How ONE Piece of Content Can Change EVERYTHING

So then maybe just hit start on the top. There you go. Okay. That's it? That's it. So we gotta hit the play, get it going. Start preview and then go. So we are live. Scroll down to the chat and then push that play. This one? Both of them? Should I pause this one? Okay. Hey guys, uh, we are live. This is our professional setup. Let us know in the chat if you can, uh, if you can See what's going on. If you can hear me right now, just type where you're coming in from, and we will get this show on the road. There's going to be some technical difficulties, perhaps, with this one. It's been a long, hard slog with Noah over here and the team setting everything up. Oh, and the mic works too. The mic works. I have to just look at the mic and talk to the mic. Oh, people are coming in. There we go. Easy Medical Device, good to good to see you. Rosh, good to see you. Coming in from can you stop putting it so close to me? Easy Medical Device from France. It's got to be really late for you right now, so appreciate you joining. Rosh, thank you. Thank you for confirming that. Wait for some more people to come in. How do we see how many people are in here right now? Chat. You could just go participants right there. Cool. All right, great. We got Ursula coming in from Brazil. So, we'll get started in a couple minutes, but this is a video I actually did the other day when I was in Punta Mita, Mexico. And I was just thinking about it, and I was like, man, you know, one piece of content can really change everything. So, I want to talk about that a little more in today's live, and today's really to test this more, test out the mic we have over here. test out the setup, you see the lighting's good, everything's better, you can see the bookshelf a little more, you can see me more, so it's great. Lydia says the sound level is pretty low. Is the sound level okay for y'all, you guys? If I'm closer like this, is the sound a lot better? Tell me yes or no if I'm closer, sound is better, yes or no. Lydia's coming in from San Francisco, so Lydia, I'm actually gonna be in San Jose next week. Hello. From Barcelona, hello as well. We got people coming in from Macedonia. That's Macedonia. That's also great too, guys. If there's any issues at all, there's going to be technical difficulties probably with this this time, just because we're trying to sort out this new light, new camera, new mic, and everything like that. Okay, great. So it sounds like if I'm a little closer, that's better. All right. So guys, let me know. I mean, is there— let me know in the chat. Has there been a scenario where you feel that one piece of content changed everything for you? So That could be from you reading something, it could be from you watching someone speak on stage, it could be you reading a book, for example. Those are just a couple ways, or even teaching, you know, teaching a class. Sometimes when you articulate what you know, that's also a way of kind of, you know, putting content out there. And sometimes when I teach, I get to learn because I articulate my thoughts. So, just let me know in the comments what you think. If there's been a time in your life where something has changed your life, Just from one piece of content, all right? So everyone's like much better when it's closer. Okay, great. So let me see if I can adjust this a little closer. There we go. So we're a little closer now. And by the way, guys, when we do podcasts in the future, we have another mic over here and it's gonna be, you're gonna see Neil and I and maybe some other guests doing podcasts live in this room. Sometimes we'll be standing, sometimes we'll be sitting, you know, sometimes we'll be eating, We'll be eating Goldfish as well. So, I think we have enough people in here so we can probably get started. I actually can't see how many people are in here right now, but okay. So, let's start with my friend Guy Tano. So, my friend Guy Tano, he wrote a blog post on a site called inbound.org. This is years and years and years ago. And it was a really well-written blog post. He was talking about— I think he was talking about SEO, and I was like, man, if I can have this guy write for me, that would be really great, and I'll just pay him. You know, he's really good, he was responsive, he hit deadlines, he knew what he was talking about, and I like to have people like that writing content— excuse me— writing content on my website. And by the way, you guys can see my sunburn, like my skin's peeling right now. Don't worry, I don't have a skin condition. So, anyway, basically what happened was I saw what he wrote on inbound.org, I reached out to him, I said, hey, are you open to doing some freelance work? He said, yes, you know, I always could use some side income. And he basically helped write for the Single Grain blog. And he wrote like an epic case study. This is like 10 different case studies on where we're studying like over 1 million backlinks where we partnered up with Ahrefs, you know, got their API data and were able to produce a really unique, remarkable piece of content. Whenever we do something really unique, well, people tend to reach out to us and we get leads from it. A lot of great things happen. Okay. So when you put in the time, when you put in the effort, You are bound to have something great happen to you. So continuing on with Guy Tano, you're like, okay, what does this have to do with content changing someone's life? So with Guy Tano, what he did was after he did really good work for me, someone, one of my friends reached out to me. He, Max, he ran, he ran a company called Sales Hacker, which sold to Outreach. And he's like, hey, do you know anybody? I'm looking for a VP of marketing. And I said, yeah, I do know someone. And I thought about Gaetano and I introduced, I made the introduction between Gaetano and Max, right? And then eventually Gaetano became the VP of marketing at Sales Hacker. And also at the same time, I