How to Generate Leads on Autopilot With a Sales-Driven Content Strategy

Good morning, everyone. We're gonna get started in about, let's say, 3, 4 minutes over here while we wait for you all to come in. Hope you all have tried Zoom before. I'm a huge proponent of Zoom for webinars. I've been raving about it for a long time. If you can hear me okay, press the raise hand button right now. I just want to see, make sure that works. And also at the same time, while we wait for other people to join, I'm always curious where you guys coming in from right now. I got sometimes we have people coming in from like Kenya. We have people coming in from Prague, or is it Prague? Whatever. But type in the chat where you're coming from right now. Always curious to see, and we'll get going in about two. 2 minutes. So let's see, we've got Vincent from Kenya, Riju from India, Shenandoah from Atlanta. We got Minnesota here. We got New York. Daniel, I'm actually going to be in New York probably the end of April. We got Mexico. David, I'm actually going to be in Mexico next week. And we got Belgium. Who else we got? Do we have anybody from Toronto, Canada here or Vancouver? Nobody from Canada. But let's see, we got 2 more minutes here. And I guess before we even go through anything, my main point here is to just make sure that you get one key thing to take away. And I'll share my screen in a moment just to make sure that it works for you guys. But If you can just take away one thing, take it to your business, implement it, then this webinar has paid off for you. Great. We got Edmonton. We got somebody from Wales, UK. I'm gonna go grab some water really quick, but we'll start in about 1 to 2 minutes. Sit tight. I advise you get some water too, and I'll be right back. All right, here we go. So I'm going to share my screen really quick. And when you guys can see my screen, press the raise hand button just to make sure that I'm not just talking to you guys. Can you see my screen? Okay. Great. Perfect. All right. So I'm gonna get started. This is also streaming on YouTube, by the way. So if your friends don't have Zoom, tell them to go watch on YouTube, just search YouTube Growth Everywhere, and it's being streamed there as well. So again, we, my main goal here is to give you one key thing to take away and go implement it. Don't try to do everything that I'm talking about here, but just take away one thing. So we're going to talk about how to generate leads on autopilot by making content part of your sales strategy for 2018 and beyond. Just a quick recap. This is me over here. This is my Twitter profile. And my name is Eric Siu. Most of you are coming in from the email list. So you guys aren't cold traffic, so you guys probably know who I am. And, you know, I run a marketing agency called Single Grain. So these are some of the clients that we get to work with. We get to help them with some cool stuff around paid advertising, SEO. And also I have a podcast with my co-host Neil Patel here. This is every single day. So really this webinar is for anybody. You're talking beginner, intermediate, advanced. The fact that Marketing School is out here, this is really for all those kinds of people too. So check out Marketing School. It's every day. Subscribe to it, rate, review, subscribe if you like it. And also I have another one, this podcast I've been doing for about 4 years now. This one's called Growth Everywhere. And I've interviewed over 300 entrepreneurs just to learn about their business, learn about their story, learn about how they grow or grew their business in the first place. So these stories are evergreen. They never change. Check out Growth Everywhere. You can see the photo here is the same one over here. But anyway, moving on. I think the very first thing that we need to establish when we are going about creating content or going about even promoting our content in the very beginning is thinking about traffic temperatures. So this Venn diagram here talks about the different types of traffic temperatures we have. We have cold, we have warm, and we have hot. So what does that mean exactly? What I see even today with Facebook ads or Google, a lot of people are still just trying to drive people to take an action just from people that don't know them, trying to get them to buy something off of Facebook. Doesn't work that way, right? And especially if you're selling a higher dollar, a higher ticket item, let's say you're selling something for $15,000, $25,000, you're not going to be able to get someone to buy because they don't know who you are. They don't know what you're about. They don't know what you do. So it's in your best interest when you first start driving traffic in any way, shape, or form to drive them to a blog post first, drive them to a podcast first, or maybe even drive them to a case study. And then once you drive them there, you're able to retarget them afterwards or get them on your email list. Then you can try to drive them to a webinar. So the reason you're on this