type in a query. But that's all because people are seeing my name everywhere and I'm trying to create that awareness on all channels, right? I'm leveraging an omnichannel approach.

All right. Armando, hello from Venezuela. Thank you for that. Jaya, thanks for saying whoever's watching this live, throw a like button. I agree. It's absolutely free. Whether you're coming in from YouTube, LinkedIn, wherever, if you leave a like, oh, instantly the likes came, look at that. And then a comment is actually even better on LinkedIn too. Neil, could you speak Gujarati?

I can speak Gujarati.

Oh, there you go. And then angels and entrepreneurs. I guess Chip or Sip said, that's interesting. Where are my angels and entrepreneurs at?

Where are my angels and entrepreneurs at? What's YO?

At YO. Yo. Yo.

I don't know.

Where are my angels and entrepreneurs at, YO?

I'm here. Eric has— he has Quick Flow on there as well. But yeah.

Cole Zucker, hello. Congrats on getting married, I guess tomorrow or the day after.

That's awesome. So Eric, what tool do you love for cold email outreach?

I love using Mixmax or I love using Outreach. So we have Outreach. Outreach is great.

Can you explain why you use Mixmax or Outreach?

2 different ones, yeah. What's the difference? So I like using Mixmax. So if I'm reaching out to a bunch of people for like a dinner, it's easier for me to quickly make a sequence inside of Mixmax and then just like duplicate an old sequence I have and then just dump people into that, right? Dump a bunch of email CSVs in. From a— I think from a user interface perspective, it's a little simpler for me to use Mixmax. I think when I want to do heavy-duty stuff and I want to, you know, put stuff together using like an API, I will go ahead and use Outreach because it is pretty powerful. The reporting is really powerful too. So it just depends on, you know, what I want to do there.

Thank you.

Feel free to ask any questions, guys. We are here to help you grow your business. And I apologize for my stuffy voice because I have allergies right now. I'm not sick though. Don't worry, Neil. Not sick. And Noah, don't worry.

I'll be like, peace, I'm out.

Yeah. Thank you, JP Wingate. And then there's a— hey, look, there's another Gujarat guy.

Gujarati?

Yeah.

Yeah, he's a Patel.

Yeah.

I love all people though, even if you're not a Patel or anything.

Manav, good morning. Are you also a Gujarati?

Uh, he is—

You have another one on the left side. All right, anyway, let's go to the next one.

All right, let's do this. Wait, dude, I love how you have a trash can just right there for you.

Yeah, it's on the recording. Look at— let's look at this one. Recording? When we're recording the episodes, look at this one. Not that one? Yeah. Okay.

Because that's a wide, it'll look like you're looking—

Okay, okay, okay. Got it. Let's do it.

All right, we are rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about what marketing investments we are making for the next 10 years. So I can go first? Go for it. So, you know, recently Neil and I, we did a deal for this podcast and it's a pretty good deal for both sides. And the reason that deal came together was because of the customer data platform we have running on the Single Grain website. So customer data platform, the way, the easiest way to explain it, I've talked about this in the past, is it is your single source of truth for all your data. It combines all your disparate sources, shows a timeline feed of how people are behaving, and you can basically take that data and then figure out how you want to distribute it into your sales enablement tools, your CRMs, whatever. So I think when people talk about how data is the new oil, I certainly think it's going in that direction. Maybe it's not the new oil quite, but it's becoming more and more valuable. This is why you see the privacy wars going on with Facebook. You can see Google's under scrutiny right now too, right? So really what they've done, especially with Facebook, is they have this free tool, but they've taken all the data and they basically figured out how to really monetize that. So you want to figure out how you can take data and use it to your advantage in an ethical manner.

Yeah, another thing that I'm focusing on that I believe is going to be a big investment in the next 10 years is leveraging all the platforms out there that already exist. I'm not talking about social media, but none of us are really tapping into like the marketplaces. So how many of you guys out there have leveraged Google Data Studio? I'm not talking about creating your own report, but plugging into Google Data Studio and having your product enabled. Now I know for all of you, Google Data Studio isn't a good integration partner. An example that we're doing is a Chrome extension.

Right?

We'll also create WordPress plugins. We'll also create Shopify plugins because all these ecosystems are really popular. So for you, it could be a Slack integration. It could be a Dropbox integration, a Google Analytics integration, Adobe or Salesforce integration, right? You don't have to do marketing to get customers. Someone already has your customers. Tapping into their marketplace is a huge source. There's companies like Supermetrics that make tens of millions of dollars just because of integrations. I know companies that actually do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, like the Marketos of the world, because of things like Salesforce and working with them, right? So figure out where you can integrate. It's a great source to drive a ton of revenue that a lot of people aren't focusing on these days.

All right, next one is we've talked about the power of free, also known as freemium or product-led growth. So I recommend you Googling what OpenView's basic, basically their entire, I think they have eBooks on this, their entire content library on product-led growth. So I think, you know, the future, there's different tiers, right? And I look at the progression of marketing over time. So, you know, back in the day when people gave out free blog posts, it was like, oh my God. And then the eBooks started coming out, oh my God, right? And then it's like webinars, oh my God. And then it's like, there's always the next oh my God, right? And I think the barrier to entry when you build a product or you use a widget and use product-led growth where you basically say, hey guys, I'm going to give this product to you for free. You can use it for free. Kind of like how HubSpot does it. At a certain point, then you get them to upgrade, right? I think that is what we're going to continue to invest in. I look at what Neil's done with Ubersuggest. We have a freemium version of ClickFlow too. And then I think we're going to continue to invest in tools because there is a barrier to entry to building a good product. You have to, You know, you have to talk to your design team, you have to talk to your engineering team, you have to talk to product people, you have to constantly iterate on it, you have to do customer development. It is not something that's easily duplicatable or duplicable. And so I think that's one thing that if you want to have an advantage in your business, you've got to, you know, you've got to figure out how to build great products or at least have a great product person on your team.