also introduced Gaetano to my friend who runs a company called Nextiva. And so my friend is the CMO, he's the co-founder of Nextiva. And at the time it just wasn't the right fit for Gaetano to make the move over to Arizona. And so, you know, Gaetano ends up working as a VP of marketing for a while for Sales Hacker, does a really good job there. And he continues to keep in touch with my other friend who I also made the introduction to. I'm not saying I'm the guy that changes everything. I'm saying literally Gaetano put in the hard work. He did good work in the beginning. So when you do good work like that, you produce one good piece of content, it carried him over to a VP of marketing job, which he never had before. And now he's the director of demand generation for Sales Hacker. for Nextiva. And that's a very big role for him. Nextiva is a company, they're doing, you know, well over $150 million a year right now, and they're scaling. They're one of Arizona's hottest companies. And so that's just one example of how one content changed one person's life because he did good work, someone else discovered him, and he was able to move on from there. I got someone coming in the room now. Are there any issues? No issues. All right, cool. We're good. So, Gaetano was able to parlay that one piece of content into a VP of marketing job, into a director of demand gen. So that's not the only example. If I think about it in another way, my partnership with Neil Patel, our Marketing School podcast partnership, that started with me reading his blog Quick Sprout years and years and years ago. And he was just talking about link blending. And I was like, what is link blending? So I reached out to him, I said, okay, tell me what this link blending thing is. Guy actually responds to me. I keep emailing him for marketing kind of questions. And eventually he's just like, dude, let's just get on the phone. We got on the phone. Eventually, that led to an in-person meeting at Taco Bell. So I first met him at Taco Bell in Orange County, and eventually that led to us doing things. I made introductions to him; he made introductions for me. Got me helped me get a basically like a VP of growth job at Treehouse, and you know I've since then helped him too. We've kind of gone back and forth. I've helped him get speaking gigs for you know healthy five-figure amounts, and it's always been a very symbiotic relationship. And that then led to. The Marketing School Podcast, which last month we basically broke a million— excuse me— a million downloads in a 30-day period, okay? So that happened kind of in reverse. I was consuming someone else's content and then that led to us starting a really good friendship and it went on from there, okay? So I'm curious, in the comments right now, let me know like what is that one piece of content you've seen that's changed your life? I'm gonna answer some questions too. I'm gonna give you some other stories too, just to show you that you might suck at content in the beginning, But as long as you continue down the path and you get better and better over time, you are bound to have good things happen to you. Okay, so let me let me read the comments right now. See what you guys think. Let me know what questions you guys have too. I'm happy to answer some questions too. And as you guys answer, by the way, if you guys want help kind of figuring out how you guys can build that kind of that brand, that content machine, or even just get more clients for yourself, just go to singlegrain.com/live. That's live. Singlegrain.com/live, and then we'll have one of our team reach out to you. All right, so let me see what's going on right here. So let's see, Easy Medical Device says reading Crush It from Gary Vee was a wake-up call. I think that's a really good book. So that's one piece of content that changed your behavior in your life to change who you are. And I'm happy to give some examples from my side too. Ursula says teaching classes, introducing the subject as a story and narrative. Yeah, when you teach something, It certainly changes, you know, when you articulate something, you start to think about things differently, and that leads to you, right, thinking about something perhaps differently than you otherwise would have thought of it. Because sometimes when you read a post and then you don't think about how you might articulate or how you might teach it, then you might only have like a surface-level understanding. But when you go a little deeper, when you teach something, you get to the next level and the next level and the next level, okay? It's a combination of many pieces throughout the years. Yeah, I agree. Each piece is gonna help you level up and get you to the next level. I think that's great. Lara says, your last video with the video game analogy, it made me think about my life. Okay, so guys, my last video, and Lara, that might be the visual or the video that changes everything for you, right? Because in the last video I talked about who do you want to be in your life? Do you want to be the hero of your life or do you want to be the NPC? The NPC, these are the people that are just sitting around complaining about their life all the time. And they just, you know, they blame people, they blame their own, they blame kind of circumstances around them. They blame anybody but themselves for taking action, for taking control, and then becoming the hero of their life, right? Because we all basically start at the same level. You know, some of us might be more fortunate than others, but most of you, like the fact that you're watching this right now, means you have all the power in the world to take control. You take control, take matters into your own hands and make a difference. Okay. So Nelson says, my clicks are not converting to sales. I'm very sorry to hear that. By the way, you can just listen to the Marketing School Podcast or the Growth Everywhere Podcast, or just watch the free videos on this YouTube