webinar right now, all of you are, this is all warm traffic. You're on our email list, or maybe you've been targeted through Facebook ads, for example. This is warm traffic. You guys have at least engaged with the brand. Cold traffic, they don't care who you are. They've never engaged with you. You've never added any value to your life. You know, it's very much give and take. So Cold traffic, again, you're trying to start a relationship up, then you're going to retarget them towards warm traffic. And then with hot traffic, these are the people that have at least spent $1 with you. They have taken out their credit card, they've raised their hand, they've indicated that they're interested in what you have to offer and what you continue, what you are going to continue to offer to them. So the idea here is like, let's say for example, the marketing agency, let's say we start them off with a marketing roadmap or a strategy, for example, that might be a little less money than what you would spend monthly, for example. So after you do the marketing roadmap, you might upsell them on a kind of marketing retainer. After that, you might upsell them on perhaps a marketing kind of a private group, for example, that might be even more money than that. But the idea is that you're sending people up a ladder and you start with traffic temperatures first. A lot of people, when they think about content, it's really, they don't think about the traffic temperatures. You've got to know who you're talking to. You've got to know what the relationship is with you before you think about moving forward. Does that make sense? Okay, great. So because I love podcasting so much, I'm going to give you some numbers around podcasting. And I think it's really important, even though I'm talking about podcasting, most of you are thinking, well, you know, I don't have time for a podcast, or I've never started a podcast before. It's too scary. You don't necessarily have to start a podcast. The reason I'm start— I'm talking about this first is because podcasting is my content foundation. Each and every one of you, you have something that you're good at. So it could be maybe you're just good at video. Maybe you're just good at blogging, for example. It doesn't matter. It just, as long as you have some kind of foundation to work with first, that's how you can build your platform. So it just happens for me that I started building my platform with podcasting. And yes, I did blog before that, but podcasting is what helped me, helped take me to the next level. So you can see here, I mean, this one, This podcast, this is Marketing School right now. And by this time right now, we were over 9 million downloads. And you can see right here, yes, I mean, we started it recently. As of this screenshot, it reached 1.3 million downloads pretty quickly. And well, I guess this is Growth Everywhere. And this is Marketing School down here, 8.6 million. Now it's over 9 million. So collectively across my podcast, over 10 million downloads, which is not bad. And it's continuing to grow over time. Now, what I want to bring your attention to is the fact that it just, it wasn't always sunshine and flowers. So the story I can share with you here is when I first started the Growth Everywhere podcast, this is 4 years ago, I was spending 6 hours a week on it. So I was doing the editing. I was doing the reach-outs for the people. I was doing the publishing. I was doing the writing as well. I think I might've said the writing already. But I was doing all the work, all the heavy lifting. I was getting rejected a lot by people in the beginning as well, because a lot of people don't want to talk to somebody that they don't know. But I did manage, you know, through sheer persistence to get a couple of good initial guests. I think my very first guest was Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. And then I think number 2 was Rand Fishkin from Moz. He's no longer at Moz now, by the way. But after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads. So let me do the math real quick. So I'm spending 6 hours a week times 52. That's 312 hours. That's basically 13 days of my life gone. And I was only getting 9 downloads a day. So the data tells you there that you should probably give up. But the reason I kept going was because people were tweeting at me. They were sending me emails telling me how much my podcast has changed their life and they don't know why I'm not getting more downloads. So, okay. Kept me going a little bit. That was, you know, the, the unsolicited responses was great. I went for another year, 6 hours every single week. And after that second year, I was only getting 30 downloads a day. That's all I had to show for it, 30 downloads a day. So by that time, I should probably give up, right? But the reason I kept going was because people kept sending me those emails. And the fact of the matter is, because I was getting to interview world-class people that otherwise, otherwise wouldn't be able to talk with, well, That