Yeah, and you know, when you're thinking about investments, don't think about getting an ROI in the short run. So like a lot of things that I'm doing won't pay off in the short run. And I'm okay with that, whether it's, you know, going live more frequently or whether it's speaking at some conferences, even if they're not willing to pay me because I think it has the right audience. The big thing that I'm really pushing for, and this investment is hard to track, is just building a much bigger brand. I look at these days in business and in marketing, there is no real moat. Whatever you have, someone can copy. But the hardest thing to copy is a brand. And brands are really valuable. There's a venture capital firm in San Francisco called Andreessen Horowitz. They even have a game plan and a fund that helps with influencers. So it's so powerful. Like Beats by Dre wouldn't have blown up if it wasn't for Dr. Dre's brand, LeBron James wearing the headphones, the Kardashians wearing the headphones, you know, the Kobe Bryants of the world and all these celebrities. If you look at Kylie Jenner, she sold part of her company, 50% or 51%, I forgot exactly what percentage, it was either 50 or 51, for $600 million. And I'm not saying her makeup product is the best or sucks or any of that. I don't know because I haven't used it, but what made it successful isn't the quality of the product, it's her name. And I'm not saying she did a terrible job at creating a bad product. I'm pretty sure she went out there and created an amazing product, but there's a lot of other makeup companies that also have amazing products. What made her unique was they don't have the personal brand that she does. And you can do this on a personal brand or a corporate brand, whatever it may be. You look at Nike, that shoe, that shoe doesn't cost much to make, but what's the value in Nike is that swoosh, that symbol. And if you build a brand and you spend years building one, you can get a huge ROI, but not in the short run.

Yeah, defer. So the final one from my side for now, I think just looking out, 10 years is a long time, a lot can change quickly, but I think the fact that you're listening to this right now, this will be converted into a podcast. And this is, I mean, this is the Marketing School Podcast, right? And the way I see this is voice. I don't think voice is going anywhere. I think voice is getting bigger and bigger. Look, people are just coming on to, you know, a lot more people are coming online now. The whole world still isn't online yet, right? I think voice is gonna get bigger and bigger. It's a very intimate type of media form. And I'll kind of add on top of that too. I think text messaging is continuing to grow. I look at, you know, Twilio, which is a publicly traded company. They're doing really well. They're getting bigger and bigger. When I spoke with the founder of ManyChat a couple years ago, he was only getting 1 million messages a day from going through his platform. Now it's 266 million per day. And it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I think voice, and I think text, those, or you want to call it chat, I don't think those are going anywhere. And I think that's why we're kind of stepping up investments on that side. And those will get bigger and bigger. Cool.

If you guys want more tips on how you guys can grow your company over the next 10 years and how to think long-term, check out marketingschool.io/live. It's so funny because I always almost say check out marketingschool.com/live.

Dude, we need it. Some Korean guy that owns it. Okay. Jump right in or you have answers to anything? Let's do one more. Guys, keep your questions coming. We're gonna do one more episode and then we're gonna answer some questions. All right, we are rolling. 3, 2, 1. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about 7 marketing trends for 2020.

So trend number 1, I figured the moment he looked at me, I'm like, all right, I'm going first on this one. Trend number 1, voice search. You guys already know 50% of them will be for, 50+ percent of the searches are going to be voice search, but Very few people are actually monetizing voice search. You're going to see, start seeing more platforms and companies monetizing voice search. There's tools out there like Jetson AI that helps you with this. It's like, think of like Shopify, you know how you can use Shopify to create an e-commerce site or WordPress to create a blog? Jetson AI creates that technology for you. They actually already have it and it plugs in with your business so you can get more traffic and monetize voice search.

All right, number 2, I think, When it comes to, look, we're doing this podcast right now, but when I think about monetization for creators, I think that's gonna get better and better. I look at the Substacks of the world where you have a paid newsletter. I look at SuperCast where you can basically make a private feed for your podcast, which I'm testing out with the Leveling Up Podcast right now, just to see what the numbers are. But what we can do basically is say, hey, you know what? We're doing this podcast, but if you guys want an ad-free version of this, actually let's test this on, 'cause we're live right now. If you guys want an ad-free version of this podcast, you guys can pay $5 a month. If you guys want a monthly ask me anything including the ad-free fee, it would be $10 a month. And then if you want like a private kind of WhatsApp group with Neil and myself, it would be $25 a month, right? And where we can answer your questions and also do the ask me anything. So those of you that just heard this live right now, type it in the chat if you would actually pay for something like $5 a month, $10 a month, you know, $25 a month. For us to actually offer something like that, right? Because, uh, the reason why I'm bringing this up too, and type into the chat, but, um, there's a teacher in China that makes $8 million a year, and he just, he teaches and he monetizes because he has different monetization, um, options within his, his, uh, platform. So I think we're way behind here. I think there's, um, look, the fact that there's Substack, the fact that there's SuperCast, I think there's gonna be more options for creators, and that's gonna be, um, you know, better stuff in the long term.

Trend number 3, companies who rely on Google Analytics will get beat by their competition. Here's what I mean by this. Everyone's using Google Analytics. Google Analytics helps you optimize your front-end marketing, but it doesn't help you optimize your business. And marketing has turned into optimizing your lifetime value of a customer. Amazon will do things like Prime in order to keep getting people to come back and keep buying from them instead of the competition. Overall, the numbers work out in the long run. And I'm not saying you have to be a millionaire to do this. Anyone can do this actually for free. And the way you combat this and get ahead of your competition is stop just relying on basic analytics like Google Analytics. You need to start looking at business intelligence. There's free tools like Google Data Studio that ties in more business intelligence, and that'll help you do things like optimize for upsells, downsells, repeat purchases, checkout bumps, right? So this will help tie in all the data that you have from all sources in one place, whether it's from your online marketing campaigns, offline, other initiatives, and this will help you fine-tune your business so you can get the best ROI and a leg up on your competition.