channel if you want to learn how to convert your clicks to sales. What I will say is, if your clicks are not converting to sales, is the traffic relevant? Are you driving the right traffic, the right people? Are the right people seeing your offer? Or secondly, is your offer even good enough? Does your offer make sense? Is it just like the other offers? Does it truly make you feel like it's remarkable? If it's not that remarkable, maybe that's why your clicks aren't converting to sales. There's a multitude of reasons why your clicks aren't converting to sales. By the way, guys, if you guys have topic ideas for the Marketing School Podcast or for this channel, let us know in the comments too. Let us know what problems you're facing and let us know what piece of content has changed your life. So, I'll tell you what, I got this bookshelf behind me right now. I'm gonna tell you one book that's changed my life behind here, so we can kinda go back and forth, right? This can be like, you know, Uncle Eric's Book Club or something like that, all right? So, Let's see. This book right here is actually required reading for our management team. This book is The Goal, and this book has really changed my life. As a matter of fact, I got following Jeff Bezos. He said that, that he makes his entire management read it. I was like, okay, I'm gonna do the same thing because Jeff Bezos said so. But when I actually read it, I was like, man, this book is really good. This book called The Goal, it's from Eli Goldratt. You can get it on Amazon, and it's about the theory of constraints. Okay, so the idea is this. So what I learned from, and it stuck with me to this day, I don't even need to open this book right now. I'll tell you the goal. I'll just hold it up like this, like an advertisement. So with The Goal, imagine this: you're with a Boy Scout group, or maybe you're doing summer camp and you're hiking with a group of boys or a group of girls. Okay, and so what happens If you have, you're hiking, and at the very end of your group, the very end of the line, you have a fat kid, right? And the fat kid is always the one that's slow, slows everybody down, everybody needs to wait for the fat kid to catch up, right? So, that's the theory of constraints. You're only as strong as your weakest link. So, if your weakest link is dragging you back all the time, guess what you do? You move that weakest link all the way to the front and everybody else pushes that weakest link, or guess what? In business, you get rid of the weakest link too, you can do that too. But there's, there's many different ways to skin a cat. This book has a lot of different fictional stories about it. And I think it's really helpful for people to understand that there are bottlenecks in each and every organization. And it's your job to continually identify the bottlenecks, the constraints, and continually solve them. Because if you don't solve the bottlenecks, you aren't able to move on to a new set of problems. Every new goal that you accomplish means you get a new set of problems, a new set of constraints. You're always going to have constraints no matter what. In any organization, doesn't matter. Okay, so that's what I learned from this book. That's one piece of content has changed how I think about business in general, and really good book. All right, so I will put this down right now, and I want to give you another story. I'm gonna look at the chat real quick. So here's that video. First metric says if you spend a lot of time and money to produce a high quality amount, high quality piece of content, should you promote it in any way that's different than the standard channels such as website, social media, etc.? That's a really good question. Let me have a drink of water. So, here's what I think. I think whenever we spent a lot of time on one piece of content, so that epic guide that took months to complete, or I remember when we did, let's see. Well, let's just use that as an example. So, it was 10 different case studies on how Airbnb backlinks case study, we did a study on Heineken as well, we did a lot of different case studies, right? Yeah. When we sent that out to our email list, We got a lot of responses, we got a lot of downloads because that was something that was remarkable, something worth sharing. So, it's not like we did anything different than our normal promotion, but when we promoted it, because the offer or the product itself was remarkable, it was unique, it was worth people responding and engaging with it, right? This is why in social media people are looking at their engagement rates all the time. So, when you have something like that, you promote it, you're gonna find that your promotion's a lot easier because you put the time and effort into producing something that's remarkable. Okay, promotion always becomes a lot easier when you're able to do something like that. What I will say too, if you're gonna spend a lot of time and effort into, let's say you spend $1,000 on a piece of content, you know, why not spend, you know, a couple hundred dollars or so promoting it on Facebook to top up on traffic? So you might do lookalike audiences, which means the traffic coming to your site is usually gonna be cheaper than trying to go to a completely cold audience, like, you know, targeting nike.com or whatever. That will typically be more expensive. And so, I don't want to get too much into Facebook ads, but just keep in mind, if you have something really good, you're going to have an easier time promoting it because it resonates with more people. You're going to get more engagement from it. You're going to get more shares from it, all right? Currently reading Dan Waldschmidt's Edgy Conversation and Drift's This Won't Scale. And just this morning, Sunit Bhatt's piece about paying attention. Lydia, that's a lot of books. Let us know which one you end up liking the most. I'm curious to know. You can also email me, eric@singlegrain.com. Let's see, so