was free education for me. So to me, it was worth it. Downloads or not doesn't matter to me. I got to learn a lot. I got a lot of business value out of it, and I got to build some long-term friendships from it. So why, why am I trying to go down this podcast train? Well, let's look at these numbers. In 2008, podcast downloads were about 9% of the total population. Okay. In 2016, jumped up to 21%. Actually, I should update this graph because in 2017 it jumped up even more. I believe it's at 28% now. So it's growing. It's not the hockey stick growth that you typically would see with like a tech startup, for example, but it's long sustainable growth. I like boring growth. I like boring companies because it's just going to continue to grow over time. People need this stuff. People, people need, you know, they listen to radio in the past, but now they're starting to listen to podcasts. People like listening to other People that have remarkable stories to listen to. And don't think that just because you're listening to this, maybe you're starting out right now, you don't have something remarkable to talk about. I think every single person has something remarkable to talk about. I think, you know, over time you're going to figure it out. Yes, you're going to suck in the beginning. I think I sucked for the first year. You're going to get better over time. That's just how it is. So about 1/3 of Americans, and I know a lot of you aren't from America right now, but, you know, these are some numbers from America. About 1/3 of Americans now say they have listened to a podcast. So 36%. And this is the podcast host that I use in 2015, 3.3 billion downloads. I should probably get an upgrade of this one as well. This 3.3 billion downloads just on Libsyn, which is again, the host that I use, probably a lot higher now. You can see it's kind of, it's, it's again, it's slow sustainable growth. We're not talking hockey stick, but just going up into the right, which is fine. Now with podcasting, I want to give you something that is actionable that you can do. So this guy's podcast, this is Russell Brunson, by the way, has a really good book on marketing funnels. It's called, I believe it's called DotCom Secrets. Check out that book. We have some of our team members read it, but his podcast, which is now named Marketing Secrets. Now what this guy did, Russell Brunson runs a company called ClickFunnels. He drove a ton of Facebook traffic towards this offer. You can see right here, this is basically an MP3 stick with a bunch of his podcasts. On there. The offer was you come to that landing page, you're able to get that MP3 stick. All you have to do, you can get it for free. You just have to pay $9 for shipping. Okay. Seems like a good deal. Now what Russell was able to do was he was able to, well, upsell people the transcripts. So let's say you, you say you want to buy, you pay for the offer, the $9 for shipping. Right after that, there's an offer, $37 for transcripts. Right after that, there's a one-time offer for one of his courses, for example. And then after that, you're on his email list. You are going to buy, perhaps you're going to buy his mastermind, which is $25,000, or you'd buy other stuff that's in there. Now, the idea with Facebook traffic, a lot of people, and Neil and I have talked about this on our podcast, is, you know, 7-figure businesses, they tend to think about, well, you know, how do we make money on our initial ad spend? Okay. Whereas 8 to 9-figure plus businesses, they think about, okay, they're probably going to lose money, on the front end and they're happy making money on the backend. So let's put it this way. Microsoft might spend a ton of money to acquire a customer initially, maybe $20,000, $40,000, $50,000, but they might make $150,000 on that customer over the lifetime of it. Now you're going to do that all day. You just got to know your numbers. Now in Russell's case over here, for every single person that opted in for the free shipping for the MP3 stick over here, He got 5 podcast subscribers and he made $32. He would spend $15 to make $32 on the front end. So out the gate, this campaign was already successful. It skyrocketed him to a top 5 kind of business podcast. And it did so well, in fact, that I think Apple thought he was manipulating their system. And I believe he kind of had to start from scratch again. But he was, I believe he even got up to number 1 at a certain point. But This is just how powerful it is when you use something like podcasts to combine it with paid advertising to build something sustainable for your business in the long term. So again, you don't have to start with podcasts. I'm just using this as an example. And this is just a creative thing that I like to show you. What I recommend if you're going to start a podcast, use Libsyn. Libsyn is the podcast host that I use. It allows me to publish to YouTube, SoundCloud, allows me to publish to Twitter, Spotify, All at the same time. Also the Apple as well. iHeartRadio. It's all