All right, number 4. So AI is not so much a buzzword anymore because it's actually working well now. It's the progressions that have made, that have been made. I think about AI for ads. So, you know, you can use a tool like Pattern89, Uh, Neil, you've talked about Jetson AI. Yeah. And, um, God, there's so— like, when I, when I think about how I use Gmail, when I use Gmail now on my phone, like, Neil might send me an email and there's 3 little pre-filled things. I just hit the pre-filled things. Neil's like, what about this time? I'm like, yeah, great, right? And I don't need it. I don't even need to type it out. Or if I'm typing things out, I can autocomplete it, right? So AI is getting better and better. I think, um, we use Descript right now for our transcriptions on the podcast. It's better than any other tool that we've used in the past. And yeah, I think, think about whatever field you're in, how can you actually utilize AI? I'm just talking about how it applies to marketing right now. But think about the context, because there's a lot of out-of-the-box solutions right now that will make your life a lot easier.

All right, trend number 3. One thing that, or no, we're on 5, right? Yeah, we're on 5. Trend number 5. One thing that you guys will end up seeing in 2020 is your list won't convert as well, and you'll have to look for alternative communication channels. So I'm a part of a big group, and we all have big email lists, and we compare stats. You know, the whole group as a whole, we have, I think, over 140, 146 million emails, somewhere around there, it's kind of crazy. Some of them send out way more emails than me, in all industries, B2B, B2C. And as a group, we've seen our clicks drop by 9.4% in 2019. So our open rates are staying roughly the same, but our clicks are dropping. And that just shows that email still works, still are getting read, but you're going to have to start looking for alternative communication channels if you want to keep doing well and you can't just rely on email. So you're going to have to leverage things like push notifications, chatbots like Facebook Messenger, or even like the Intercoms of the world or Drifts.

Bless you.

Thank you. That time it was me, my bad. So, uh, and in general, when you start doing that, it'll help you in 2020.

All right. So this is what, are we done?

No, you have one more.

Oh, I have 6 and then you have one more. Okay. So number 6, I think because we're talking about 2020, um, Neil and I, we've talked about TikTok in the past, but I've been looking a little more into TikTok and look, TikTok actually, as of this morning, ByteDance, which is actually the world's largest startup in the world, it's a Chinese startup. Um, they're looking to borrow $2 billion to grow, to compete with the Snapchats and the Facebooks And, you know, TikTok is basically the way I see it, it's Vine in the past, but they're doing a really good job. It's been downloaded 1.5 billion times. So I think at least for 2020, the way it's trending, at least maybe in the first quarter or so, I think TikTok is still very much on fire in a good way. I don't know how long it's gonna last for, but I do very much think it is a trend.

Cool. Last but not least, I think moats will not exist anymore, and the only moat that'll pretty much be left won't be as effective, but it'll still be the most effective moat. Is going to be your brand. So whoever builds up their brand is going to win in the long run, whether it's a Nike or a Kardashian type of brand or a personal brand, it doesn't matter. Brands is your biggest defense on your competition copying exactly what you have.

All right, that is it for today. But before we go, don't forget to check out marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E. You can fill out an application for our Growth Accelerator Mastermind. Amazing speakers, amazing people. Amazing places we're going to be at. It's just a way for you to grow your business a lot faster, and we're keeping the number of members very limited. So right now we're we're about filled up for the the second round. So check it out, and we'll see you tomorrow. Jaya wants you to speak.

Me to speak?

Gujarati.

Gujarati.

Gujarati.

Ah, मारी नाम नीलचे। I just said my name is Neil.

I already knew it. See, I can speak it too. Okay. Yeah, look at that. Hey, there's 2 people that said they would pay for it. Look at that. They pay for the monetization.

It's cool.

Hey Neil and Eric, both of you have successful agencies that work with real businesses. Why is it that you're also doing education in the form of training programs, masterminds? I, for me, I personally just love teaching. Like if I had all everything I wanted in the world, which I feel like I have most things that I want, I would just be teaching. Like, I really enjoy teaching. Neil?

I enjoy teaching as well. It's one of my biggest joys in life.

Yeah.

Financially, it's not rewarding, but I don't care. I don't know why, I just enjoy it. It could be because my mom's a teacher.

There you go. His mom's a teacher. What are the best channels? Oh, well, you clicked it.

You clicked on Scott.

Scott, Nutritional Products International. And Margaret, by the way, I wasn't saying WeChat, I was saying ManyChat. WeChat, sure. I think great for the Chinese. Scroll down. Oh, Desiree would pay for it too. Is direct mail still effective, and what's the best part of the sales cycle to utilize it? Is it worth the greater cost versus email? Personally, for me, I would say yes. It just depends on the industry that you're like. I feel like what you're doing, right? Like if I were selling, if Andy's still listening to this right now, if I were selling. vending machines and I was trying to sell to affluent retired people, I would send direct mail to like, probably not Beverly Hills, but like affluent areas, right? Where I feel like people are just looking for money, ways to park their cash. That's probably not the best example in the world, but I'm just saying like direct mail still does very much work, Neil.

Yeah, direct mail still works really well. And I have a few friends who send a lot of direct mail. What they've actually said is, Because not as many people have been doing it recently, the costs are pretty decent now. They're getting better and better and people aren't used to getting as much direct mail in the most recent years. And they're finding that the conversion rates are through the roof. Frank Kern is amazing at it. You know, he used to have these campaigns where he would actually give you money to take a phone call and would convert like crazy, but he's an amazing copywriter as well.

Do you have another one? How about final one? What we'll answer right now is from Mansour. I'm a marketing major in college. What are some tips I should learn from when I graduate? Go work for someone for free if you can, and someone you look up to. I would say like an maybe if you can work for like an influencer, someone that is where you want to be in the next couple years. Download as much as you can from that person. Work for free for a little bit. Maybe offer to work for free for like a month or so. And then, you know, maybe you can say you come back to the table and negotiate. I think that way, I would argue like you working for free, honestly, you should probably be paying that person to learn from them. Honestly, it's like that's how much it's worth. I think back in the day when Warren Buffett wanted to learn from— God, who's that guy that wrote The Intelligent Investor?