Smart Monkey says, I see lots of books on my shelf. I don't know if you're talking about my shelf or your shelf, but I'd like to know what book you like. It is a great book, read it 12 years ago. And by the way, this type of book is a book that you can reread maybe once every couple years or so, because, you know, sometimes it's a nice healthy reminder. A book called The Leader Who Had No Title by Robin Sharma. Powerful eye-opener for everything I do in my work. I'll have to check that book out. I'll add it to Amazon. I'm kind of in between like a sneeze right now, so I'm like holding it in. Lydia says, considering starting a weekly 30-minute AMA live video about marketing, sales, CRM, customer success suggestions, recommendations. Lydia, I think that's a good idea. You do it like— look, we're doing this live right now. We're engaging. Your watch time goes up way higher, which means your videos are gonna have an easier time kind of showing up. Our subscribers have started to increase. I just like engaging with people. Believe it or not, this actually drives leads for us. So by the way, guys, like the offer that I do, like if you want to learn about the programs that help you increase your traffic or get more clients, just go to singlegrain.com/live. That's L-I-V-E to check it out. So I'm peppering that in every 10, 15 minutes or so. And so I'm constantly making these offers as I'm talking, but you can see like, it's not like a really annoying offer. Like, come buy my stuff, come buy my stuff, right? You can get this upsell over here. You know, you get these goldfish as an upsell too. Right? Who knows? So, my recommendation, Lydia, would be absolutely do it. And I cannot pronounce this name, let's just call it Shiznok. He says, hi Eric, or she says, hi Eric, how long would it take you to get 100 visitors on a blog daily if you would have to start all over, and how would you do it? Okay, that's a good question. I'll answer that and I'll kind of move forward with stories. And guys, continue to ask questions in here, continue to let me know what piece of content you did or you put out or, you know, a book, whatever has changed your life. I'm always curious. We can talk about it a little more and engage because this is a conversation. So, if I were to start a blog from scratch, what I would do is the same thing we do right now. I would write, you know, okay, let's say I'm starting alone. I don't have any resources. I would focus on writing one really good piece of content that might be 3,000, 4,000, maybe 8,000 words. I might spend weeks on it. I might spend 4 to 8 weeks on it. Make sure it's damn good. Make sure I mention a lot of different people in it. If I can, and then what I would do is make sure I promote it to people too. Okay, so the beauty of having like a four to eight thousand word piece is that it will stand as as an evergreen piece, and maybe you only have one of these every single month, and you have to do other stuff like start your business, handle the operations, all that kind of stuff, right? But when you're able to do that every single month, you do it. It's like you know who does a really good really good job? Shiznok. Shiznok, you know every month they got this really good essay. Here's a good example. This guy named Andrew Chen, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, used to work at Uber, well-respected growth guy in Silicon Valley. He has an essay on andrewchen.co, and he's got really good stuff. Every single month, he's got like one super long essay, very thought-provoking. And that, that's what led to his role at Uber. That's what led to his role as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is a leading venture capital organization, right, or firm. So That again, for Andrew, one piece of content, like, you know, having like a partner at Andreessen Horowitz read it. It's like, I think that guy Andrew is smart. I want to hire him. Same thing with Uber. That's how Travis, the original founder, CEO of Uber, ended up hiring him by creating that one piece of content that stands out. It changed. It just changed this guy's perception. He's like, man, I really want to work with this guy. Right. And to be frank, that's what leads to a lot of conversations, like where people were trying to hire me in the past, where like, Hey, look, I really admire what you do around the content side. You know, they want, they want to start a conversation and then eventually that could lead to other roles, which is why, like I tell my parents, you know, my worst case, my worst case scenario in my life right now, and this is not to brag, I'm telling you content can make this difference in your life. My worst case scenario in my life is the best case scenario they would have ever dreamed of for me growing up. Okay. And that's saying a lot because they had high expectations for me. You know, Asian parents, you know, moving over here. They always want you to be a doctor, a lawyer, engineer, whatever. And I'm just telling them like, look, worst case scenario, because I've created content, because I've created so much goodwill, there's no way that I won't be able to, you know, work for somebody else and at least make a good living from it, right? But, you know, I have my aspirations, I have my vision. But when you do that, you create so much leverage that you basically— again, I talk about this, right? I'm just like, man, You really cannot fail in the long term if you do stuff like this. Okay. So, um, I'll give you another example. My buddy. So let's go back to the, to Nextiva. So Nextiva, they had a conference called NextCon, which happened, started 3 years ago. And, uh, Yaniv, who's now a close friend of mine, he's the CMO and co-founder. He reached out to me to speak at the conference. He emailed me, cold emailed me, and he asked me to speak at his conference. So he had Steve Wozniak speaking at his conference and he said, Eric, you know what, we'll take care of the hotel, we'll take