there. Just makes your life a lot easier. And it starts at about $10, $20 a month. Okay. So it should be a no-brainer. And I'm showing you right here. This is just where it publishes to. Now, for those of you that actually publish content to your blog, raise your hand right now. I just want to see a good show of hands. How many of you actually publish content to your blog? That's also my excuse to take a drink of water too. So thank you for that. So this is the hub and spoke model. So when we create content, any kind of content at all, podcasts, when we create blog posts, you don't want this. This is like a PR bump. Okay. This is not what's exciting. You get this PR bump and then it kind of just flatlines at the end. You don't invest hundreds or thousands of dollars for a piece of content and just let it sit out like that. Okay, you don't want that. Instead, you want something like this. You want something that will continue to grow over time. You want something that is sustainable. You want something like this. Okay, and I'm going to show you how you can do that. Very simple. This is the hub and spoke model. You can take your phone out, take a screenshot of it. But the idea behind the hub and spoke model is that you are— you're creating a hub page, which is like an overview page, and I'll show you what that looks like in a second. But you have an overview page. And then you have multiple spokes. These can be different chapters that are all internally linking to each other, and they're internally linking to the homepage as well, or the hub page, I should say. The reason you want to do that is because you're making something more comprehensive, and Google can easily see that. When you have something comprehensive, it tends to do well. And I'm going to show you some real-life examples. But the easiest way to put this, for those of you that— maybe I'm dating myself now— but those of you that used to watch Power Rangers, or those of you that used to watch Voltron, for example. The idea is that you take these things. Yeah, sure. You know, they're cute little dinosaurs, but when you combine them together, you get the Megazord, right? So they're nice by themselves, but you make something even stronger. And that's how you're able to rank for a tough keyword. And I'm going to show you what that looks like. Okay. So here's an example right here. If you Google the keyword conversion rate optimization, Qualaroo is right here, number 1. And I'm going to show you, I'm going to prove it to you that they are number 1 or maybe even number 2 right now. But number 1 or number 2, you're probably not going to complain with that. But here's the idea. You have, you have the main hub page, and I'm just showing you the chapters right now. That's what it looks like. It has chapters on what is conversion rate optimization, why is it important, the basics of it. So you have this comprehensive guide instead of just having one blog post. What do you think Google's going to rank higher? It's obviously going to be something that's more comprehensive. So let me stop my share really quick. I'm going to switch over. To my other screen, and you tell me when you can see my screen. And by the way, you guys can ask questions. You can put it in chat. You guys can put questions in the Q&A as well. You got— I think you guys can actually see each other too. So that's cool. Anyway, if you can see my screen now, raise your hand. Cool. Great. So thank you for that. So if I Google conversion rate optimization, Okay, who's number 1? Moz is number 1. Who's number 2? Qualaroo. I'm going to click it. Like, Eric, is this guy like BSing us? No, Eric is not BSing you. Okay, right here. Overview. Here's the hub. And then here are the spokes down here. They kind of changed the design on it. And the reason why I think they dropped to number 2, this is my hypothesis, is because these used to be blog posts and now it's downloadable. Okay, so, um, you know, they kind of pulled the The bait and switch. And I don't think they intended to do that, but from like a search engine perspective, that's why they kind of got dinged a little bit. I'll show you that in a little bit. The other thing, but here, I'm also— this is my podcast co-host right here, Neil Patel. If you Google online marketing, who's number 1? Neil. Who's number 3? Neil. What does number 1 look like? Number 1. By the way, this designer— Neil has a knack for finding good designers. This designer now works at Lyft. Which is one of our clients. But anyway, so online marketing, it's really well designed. That's the first thing. This is the overview. This is the hub page right here. And then we can look at the different chapters. If I look at chapter 1, look, he's got these cute little, you know, whatever things, and it's in-depth. This thing can stand on its own. That's what a hub and spoke model looks like. That's how you can rank number 1 for competitive keywords. Okay. Makes sense. All right. I'm going to look at some of the things you're writing in chat right now. See