I don't know.

Benjamin Graham. Ben was like, no, like, no, dude, like you should be paying to work for me for free because The amount that you're learning, like that's so valuable. No, I don't think so. Yeah, but that's the point that he made.

He's still he's still done very well.

Yeah. All right, let's go to our next one. E.S.S. We'll answer your question in a bit. Rolling. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about a simple marketing game plan for the first 30 days of 2020.

So, all right, so 2020 is about to start. You're probably figuring out, all right, what am I going to end up doing? And we want to, instead of telling you what you should do for the whole year, we want to just break down the first month. So Eric and I are going to each give one thing that you need to do at the beginning of the year, just 4 things, one thing you can do each week. And that'll start helping you kick off 2020 in the right way. So do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?

You go first.

So the first thing I would look at is what channels are working really well for you, whether it's SEO, social media, you're probably missing a few channels. So if email is working for you, that means push notifications and chatbots will probably work for you and you can replicate what you're doing there. If Facebook's working well for you, chances are LinkedIn, Instagram can probably work well for you as well, and as well as YouTube. If SEO is working for you really well, paid advertising probably can work well, even if you're not doing it and you can't figure out the funnel. If you have sales pages that are working well for you, that means webinars will probably work for you really well too. So figure out what you're already doing, and there's already other channels or strategies that are very similar, that typically work and it's just another way to convert more people into customers. And I would start off by doing that in early 2020 because it'll give you a quick boost. Because if someone doesn't convert from a landing page, then you can get them through a webinar. If, you know, someone's on your email list, not everyone's going to open and click through, might as well also get them on your push notification list and also your chatbot list.

All right. So from my end, I think what you could do, if you haven't done this before the end of the year, and those of you listening live right now, I would definitely do this now. Make a list of all the things that are not going so well right now. And obviously there's the things that are going well, right? So you want to have like you kind of want to balance it out, especially if you're working with a team. You don't want to completely demotivate them by saying, oh, here's all the issues, right? Like, and what I would say is each week what you're doing is you're creating a new list of issues each week and you spend that time. Maybe there's like a 90-minute meeting each week. It could be shorter if you're just starting out, but you want to solve those issues. You want to continually solve these issues. 'Cause what happens is a lot of companies, they don't— excuse me— they don't focus on— they let things pile up, and then all of a sudden it's like you're just completely behind. Like you have all these issues that stack up on you. So for us, we run on the traction, the EOS, the Entrepreneur's Operating System, and that works out really well for us 'cause it's very fluid, it's fast, and we just keep solving issues. You wanna have long-term issues, you wanna have kind of urgent issues too. You wanna have a good mix of them. And that way people can contribute.

The next thing I want you to do is figure out some sort of tool that you can end up building. I believe it's the new form of marketing. I've done this with Ubersuggest on my website, and it's what's caused me to grow the fastest and the biggest. To give you a rough idea, I get around 21,000 visits a day from just people Googling the term Ubersuggest and landing on my website. Literally 21,000 visits a day. That's averaged out for Friday, Saturday, Sundays, et cetera. I'm averaging 21,000 visits a day. Just think about that. You don't have to build a tool like I did. You can go to CodeCanyon, which is a site that offers a lot of tools for pennies on the dollar, like $5, $10, $20. But offering free tools is the easiest way to get more traffic. And you just got to figure out what's related in your industry. You're in the mortgage industry, mortgage calculators. There's health calculators. There's even, they have things for shopping and parking apps and video games and all this kind of stuff. They even have free SEO tools. Like, they have tools that you can add for any type of industry on CodeCanyon.

All right, from my end, it's taking the— we've talked about omnichannel in the past, but it's really looking at where are your customers actually hanging out? So for example, you know, for us, let's say on the marketing side, we know our people hang out on LinkedIn. They hang out— there's people hanging out on YouTube right now. There's people that hang out on Twitter too. So taking an omnichannel approach, but not just posting, you know, just taking, using like a social media tool and like blasting to multiple different channels. It's actually posting natively, right? So sure, we're live right now, but you know, when we go live, it's actually native to both of these platforms. It's fine, right? But when you tweet something, people can tell, especially when you outsource your tweeting. People can tell when you're doing that. When I outsource like my LinkedIn posts, people can tell when that's happening. So when I actually write something, It's like, it's a completely different world, right? Like, especially we had Hannah from my team. She was writing a post on, you know, it was a post on like basically like Asians, right? Like I'm Asian. Like, so that piece of content we had was related to Asians. She completely cannot relate to that, right? So it's really very difficult for her to do that. Is she Asian? No, she's not.

Okay, so that's probably why.

Yeah, exactly. So you can't expect people to understand kind of what's going on in your mind, right? So this is why, you know, the Gary Vees of the world, He actually writes all his Twitter copy and he writes all his Instagram copy. Sure, the other stuff he's not so good at, he has other people helping, right? Like the editing stuff.

Like the blog posts.

Yeah, the blog posts. That's not his strength, right? So figure out like where your customers are hanging out and then where you can go omnichannel and spend that 20 minutes a day, the 30 minutes a day. We started doing that recently and like it's been a world of difference.

Yeah, so those are the 4 things that we want you to focus on in 2020 in the first quarter. First 30 days, so pretty much just January. Make sure you do this, bookmark this podcast episode so you can go back, listen to it right before 2020 starts again. And if you need more help growing next year, check out marketingschool.io/live where you can meet with Eric and I in person and multiple times a year, and we just help your business scale.

Desiree, I will get some ginger tea after this. That's a very good idea. I had some really good green—

Do you have tea? You should try it.

I probably do.