care of all this stuff. I'm just like, at this point I just started speaking. So I was like, okay, cool, sounds good. And it's because he follows the podcast. He's like, I really admire your work. And he also followed me since my days at Treehouse, right? And, you know, I was really flattered by that, but it's just like he consumed content that I had out there and that led to a good perception and that led to us starting our relationship. And now he, you know, we're in different groups together. We're going to, we have a mastermind, we're going to Tulum. And in March, right? So one piece of content can create deep relationships. And it's not even like I'm here to get sales. No, it's more like, you know what, we're going to like create this deep bond and business is just like a side effect that comes from it, that stems from it. Right. So hopefully that makes sense. So let's see what else you guys got in here. First Metric says your video quality is great. What brand camera are you using for this live conversation? I'm gonna have to have my team chime in here. Hannah or Yue, maybe ask Noah that's sitting around what camera. It's a Sony A550, maybe. I'm not sure, but maybe they can put it into the comments. And then this mic over here, this is the Heil PR40. Shiznok says, I had one product winner and made $100K in sales from it. Now I'm free and can do what I want, thinking to start a blog. Absolutely do it. Don't give up. You got to go for it for 6 to 12 months or so. You will for sure get 100 visits a month. And before you know it, 10,000 visits a month. And then before you know it, 100,000 visits a month and you're going to go up and up and up. All right. Thank you, Hannah, for putting that in there. So I guess I was way off. Let's see. First Metric says, what are your thoughts on the purpose these days of what should be on a website versus what is, what it is on blogs and content. I'm seeing more websites going very minimalist, lots of white space, et cetera. Actually, when we talk about our blog, we're planning to go more white space too, just because it's more pleasant to read. And we don't want too many distractions. Right now, to be frank, our site looks a little dated. And we do have a little too many distractions. If you go to singlegrain.com, you can see it. And look, if you don't do blog posts, it's going to be— unless you're like an e-commerce site, you're going to have difficulty driving traffic. And I think if you're going to produce content in the beginning, most of us, since we're so resource constrained, You might as well go for high quality versus try to go for, you know, the small, short little 800-word post or so, because everyone does that. That used to be the business model of Demand Media, and you look at them now, I think they shut down or they're doing really poorly. Excuse me. Easy Medical Device says, one piece of content that I created was a free email course. It led to thousands of subscribers. I asked if they want the Maxi course and they all said yes. So validation done for an online course. That's a really good point, Easy Medical Device. If you're going to create any type of course at all, always validate with your audience, see if they're interested and see if they would vote with their money or at least opt in in the beginning. Say, hey, look, if you're interested in this course, you know, we're going to charge $100 for it, but if you put $5 now, we'll give it to you for free. Figure out how you want to structure it, but that's going to help you get validation versus putting in all the work and then finding out that nobody wants it. And here's an idea for you. Like, if you're producing a lot of content already, sometimes just take like, when I look at all the interviews I've done, 300 to 400 people I've talked to on the Growth Everywhere podcast, if I just consolidated that into, and by the way, here's some like real-time feedback, right? Everyone, if I consolidated the top 10 business and marketing takeaways from over 400 entrepreneurs, I got the key takeaways, the key tools. Type yes if you would be interested in getting that as an offer, right? As a free download from me. So just type yes into the chat and we'll see. We'll see if we actually end up doing that. Nelson says, "What is the name of the podcast?" So Growth Everywhere is one of the podcasts, and then the other podcast is called Marketing School. Swiss Davi says, "What type of content would you recommend for someone who is starting from scratch?" Blog posts or YouTube content that inspire, educate, or entertain? Yeah, inspiring, educating, and entertaining. That's kind of what we're doing right now. I like to think that I'm entertaining, but I am somehow. I hope I'm inspiring, but I am educating right now. I'm kind of sharing stories, and then the stories are inspiring too, which is why I like doing these live videos. And you know, kind of making fun of myself, you know, eating goldfish in front of you guys, whatever it is exactly. Hopefully that's a little entertaining for you. Thank you guys for a little validation there. Swiss Dobby asks, what are your best tips to create content that stands out from the noise? So, creating content that stands out from the noise, look, it's simple. If you're starting out in the beginning, you got to have a point of view, right? So, if everyone says, oh, you got to do link building, say, oh, I have this new SEO tactic where I don't need to do link building, okay? Or, or you do things differently than other people. So, the Marketing School Podcast where we just broke a million downloads, You can, like, everyone does this weekly interview podcast where they're just talking to someone else about their story. Boring. Everybody's seen, like, I have an interview podcast too, I've been doing it for 5 years. But everybody does that right now, so how are you different? Well, Marketing School Podcast, you have 2 entrepreneurs who happen to love marketing, Neil and myself. We