if there's any questions I can answer. Yep. Sam, we work with Lyft. Also used to work with Uber as well. And Scott is saying, when you use a hub and spoke content strategy, ideally, where should the hub page be located on your website? So good question. I mean, I like putting the hub page, like let's say you're only doing like a couple, maybe 4 or 5. I like putting it in the footer of the homepage at the very least, because then you have the link equity from the homepage. Passing over into these different hub pages over there. Does that make sense? David's question is, how much time does it take Neil to get the first spot on Google? Not long anymore because he's taken over 17 years of doing this. So after you build up your domain authority from a search engine perspective, it's really easy for you to rank whatever you want for the niche that you're related to. So if you, you know, you look at a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can see he ranks not only for like online marketing, But, you know, top 5 for SEO, for example. And even for our blog too, we rank for a lot of different keywords like marketing funnel or like podcast advertising. It's because Google sees our site as an authority in the marketing space. And that's how you do it. The way you can get there is start with the hub and spoke model. James' question is, hub and spoke, is that— is this equal to content pillars or clusters on HubSpot or Google? Yes, it absolutely is. It's just semantics. Okay, so keep asking your questions. I'm going to come back to your questions in a little bit. But before I switch my screen again, I'm going to start a poll for you guys. So I'm gonna launch the poll right now, and I'm going to keep it open for 30 seconds. So what was your business revenue in 2017? You got 25 seconds to answer, and I'm going to take a drink of water. I'm going to end it in 10 seconds and extend a little more because I know our engagement rate here, 56%, is not that good. I know we can do better. So if we can get to 60%, Get to 60%, then I'll end the poll. There we go. Cool, guys. I'm going to share this with you. So 62% of us are under $1 million, 22% are $1 to $5 million, and then 11— or let's just say 17% are above $5 million. So I'm going to stop sharing that. And now I'm going to switch back. Uh, Reggie just asked, how do you do— how much would it cost to get an article written and designed like the way Neil Patel had it set up? If you listen to my Growth Everywhere interview with him about 3 years ago, or maybe even, yeah, I think, I think 3 years ago. Yeah. So 3 years ago, he talks about how he spends $30,000 on these guys and gives them away for free. Neil's all about that. Now he's buying tools and giving them away for free. Okay. So I'm gonna switch my screen. Coming back. If you guys can see my screen again, raise your hand. Thank you, Scott. Scott, by the way, everyone, Scott Colnutt is on this webinar. He is the guy that supplies us a lot of topic ideas for the Marketing School Podcast. Because Neil and I, sometimes when we're recording, we struggle to come up with ideas because he's traveling a lot. I'm traveling a lot. So if you guys have ideas, if you listen to Marketing School moving forward, we are going to have a page where you can submit your ideas there. And we would really appreciate that. All right. So next step, the secret to maximizing your content. So those of us that are publishing content right now, but how do we make the most of it, right? I'm going to give you a framework that you can follow to help you grow. So those of you that are interested in the framework, well, get ready to take your phone out and take a screenshot. So the example I like to use here is the Abraham Lincoln post on Wikipedia. Now Abraham Lincoln, it's not that I really like Abraham Lincoln. I think he's a great guy. You know, learned a lot about him in history in high school, but Abraham Lincoln right here. This— the reason why Wikipedia does so well, part of the reason why they do so well is because take a look at this. In 2007, 13,000 words on that very specific topic. 2011, 18,000 words. 2014, 20,000 words. In 2017, 24,000 words. So the basic concept there is that they are Because Wikipedia has this flywheel where people are continuing to kind of upgrade content and they're adding to it, I'm going to show you a repurposing framework. But if you look at this post right here, this one on 10 companies with the best digital marketing campaigns, well, all we did was we basically upgraded it. Originally in 2006, this post— 2006— 2016, this was getting about 731 visits a month. Now in 2017, after we upgraded it, It jumped up to 2,800 visits per month, which is not bad. That's a 4x increase, right? So how many of you would actually take a 4x increase on the content you have? Raise your hand right now. Right. It's good, right? It's good results. Like we don't necessarily have to write new content all the time. Okay. Now in, in 2018, this jumped up to 5,400, 7.25x increase. So it's the