You want me to make you some?

That'd be really cute. No. Oh, I do have that hot water thing. Yeah. Yeah. Can we put the filter— no, can we use the filtered water in the fridge? And then I have some tea somewhere. Yeah. Probably, probably a good idea.

You're like, I haven't used it in a year.

No, I definitely haven't. Okay, so there's some questions for us here. Recently started a media and marketing agency here in Silicon Valley. Wow, okay, great. We help local businesses create content, video, graphics, websites, etc. How should I charge them? I'm currently breaking even. So we have a lot of podcasts on pricing and then agency model. For marketing school, I would just go to marketingschool.io and check it out. What I would say is there's a book called Pricing Creativity and one called Win Without Pitching that's going to teach you how to price. You want to price based on value. You don't want to really price based on hours because then you're trading time for money, right? And maybe when you're starting out, you can certainly do that, but you eventually want to get out from that model because it will kind of keep you trapped.

And when you're starting off, the other thing I want you to do is Don't worry too much about the details. Make sure you ask each customer what their budget is, potential customer, what their budget is before you come up with your pricing. And the reason being is if you don't end up figuring out what their budgets are, you could either massively underquote or overquote. And if they refuse to give you a budget, you know, the pitch I always use when someone's like, hey, we'd love for you to do marketing, I'll be like, hey, what's your budget? They'll be like, oh, I don't know, you know, just come up with a proposal. I'm like, well, We have packages that start in the hundreds of dollars and millions of dollars. And I'm being drastic here, for example, on purpose, because someone's not going to be like, well, yeah, for everything. Well, do you have $1 million to spend? Do you have $500 a month to spend? And when you say, you don't have to give me exact amount, but give me a rough range, it'll allow you to create a proposal within that price range, and you can give them multiple tiers and let them pick.

Cool. Let's cover one on the LinkedIn side and we'll jump into another one. Yeah. My clients—

Should we end live today at 11:30 so we can record the other stuff?

Yeah. We're going to end the live at 24 minutes, FYI. So get in all your questions. The more comments you leave, the better. Jaya asked Neil and Eric, are you using Google Site Kit on your site?

Google what?

Site Kit.

Is that for the fonts and stuff?

No, that's actually, I think it's a WordPress plugin.

I'm not.

And it actually shows you a lot of stuff going on in your dashboard. I actually don't use it. I don't, yeah, it's—

I don't even log into my WordPress.

Yeah, I don't log into my WordPress. I haven't done that in a long time.

I only log into WordPress like a few times a week.

Once I need to add somebody else. I need to add an admin or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Sam. Oh, look! People are doing business in here too. Desiree, good job. Sam, I'd love to chat with you after. Definitely. If I could afford. Okay, Sam says. Well, I mean, Desiree's got that covered. Let's let's look at Brian's. So Brian jump. If I could afford it. Wait. Wait. If I could afford it, would Google be good with me buying all three top spots for my keywords and closing out all the companies?

No, they will not like that. They do not want that. You would have to have 3 different companies, LLCs, or websites. It gets really complicated. And they have other filters in place too, looking at like how pages are very similar and stuff to see, to see and figure out if it's the same person advertising and taking multiple spots. They do not want that. Nor do I think they allow that in their terms of service. Maybe I'm wrong, but. I know they frown upon it.

Let's do it. Okay. Rolling. 3, 2, 1. Is that okay? Yeah. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about when you can and can't outsource with social media.

So let's break that down. And funny enough, we were talking a little bit about this. For all of you guys listening on the podcast that's recorded, we also go live when we record these. So check out for Eric's LinkedIn page, YouTube, Instagram. I think you go live on all of them.

Not Instagram.

Not Instagram, but he goes live on the rest. And we were talking about, you know, the most important thing that you shouldn't outsource is your voice, the message you're putting out, like on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, those little quick blurbs. And the reason being is social media is all about being personable. And when you have someone else create the content for you, like those little blurbs, I'm not saying you can't have other people create your images and videos and help you out with that. But I'm talking about like the messages, the little status updates, the one-liners, those sentences. You can have other people help you with the content, but those little messages, people will know if it's you or not. And Eric has a great example of this. You had one of your colleagues, Named Hannah, create a content piece for you. And she was writing an article on—

Asians.

Being Asian. And she herself is what ethnicity?

She is African American.

And it was really obvious that based on the content—

Oh yeah, it just— it's not coming from the heart. You can tell.

There you go.

Like, if I wrote something about being Indian, like, I totally couldn't resonate. Like, Gujarati or Gujarati, whatever it is. I cannot relate at all. It's— and that again, well, finish your point first before I go into it.

No, but I think you got it. And that's why I was passing it over to you is just make sure you're the one putting out those little quick updates because people relate to it. That's how you build that brand.

Yeah. I think the way you build your brand, especially when I look at LinkedIn or the Twitters, like yesterday I sent out a tweet and I just talked about the lessons I learned from interviewing over 300 entrepreneurs. And I tagged Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz in it and he retweeted it. And that's probably my best performing tweet like ever. So I think there's like, for me, it's like, oh wow, I got 140 likes and like 60 retweets on it, right? Like that's pretty good, right? And the types of people that were retweeting and liking it, like Twitter has pretty affluent people still using it, right? So that's why I love it. But I'm the only one that can really write that story because it's like those are coming from the heart. Those are like what I feel like. Sure, I could tell someone else to do it, but I'd have to like spend the time, explain it to them. I might as well just do it myself. It took me 10 minutes to write that tweet storm. And then I also threw it up on LinkedIn too, right? So I think, you know, that this is why the Gary Vees of the world are— he still controls his Twitter because it's coming from his mouth, his heart. He's still controlling his Instagram, right? So you can tell now, like, my friends, like, when they look at my stuff, I have a good friend of mine. He's always looking at my stuff. He's criticizing every little thing that I do, right? But when he sees me write, he's like, dude, why don't you just keep doing that? Your writing is like 10,000 times than anything else that you do, right? I'm like, okay, so I just kept doing it, but I'm not always going to have a hit. But even though I spent, look, I could come back to it, like just 10 to 20 minutes a day spending on social media. And like, we've gotten some pretty incredible leads from that. And it's not like I'm trying to get leads from it. People just want to do business with people that are, that they end up listening to, right? Because we're building a relationship at scale and we're trying to take this omnichannel approach.