have different points of view, or POVs, okay? And Neil and I, we're just like, okay, you know what? We're gonna do it every single day. And it's gonna be five to ten minutes. That's it. Actual, to the point. And up to this day, we haven't had any ads on that podcast. Right? Everyone's trying to monetize it. Oh, how do you make money? How do you make money? I'll tell you what. With a million downloads per month, if we ran two ads on it, that podcast alone would make a million dollars. And that's basically all profit per year. Right? And we're not doing that right now because we're playing the long game. That's a story for another time, and I can share that with you later. All right. So da da da. Everyone says yes. Thank you guys for saying yes. I'm gonna answer one more question and I'm gonna give you another story and I'm happy to answer more questions. Okay, so Martin Tolovski, Tolovski, there we go. Tolovski says, long form, one year ago we wrote an article, a detailed tool review and a tutorial of almost 6,000 words, and that was the turning point of the blog. It was unique and raised the quality of leads as well. Martin, thank you so much for sharing that. I think that's huge because that one piece of content, and sure you built up your experience to get to that one piece, but But that one piece, like you're slowly growing, all of a sudden you create that piece, it's like boom, like that one learning right there is like when you start to really move up the hockey stick. And I'm trying to think of like for us, like when was a turning point for us in terms of pieces of content? And here's the other thing to consider. Let's say you're doing a daily marketing podcast like Marketing School, we have people that are at different stages in their life. They're part of different companies. They have different titles. So just because they listen, you might have one person listen to your first episode and that totally changes their life, right? And then you might have someone else that's like, so let's say you have like a, like a college intern or something that listens to your first episode. It completely changes their life because now they can go get a job. We've had people literally say they've gotten full-time jobs where they were unemployable before just from listening to the podcast. Also, we've also gotten clients too where someone has said, you know, over the weekend I listened to 30 episodes or so and I decided why not just reach out to Eric? And, you know, then they start a relationship with me and then they end up working with my agency, Single Grain. So, one piece of content can change everything. But if you keep going, you're constantly consistent with content, you have a cadence to go with, you have a process for it, which maybe another day I'll talk about the process and then I can do a screen share with you. But if you keep going with the process, You're gonna have— you're gonna hit people at the right time with your content because sometimes the content that you produce, it might not be relevant. If I'm talking about like how to make your— how to get an American Express Black Card, right? Not many people can relate with that. And by the way, I don't have one. I'm just saying that that's really hard to relate with. But if I say, hey, how to get your first 100 blog visitors, I think a lot of people can relate with that. So, you create different types of content for different people. It's gonna hit people at the right time. And that's the intention with the content. Again, one piece of content can cause, you know, you to get more freelancing work, can get more client work, it can get you a full-time job, it can start full-blown relationships, it can lead to you traveling around the world. Because of the Growth Everywhere podcast, that changed everything. That led to me doing a webinar. Here's another story for you. I'm gonna have another drink of water. The water's too cold. I'm gonna have a drink of the hot water. All right, so guess what? With the Growth Everywhere podcast, I was like, man, you know what? I'm gonna try doing webinars. So I did a webinar. I did it. I hit my email list, which is pretty small at the time. It's still pretty small. And you know, we had someone from Brazil watching the video. And after I did the webinar, that person from Brazil happened to be an employee of a conference in Brazil, a marketing conference. And she reached out and said, hey, do you want to speak at this conference in Brazil? I said, uh, and this was a long time ago, and I was like, sure, sounds good, right? She's like, you're gonna have to pay for your own flight, okay? And we'll cover your room for one night. So I was like, man, I'm gonna have to fly 14 hours to São Paulo, or São Paulo, however you pronounce it. And 14 hours, okay, I pay for my own flight too. That flight cost me a lot of money, and I spoke for 20 minutes on stage, and then I flew back. So, you might be thinking like, man, Eric, that's pretty stupid. But I'll tell you, that webinar, online webinar I did, flying over to Brazil, changed everything. Because what happened was I actually got to hang out with a couple of US people, some VPs of marketing, and then an event organizer named Vasil. Vasil happened to be an event organizer and he said, hey, you should come speak at my marketing conferences. And that led to me speaking internationally around the world in Paris, London, Germany, Just Amsterdam everywhere. Okay. Again, also in in in another time in Brazil too. So I'm just saying, man, growth everywhere led to the online webinar, led to me speaking for free in Brazil, which was a gamble at the time, but I like gambling, and that led to me speaking around the world now. I got to speak in Dublin, Poland, Ukraine the past year. I'm going to I'm going to Germany this year. I just came back from Putamita, Mexico. And I'm trying to dial back the speaking a little bit, but look, I think Montreal is also in the cards too. So there's a lot of