gift that keeps on giving. Every time we upgrade a piece of content, it's just going to keep getting better over time. We don't necessarily need to get on the hamster wheel of writing new content all the time, spending hundreds, thousands of dollars. And the analogy I always use is like, you don't go buy a car and you drive it for one week. You make the most of it. How do you make the most of what you have already? And even more kind of extreme or crude example is you don't get in a relationship or you don't even have a, um, it's the same thing. Like you don't have children just to like, okay, I'm done with the, done with the child a year into it. Same thing with pets as well, right? It's not how it works. So, you know, sometimes I get questions. Last year, I remember getting a question that was amazing from someone on my team. And the question was like, why are we spending all this money on content marketing? Like, what's the ROI of content marketing? Well, if you have to prove the ROI of content marketing to your stakeholders, it's very simple. For us right here, we pull open Google Analytics. And for us as a services company, were interested in free consultations. So guess what? That post right there, that drove 6 free consultations in 1 month. Not bad because a consultation is worth, let's say, $500 for us. So that's $3,000 in value right there. You want to try to quantify something, use Google Analytics, use data to back you up. And I even took it one step further. I showed all the clientele that we have, like the Ubers, Amazons, Lyfts of the world. That's all from inbound. That's all That's, that's all from content, right? What's the ROI of content? And even like, even if you're going out speaking, even me doing this webinar right now, that's content. Even going out there networking, building relationships, that's content. So don't tell me there's no ROI on content. Like I'm getting kind of angry right now, but that's how it is. Like that's the ROI of content marketing. Yes, it takes a long time, but anything good takes time, just like anything with business. So again, if you need to prove to stakeholders, like, you know, We had someone from our team just kind of write this all out. It's like, okay, we upgraded. What's the before and after? Okay, so we changed it. Okay, 23% jump, 286% jump, but it's all green across the board. Like, when does this fail? This is foolproof. Everyone should be doing this. All right, so here's the framework. Are you guys ready? Take your phones out. It's almost as if I'm doing a live talk right now. Thanks, Derek, for raising your hand. Thanks for participating. But here's the content reuse workflow. Okay. This is from Aleyda Solis, Great International SEO. This is very simple. You just take— I almost want to just print this out. And Yue from my team is actually watching this right now. Maybe Yue, we should just print this out and just plaster it on the wall in the office. Is this topic covered by existing content? Very simple. Okay. You go down, you look at the top right first, you've written something. Is it outdated? Okay. Maybe something on Abraham Lincoln was outdated. Maybe somebody just updated it. Wikipedia has its users update. If not, move to the next phase. Is it incomplete? Can we make it a little more accurate, relevant, or useful? If so, let's go ahead and expand it. Okay. And in some cases, like some of the topics we have on our blog, we have on our YouTube channel too. So maybe we can publish a YouTube video on the blog as well. And that's going to increase the time on site. Or another example is we just recently started using Amazon Polly, which will basically read out the blog post for you guys. Very easy to implement. We put it on our site. So that's kind of a way of expanding. And our dwell time on the site went up. And that is a factor for SEO. You got to increase your dwell time. Okay. So let's say you've expanded it. Great. Move on to the next one. Can this be covered in a blog post? Or, okay, let's say it's a video, right? Video. Can you convert it to a blog post? Can you convert it to a podcast? Can you convert it to a webinar? Can you convert it to a social media post? Okay. Let's say you maximize that. Move on to the next one. Can you curate it somewhere else? Can you move it somewhere else too? Can you, can you, can you use this as a syndication piece or maybe even use the piece you have and guest post? But basically this is making the most of what you have already. Does that make sense? Okay. Now, before we go on, I think we actually have another poll for you. So I'm going to launch this poll and get a drink of water really quick. You guys have 40 seconds this time. What's your biggest marketing challenge right now? And you can select multiple choices. Let's try to get this to 60%, guys. 54%. We just need like, what, 2 more, 3 more? There we go. All right, here we go. Cool. So it seems like the biggest marketing challenge here by far is lead generation. Okay. Number 2 is around SEO. Number 2, or