Yeah, another thing is personal photos. you know, everyone on social media—

Oh yeah.

They're trying to figure out how to just put up random images and, you know, whatever it may be. I found that the personal photos performed the best. And I don't know how you outsource that, but like to give you guys an idea, if I put up a quote or any other type of image, I can get anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 likes. If I put up a personal image of me or me and my family, I can usually get somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 likes or hearts or whatever you want to end up calling it. In other words, that's a huge difference. And I'm not educating in any of this stuff. I'm not providing as much value, funny enough, but it does really well. Why? Because people want to see the personal side of you on these social sites, and you can't really outsource that. And don't forget about that.

You know what's interesting too, when I, when I look at like our, um, when I looked at my Instagram, I was looking at the number of people that saved a piece of content and they also shared it as well. Um, it again, it came down to a story that I shared. So maybe we'll talk about storytelling in a little bit. But, um, yeah, I mean, whenever I do that, it's just like, yeah, how can I expect to possibly outsource that? I will say that what tends to work from my side in terms of what we can outsource is when it's like When we're doing like Instagram carousels, as an example. So that is easily just taken from like a video that I've done. And I usually give— I'll usually give like 6 or 7 points that can easily just be like kind of distilled out. And like, these are the 7 points, we're going to make carousels for them. I think that works out well. I think when there's like a kind of set foundation, people can kind of just take that template and roll with it. But I'll say again, like the stuff that we do kind of outsource or we have people helping with, is the video editing portion, right? Noah from our team, you know, helps put together, you know, all the stuff that we have going on with the live right now. Like, that takes time to figure out and takes time to set up, right? So focus on what you're actually good at and focus on where your audience is. And then, you know, you should do much better at social media because, you know, and Neil's talked about this before too. Like, we were— we both previously, we just used Twitter just to broadcast, but realizing now that like, wow, There are really good people that hang out there and there's really good conversations. Using it the right way, like how it's intended to be used, goes a long way.

Yeah, another thing too that I found is you can outsource things like carousels. I got this tactic from Eric during our in-person event. You guys can check that out, marketingschool.io/live if you want to attend the next one. And you can do these carousels on Instagram and a lot of these social sites. Where people just keep going next, next, next, and they're getting more tidbit information and advice. Think of like a how-to blog post, but they're getting bite-sized chunks in like a mini graphic. You can outsource this on places like Fiverr for literally pennies on the dollar. That works really well.

They tried to charge me $10,000 a month for the carousels.

Are you serious?

Yeah.

Dude, like I don't even pay $100 for them.

Dude, that's a good price.

No, I'm saying I don't even pay $100.

Yeah, I'm saying like going up to $100 is pretty good because they might take like 2 or 3 hours to get it done.

Yeah, I think I pay less than like $20.

Okay, that's a really good price.

So, but yeah, I would consider outsourcing that.

Cool. Anything else?

The other thing that I outsource too when it comes to social media is someone checking my social inboxes. If you get a lot of messages, you can be the one who responds, But someone can go through the generic messages and reply with the thanks. I would say—

oh, sorry, I cut you off.

Yeah, no, that's pretty much it. So like, and they'll tell me which ones I need to go through and respond to and which ones are spam. And they'll tell me all the generic ones and they'll just respond to those.

The final thing I'll say from my side is make sure that like we have tools out there. Like we, if you're using like a Hootsuite or Sprout Social or anything to kind of manage your social media, Sprout Social has really good analytics. It wasn't until I started actually looking into it where it's like, it's actually really insightful stuff, like how your analytics are performing. You probably want to have someone looking at how things are going over time to spot trends, right? Because what you're looking for are, hey, look, if this type of post actually starts to work, why don't we just do more of it, right? So if you don't look at the data, you're not gonna be able to get better. So you might— it might be you looking at initially and then kind of calling the shots, but eventually you want to have someone else looking at the data. And then saying, hey, these are the insights. And maybe we should be doing more of this, right? So maybe initially you first and then hand it off. Neil?

That's pretty much it on my end. So I don't have anything else.

Oh, I was giving it to you to close out because I wanted to drink water.

Oh, okay. Well, if you guys want more info, more tips on how you guys can grow, check out marketingschool.io/live. Bye. You're like dripping everywhere.

Yeah.

Is it just hot water?

Yeah, it's just hot water.

You're good then.

Yeah, I might not have tea here. Yeah, I thought I did. Sam, or was it Sam that said that the skipped over comment? Sam, we did not mean to skip over. We just have a lot of comments going going through here. We're just trying to get through.

Let's go find Sam's comment.

Yeah, let's get Sam's comment. There it is.

My client's LinkedIn company page has next to no followers. But he has 10K followers. We want to build up both, switch posting company page. It sounds like your client has 10K followers, but his LinkedIn page has no followers. I would just, we want to build up both. Should he switch to posting on the company page and sharing posts on his personal? Yes, start posting more on the corporate page, share from your personal. Also have other people within the company share messages that the company page is also posting. So if you do it and other people do it, what you'll find is you'll start quickly getting traction to your company page. That's what we did for ours. So you pretty much got it right. The only thing I would add is have your other coworkers do the same.

Desiree was, said, what's one of the best ways to leverage Twitter? I think actually just use it because I mean, the way I looked, I used it in the past.

But use it for its real purpose. Yeah.