speaking things that happen, but each, you just level up, you get stronger and stronger and stronger. And just one piece of content can lead to you, you know, doing amazing things that you, you're like, you look at other people and like, I can't believe they're doing these things. I don't know how they can do it. You know, they have a brand. It's unfair. Look, you can do the same thing too, because if I can do it, you can do it. All right. I'm going to turn to some questions now, but before I do, If you guys want help, you know, getting more clients, learning how to build your brand, we do have programs out there. You can talk to our team. Just go to singlegrain.com/live. That's L-I-V-E. So we can learn about your needs and then figure out how the best way, the best solution there is out there to help you. And even if we can't, we'll try to point you in the right direction. So let's see. Oh yeah, Thinkific is here. Yeah. By the way, I wore this 2 days in a row. So it shows you how much I like it. And I also wore it to Mexico too. So, I wore this over like my Lululemon stuff. That's how much I like this. All right, let's see what people have said. Sorry, I just slurped in front of the mic. Shiznok, I forgot how to pronounce your name again, but my friend Lisa is building a food blog. Shall she listen to your podcast or look somewhere on your pages? Yeah, listen to the Marketing School Podcast. It's every single day. You can start from the beginning. It's free. And we're also starting a training program for it too that's based on that content. Lydia says, I'm in love with yours and Neil's Marketing School Podcast. I listen to them one after another on power hikes. Thank you so much, Lydia, for being a fan. And always appreciate any feedback. James Isaac says, hey Eric, nice comments. Appreciate you sharing with us. Tim says, if you wrote a long-form blog article to attract Full stack engineers as an agency recruiter, what would you write about? Okay, that's a good question. So think about it this way, and I talk about this with my team. I'll give you an example. My friend Syed, he actually brought up this concept, and it's called the concept of success gaps. So his software is email. It's like email pop-up tool. It helps you collect more emails, right? And he asked his team, he said, "Hey, what is success?" for our product? And his team was like, if they activate and they start paying us, they start using the product, that's success. And Syed said, no, that's product activation. Success is what do our customers need to become successful? They need an email list, they need a website, all right? They need a faster website. There's just a bunch of different things that they need to become successful. And then when they become successful, right, you can create content around that. And then those people will end up needing an email collection tool, to help them collect more emails, right? And that's when his product comes in. So, if you sold plungers, for example, on the internet, like, you know, the little toilet plungers, well, you're not gonna have much to write about. You write a couple things and you're basically done. But if you write about like, if you write about other things around decorating a bathroom, you know, accessories around the bathroom, or even, you know, take it one level higher, you talk about interior design, you go to that level, then it's gonna be a lot different. Issue? Can you repeat the question? Good. Okay. So that's the example of success gaps. I think we're just checking if the camera went off or not. So when you think about recruiters, for example, and you want to attract talent, these engineers, like, what are they interested in? Right? What do they want? What programs do they want? What are they interested in talking about? You can always check. There's always forums out there where people are hanging out. A lot of engineers hang out on Hacker News. So I would just, you know, you can even check Reddit as well. There's a lot of communities or Stack Overflow. There's just a lot of different things you can look at, right? And then from there, you can figure out how you want to craft your content. But I encourage you to not look at it from just the lens of, oh, how can I talk more about my product? How can I only talk about my industry? How can I only talk about my niche? Once you take it a couple levels higher than that, then you're able to produce more content. In the beginning though, you probably want to focus in a little bit, so there's a delicate balance. All right. So Thinkific is here. Tim Coyle says interview some full-stack engineers to find out what their pain points are. Lydia, I think that's great. Very smart. James Isaac says speak from diaphragm so as to not strain your vocal cords. That's a good tip. I don't even know what a diaphragm actually is, but I'm gonna look into that afterwards because I am definitely straining my vocal cords, and I like that you can tell. So thank you for your concern, James. Da da da da da da. So G Fallon says, "Hi Eric, in our market support and laboratory equipment in Argentina, there are only a few competitors, perhaps fifteen, and for certain equipments only five. Any special tips for us? I follow you every day with with Neil." So, when we talk about support and laboratory equipment, that's a little more different, right? Because you have something that's dense. So, when you think about one of our clients, they're in machine tools industry, when they create content, it's dense, it's long form, it might even be in a PDF. So, you just got to think about like how your people are. Like, if people are buying machine tools, their consideration, like their sales cycle is much longer and they have a lot to consider. So, they want to see the data, they want to see images, they want to see stuff usually people don't. Want to go that that in depth in, but it sounds like what you have might might need to be a little more in depth, and you might