actually no, tied for number 2 is content marketing and SEO. Well, cool. I have a goodie to show you guys in a little bit. Upselling. This is so interesting. A combination of these. Geez, I didn't know we had so many. Here, let me share the results with you guys so you can see it. I had no idea that we had all these different options over here, but that's cool. Maybe we should pare it down a little bit next time, but that's what it looks like. Okay. All right, moving on, moving on, moving on. This is another way of expanding content. For Marketing School, we've done over 600 episodes now. We have one every single day. Why in the world would we not have people writing show notes? Why would we not take the transcriptions out just to feed it to search engines? And this is what we did with marketingschool.io. If you go to marketingschool.io, it looks a lot better than this now. This is actually our very first podcast graphic. And yeah, it's very simple. I mean, we have a show notes guy, the show notes will be written, and then we use a podcast player called the Smart Passive Player. You can see it right here. And yeah, it's been great. And when we put it up on marketschool.io, we didn't build any links at all, just pure content. And that site gets about 5,000 visits a month right now, which is not bad. But we're thinking about it. It's like, okay, well, it's a brand new website. It has no links. It has no authority. How can we do even more with this kind of content? So what we did was Single Grain has a much higher domain authority and it's known as a marketing website. We threw this content over to a site with a higher domain authority and our traffic shot up by 20,000 visits a month. And our traffic is continuing to stack right now. So that's one thing you can do with your content. Highly recommend it. Just again, this is just part of the content reusage framework. Okay. I'm gonna check chat right here to make sure nothing's broken. Uh, Sam, how long is the webinar? The webinar is probably for like another 10, 15 minutes or so. Actually, probably faster than that. Anyway, so LinkedIn, those of you that don't have time to— let's put it this way. Those of you that are doing sales right now, LinkedIn is fantastic because after the Microsoft acquisition, LinkedIn's getting real serious about the social game. And this is something we're looking into a lot over here at Single Grain, which if you follow me on LinkedIn, you can see us posting videos. We're probably going to be posting more status updates and all that. I actually just got off the phone with a friend today and they're just crushing it with LinkedIn. It gets them a ton of different opportunities. So Greta Van Riel right here, she was actually on the Growth Everywhere podcast, 5x startup founder, really successful woman. Look at this post right here. 4,200 likes, 371 comments. And it's just like a short summary. It's like a quick blog post. If you can do stuff like that, if you can be consistent on LinkedIn, keep connecting with people, it's going to work out well for you. Okay. And then she kind of makes fun of people that say LinkedIn gets no reach. Look at this one right here. 101,000 likes, 1,900 comments, 8,000 shares. Who would not like that? This is my friend Ginny over here. She runs a design agency. And she wrote one post, 187,000 views. I'm sorry, not even that. It's 10 million views, 187,000 views on her profile. You're telling me that's not valuable? That is valuable. Okay. So think about it. I mean, what medium makes the most sense for you? I started with podcasts. You don't necessarily have to start with podcasts. Yes, we do a ton of blog posts. We haven't been doing a lot of LinkedIn. Now we're going to jump into LinkedIn, but It's only because we've tried a lot of different things and now we can expand into different areas. If you're just starting out right now, just focus on one and then start to branch out. And you can even listen to a couple of Marketing School episodes on how we talk about how you can get started with content marketing. Now, content marketing, like I mentioned, is me doing a webinar, me speaking at a conference, also networking as well. I like to call it relationship building, but live events like right here, here, here's an image of myself in San Francisco. Funny story, the guy on the very right, the Asian guy in front of me, I used to intern for this guy when I was in college. And the guy in the top left, actually, yeah, the guy in the top left, maybe even, maybe 2 in the top left went to my high school. And then, yeah, I mean, just, it's funny how everything's connected, but you set up dinners with like-minded people. These are all entrepreneurs over here. And let's say you're a salesperson. Maybe you set up dinners with all salespeople. Maybe you're just starting out and you're interested in marketing. Maybe you find people that are interested, but you got to find people that are the same caliber and put the group together. It's not easy to get a— to curate the group. It's