Which is, I mean, you're trying to add value, you're trying to engage in conversations with people, right? And people actually do engage. I think, you know what, like for example, like the podcast that we do, we automatically push it from the podcast directly to Twitter, right? Doesn't work that well because people can tell that it's not native. So your engagement rate dips quite a bit when that happens. Yes, let's answer his question. Oh, it's a Neil question. Hey Neil, if I was to grow my personal brand, which platforms are working best for you right now?

LinkedIn and Instagram are working better for me than any other platform right now.

Yeah, the organic reach on LinkedIn is especially crazy.

Especially if you do live.

Yeah, which is what we're doing right now. And then we'll answer one question on the YouTube side and then we got to move on. Neil, do you know coding? How many developers have you hired for your site?

Do I? I do know coding a little bit. I know basic PHP. I can do quite a bit of HTML. Just for the neilpatel.com website, I have one full-time WordPress blogger developer that works for me. As for the Ubersuggest tool, I think I'm at 8 developers right now full-time.

And Super Overdrive, would you guys launch a startup offering digital items all for free in the first 12 months, then start to introduce paid products versus launch? No, I wouldn't. Because you're setting the expectation that people get stuff for free, right? And then, like, I remember what happened with Ramit. He, Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You to Be Rich, for years and years, he just gave stuff away for free, his content away for free, right? Built a good following. And then the moment he offered a $5 ebook, the audience tore him apart because he tried to make money on the $5 ebook, right? So you're going to get people that have different expectations. I think it's right to set expectations out the gate. I think what, even before that though, I would say you want to try to build some type of leverage, some type of brand, some type of audience. And then, or you can just, I mean, obviously you can leverage paid ads, but I don't, I think if you're trying to grow that way, On like, if we're talking about digital kind of courses and things like that, probably not. But if we're talking about like products, like software, we're talking about something different, like which is freemium.

Yeah.

All right, let's do it. Neil, have you celebrated Diwali?

I have.

You know, people tell me to say happy Diwali to you all the time.

Really?

Yeah.

All right, I think we can get in 2 more.

All right. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about 7 ways to skyrocket your LinkedIn engagement. So number 1, number 1 on the LinkedIn engagement side, guess what? We're live right now. Live works really well on LinkedIn. Whenever, you know, what I've seen with these platforms, the Facebooks of the world, the YouTubes of the world, even the LinkedIns of the world, like when they launch a new thing like live, they want to push it really aggressively, right? And LinkedIn to me, when it comes to— and the reason we're talking about LinkedIn is because LinkedIn organic reach is just so amazing right now. So yeah, this live, it gets a leg up.

Number 2, get a lot of comments. So here's what I mean by that. You already have friends, you already have connections on LinkedIn, hit them up, get them to comment on your posts whenever you post. That is one of the easiest ways to skyrocket your engagement and virality. It's the number one thing that they look at. And you can also respond to every single person that leaves a comment, which then increases them to come back and comment again. Just those little things do really well. And you want to make sure the people leaving a comment aren't just leaving like a hey or thanks. They need to leave comments that make people want to like them and upvote them. Because if they do that, that means there's a ton of engagement and that's what makes the content spread more and more.

All right, number 3, start. So you want to start with a, like, almost think of it as your headline. So your first sentence should be captivating, right? So I could be like, oh, this is how, this is how I almost lost everything. This is how the, you know, after the first year of Single Grain, we dropped all the way down to 1 employee, right? You get people with that first, captivate them, and then that'll get them to want to continue to read. And then what you do there is you'll leave, this is very tactical, but you leave 2 to 3 paragraphs of open text. And then that way they can hit see more. Because after that, they're like, oh, I want more, I want more, right? And then your job is to kind of hook them. Hook them with the headline, get them with the story, and then get them to comment.

And LinkedIn's looking— what Eric's trying to say is LinkedIn's looking at how many people are clicking the see more, which then helps with engagement as well. Number 4, a lot of you guys use videos on LinkedIn. Most people do not know this, but there's a little pencil icon. Click the pencil icon when you're uploading a video. Add an SRT file. When you do that, your engagement through video will go through the roof on LinkedIn versus if you don't upload an SRT file.

All right, number 5. Yeah, number 5. All right, number 5, don't forget to tag people too. So if I'm talking about, if I'm talking about Neil, then I'm going to tag Neil, right? Like I think I just sent out a post today. I tagged Howard Marks from StartEngine. When you tag people, excuse me, when you tag people, Naturally, they're at least going to like it. And then there might be more, they might reshare it, they might comment on it. But this is what a lot of people do. They, they, you don't want to make it too clickbaity where it's like, these are the 50 marketers to follow and you tag every single marketer in there. People can kind of see right through that. You want to make sure that you add value in your post. Yeah.

And then number 6, this works really well. I know this may sound bad, create a little social media ring. where you and a group of people all like each other's comments and comment on each other's thing and just reciprocate it. And you'll find that it works really well. And even if you're the same people commenting over and over again, LinkedIn's not really looking at that. You'll still do really well.

Yeah. I think those are called pods, right?

Yeah.

Number 7, kind of in a similar vein, like we use subscribers.com for this, but, or you can use your email list. We basically send them, You can use your email list to promote. It's like, hey, like I just talked about this. You know, the post is going crazy right now. We do it that way. And then a lot of times my friends will send me text messages to kind of, you know, just basically like and comment on something. And I— there's not one time where I haven't done it. And those of you watching this right now, don't text me on this. Yeah, maybe that's like opening up a can of worms. But yeah, I mean, you want to build not just a pod around the LinkedIn area, but like A circle of friends that you have, your list, your subscribers list for notifications. That's how you can kind of skyrocket your engagement.

Cool. Well, that's it for today's episode. If you guys want more hacks, more tips on what's working that other people aren't leveraging, check out marketingschool.io/live. Eric and I give away a ton of great information on the podcast, or at least so we hope, but we give away way better information in person. So check that out. All right, one more.

Yep. Yeah, one more, then we're shutting the live off, right?