need to have content around that. Da da da. James Isaac says good courses everyone. We should wear it every day. Oh, I think if it says we wear it every day. Swiss Davi says sharp question. What type of packages do you offer on Simple Grain? So A, it's Single Grain. A lot of people say Simple Grain, so it's all good. Is more related to consultancy or an existing online biz, or can actually support the content production activities as well? So, excuse me, Single Grain, we have a couple different things. So we have our agency, which does paid media work. We have our SEO team, and then we have a video production team. That's what we have. That's what we focus on. We typically focus on technology companies or e-commerce companies. Now, that being said, we also have a software company called ClickFlow, which is SEO A/B testing software. And then we also have our education division, which you guys see us producing so much content. We have individual and corporate training coming out. And yeah, that's basically what we have. And then we also have our agency kind of accelerator program and then our evergreen traffic machine program too. Agency accelerator is more so how to gain more clients. So you can go to singlegrain.com/live to learn more about it. Same thing with the Evergreen Traffic Machine. That was just more so on how to build a lot of traffic. Because look, with one piece of content that compounded to another piece of content, and now our site, we're at about, I want to call it, I think it's about 224,000 visits a month and about 184,000, 185,000 uniques per month. That's thank you to the team. And then the podcast, over a million downloads a month on Marketing School. And then the YouTube channel is growing a lot faster now because we're doing these lives. So, one step at a time, like you don't need to try to do everything at once, but you know, you keep building, keep building, hire a team around you, you're able to leverage and build more, build more, and you're able to, you know, do really cool things. Like, we didn't have this setup before, like I was just doing this through my phone, and I had a blast doing it through my phone. Like, you don't need all the bells and whistles, you don't even need an iPhone, it's just, I have an iPhone, like whatever you want. And then, what you can do, This thing right here. I was using this thing and this thing to broadcast. This is like, I don't, this is cheap. This is on Amazon. It's like, you know, live, what's this called? It says livestream gear. That's what it is. Livestream gear. I just tried to sell you like items on the back over here. So anyway, I forgot what I was talking about. So I'm gonna look at the comments real quick. Swiss Dobby says, can you mention one example of content that you helped create with one of your clients that helped them scale their business? So, okay, here's an example. There is a long-form power page that we did, which is like 10,000 words or so. When you do— the original piece was like 2,000 words, and when we upgraded it, the traffic on that page went up by about 22 or 28x. So that's kind of the difference that you can see when you do stuff like that. And you don't need to hire like an agency to do it. You can do it yourself. Laura asks, Eric, for curiosity, do you know how to code? So, interestingly enough, okay, let's go to one piece of content again because this is the theme of this episode. So, when I worked at Treehouse as their VP of growth, I originally wanted to join because I saw Ryan Carson's interview and he seemed like a very genuine guy. So, Ryan Carson was the CEO of Treehouse, still is. And I saw him interviewing Kevin Rose, who was the guy I admire too, the founder of Digg. And I watched their interview for the entire hour. I'm like, man, this is a guy I can get behind. He's got a mission. He seems like a very genuine guy. And that's how we started working together because I reached out to him. And then at the same time, Neil actually introduced me to him too. And I ended up beating out people that were much older than me, much more experienced than me because they're interviewing like CMO-level people. And you had this, you know, this 25, 26-year-old kid and I was able to get the role. But that's one piece of content that changed everything for my life and my career. career trajectory. And I joined Treehouse because I partly wanted to code too. And when I joined, I didn't have time because I had to do marketing stuff, so I never got to learn. So, Swiss Davi, sounds like I would need to contact you. You can also email me, eric@singlegrain.com. First Metric says, thanks for all the time you take to educate. You're welcome. I am gonna have to learn to speak from the diaphragm because I think I'm losing my voice now. James Isaacs asks, what type of content would you focus on in 2019? What platform? Simple. 2019 is a year of live for me. I just hit this thing over here. So YouTube Live, Instagram Live, and Facebook Live. So right now we're on YouTube Live. We're gonna get it working with Facebook Live simulcast. And then what I'm going to do is I'm probably going to take this little thing out here and do Instagram Live at the same time, look at the comments at the same time. That way I'm live on 3 channels. I'm answering questions. I'm engaging with people. It truly helps everything grow. So anyway, guys, by the way, if you want to learn how to grow your traffic or get more clients, you guys are kind of struggling with that. Check out singlegrain.com/live. You can speak with my team, L-I-V-E, and we can figure out how to solve your problems. See if it's the right fit. If not, we can point you in the right direction, and it should be a helpful call. And that's all I got for you today. I'm definitely gonna go look into how I can find a way to speak better so I don't lose my voice on stage either. And hope you guys have a good weekend, and we will see you later if I find out how to close this thing. So I think