Okay.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu, and I'm Neil Patel, and today we are going to talk about the smartest marketing examples that we've seen recently. By the way, before we do that, We will answer one more or two more questions on the live side after this, so stay tuned. And, um, so smartest marketing examples. I'll start first. Um, I don't know if you've seen this, Neil. There's this piece called The Tinder Swindler.

Have you seen it? Mm-mm.

Oh my God, it's amazing. I have to show you too, Noah. Um, so there's this one guy, this— I think he was an Israeli guy, and, um, he went through— he was basically conning a bunch of girls, and then these girls would like eventually like fall in love with him And then they would give him like, you know, $400,000 or $500,000, and he would just disappear on them. It's like, hey, like, I'm in a lot of trouble right now. Business is bad, blah blah blah. And but the most amazing thing about this piece— just Google The Tinder Swindler, and you'll find that it's a very interactive piece. You scroll through it, there's like videos, there's text, there's images, and it's almost like you're following a movie. It's very sequential. It's really good storytelling as you're following it. I'm just like, man, this is, this is the future. It tells you to swipe to continue. I'm just like, like the Tinder swiping style, but like it is really good. And I actually, I stuck through the story the whole way. I couldn't stop. It captivated me.

Yeah. And another really smart example that I've seen of marketing recently, I had a buddy who has a B2C company. They end up selling, what is it like? They end up selling something for women and men who are like, 40+ is my guess. It's a consumer product. And I don't know if this works well for B2B, but it does work well for consumer. They do it where upon their checkout, on their checkout pages, they give options for other nonprofits to donate to. And you can end up donating to whatever foundation like Operation Smile, which clips cleft palates so that way kids can smile properly and little things like that. And what's funny is, Not only are people donating, but their overall conversion rates have gone up.

Cool. Do you know who the company is or are you not revealing it?

They probably don't want me to reveal it.

Okay. All right.

That's why I was trying to think of how to say the product without saying it, because then it gets really obvious.

Got it. So I actually read this blog post recently. This came from contentharmony.com and it just shows different examples of pillar content. What I really liked about that piece was basically, It was custom images. It was like, the images aren't like amazing, but they were quickly drawn out. And I'm like, this is cool. Like, you know, when I think about waitbutwhy.com, like a lot of the stick figure illustrations, like they're very novel. Like it's very him, right? And so if you're able to do that, that's something that sets you apart. It's very shareable. And, you know, I just, the fact that I'm talking about it right now just means that I remember it because it's remarkable.

Yeah. The next one that's really amazing that a lot of people are doing right now is go on Instagram. You'll see Grant Cardone. I saw this, this morning. He's like, want to be a gangster or something like that? And he has an image of him being dressed up as a gangster. And he's just like, text me at this phone number. And Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing some interesting stuff to get people to text him as well. Check out what they're doing. Even they're walking around with like a t-shirt with their phone number on it because they all know that the reach is dying on a lot of these social platforms. So they're making it so that way you opt into their text-based list That way they don't have these spam filters or have to deal with these algorithms crushing their reach.

Yeah. Last one from my side. When I think about what ManyChat is doing from a marketing perspective, I mean, these are features that they have built in now. So they originally focused on Facebook Messenger, but they have SMS in there and they have email in their platform now too. So they're kind of hitting everything across the board. This kind of ties in with Neil's point. I think you can control your email list. You can control like, More, you have a lot of control over like text messaging if you're using like something like community.com. And you do have more or less, unless Facebook decides to ban you, you have control over the Facebook Messenger, right? So, you know, when I think about the social platforms, like reach, like LinkedIn reach is really good right now on organic, but that's going to die, right? TikTok reach is really amazing right now. Who knows what's going to happen with that, right? YouTube organic reach used to be good. Instagram reach used to be really good. And, but now it becomes pay-to-play. It's the same pattern over and over, right? So you kind of have to be able to defend yourself. And how you do that is by controlling the channels that you, you have a lot more influence over.

There's another thing that you can end up doing on Instagram that crushes it. Like it's an easy way to grow your follower count by 30, 40% in less than 30 days without paid ads. So post on Instagram how, you're going to be revealing some tips or whatever you're focusing on. Like, people follow me for marketing advice or business advice. So I'll say, hey, I'm going to post exclusive tips only to my close friends. If you want to be in this, repost this image and make sure you tell people to follow me and join as a close friend. So by doing that, not only are you able to get more people to see your stuff, because when someone's a close friend, they're much more likely to see it, but you also have a ton of people sharing how others should be following you because you're giving some amazing tips and your follower count will just go through the roof.

Actually, you had, you were at that mastermind, the $100 million mastermind with Joel Marion, right?

Yeah.

And the way he grew his Instagram to millions of followers was really off the backbone of contests, right?

Contests work really well. They don't work as well as they used to, but I found that the close friends and posting and making people repost that to join your close friends, Works really well.

Cool. Anything else?

Well, if you guys want more marketing advice, you want to grow your business, you want to get more traffic, crush in the next quarter, check out marketingschool.io/live where you can meet Eric and I in person and we'll personally help you get there.

Cool. All right. So we will answer one question and then we got to go away live. So what do we have here? I think you have a typo. Let's see. Digital Marketer. If you create that I asked earlier, would be would be awesome to know what you have to say on backlinks. How much you guys read and watch educational videos every day? Super overdrive. That's I'll take that one. So I spend at least twenty to thirty minutes a day reading a physical book just because I get to disconnect from technology. Sometimes I do more than that. Educational videos, not as much as that. I mean, I try to read for like, and then combined with the other stuff, like when I read from Pocket and Twitter, I probably end up reading like an hour, an hour and a half a day. But educational videos, if I consume anything at all, it might be like 15 minutes in a day. Neil?

I don't do too many physical books, but I probably read for like 3 hours a day.

Cool. That is it. All right, live, thank you so much. I'm sorry we couldn't get to every single question. Join us for the next time. Hope you enjoy. If you're in the US, have a very happy Thanksgiving.