not easy to find a location. It's not easy to wrangle people together, but I can guarantee you it's worth it. I can tell you from this dinner alone, got a $200,000 contract. And the thing is with these dinners, you're just trying to help people out. You're not necessarily looking for business. You're there to connect people. You're there to help people out. They're to figure out what their problems are. You're here to build friendships because entrepreneurship, or even just any kind of career, can get lonely. And right here, this is a live event that, uh, that I did with Neil. This is with Marketing School. Okay. We did this and about 150 people showed up. It was great. Again, like, yes, we have, we do Marketing School. Yes, it gets a good amount of downloads every single month, but being able to connect with people, I don't think you're ever going to be able to replace that. And I think, That's the mistake I made when I first started getting into this industry. Oh, I'm not going to have to talk to anybody. I don't need to sell. I just need to learn how to market. But at the end of the day, A, yes, you have to know how to sell. B, it's great to connect with people and that leads to further opportunities down the road. Now, if that's not your MO, if your goal is kind of just, you know, build something online and relax, that's completely fine too, but not my MO. So that's why I do this stuff. So examples, you can do dinners, you can do happy hours, you can throw your own mini conferences. I think we only lost $500 on this event, which is great because that was the first event that we ever threw. And then dinners as well. You know, I used to pay initially, but I realized that people are actually down to pay. You can, you can set that up through Eventbrite. And those of you that are actually interested in how I set up these dinners and what the ROI of these, these kinds of events are like, can you raise your hand? Maybe I'll create some content around this. Okay, cool. Yeah. Every time you guys raise your hand, you give me a chance to drink water. So thank you. So the results, $200,000 contract, referrals to incredible people, long-term friendships. I get more value out of— I don't even— to be honest, it sounds like maybe I'm BSing you, but the $200K contract in the grand scheme of things is worth less than the long-term friendships because the long-term friendships with really impactful people, you don't know where they're going to go. That matters to me more. It just, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, even though, even though maybe I don't come off that way, but it certainly does. And I guess the final piece that I have here for you guys is, you know, if you're publishing content, how long should your content be? So write into chat right now if you have an idea of how long your content should be to rank well on Google. Could be 500 words, 1,000 words, 5,000 words, whatever you think it is, go ahead and write it into chat. And just because you saw the Hub and Spoke pieces out there, Doesn't necessarily mean you need to go that long. Okay. I hope I'm not losing my voice, but, um, let's see. So 1,000, we got 2,000, we got 1,500. The longer the better. 3,000 words here, 2K words. So it's 1,000. Somebody wrote 500 words. So the answer is, let's take a look at the data. You guys are very savvy. Top 3, this was done by SERP IQ a couple of years ago to look at the Google kind of average content length for the top 10 results. Look at the top 3 here, about 2,400. And then this one was done much more recently by our friend Backlinko, about 2,000 words for the top 3 over here. And so yeah, longer form does work. And Neil and I talk about it all the time on Marketing School. We like longer form content because it gives the search engines a chance to capture more long-tail traffic. Now, some people are saying, yeah, you don't know, you don't write long-form for long-form's sake. Totally agree with that. If you don't have that much to say, if you can establish finality, like, you know, I use an app called The Economist Espresso and I read it every morning. And it tells me just like in one paragraph what's going on with news around the world. Doesn't have any links, just makes it very short and to the point. If you can get something done, if you can make your point short, great. You don't necessarily need to expand it really long just to make it long. Don't do that. Think about the experience. But if you can make it long and deliver a great experience, be consistent about it, make it long. Now, the other thing I want to talk about here is using Google Search Console. So Google Search Console is free. And those of you that actually have Google Search Console right now, just, just really quick, raise your hand. Okay, great. So Google Search Console right here, this is free to do. And you log in, you can just go to the You hit clicks, impressions, CTR after you go into the search analytics section, and then make sure you put the radio button on pages and then sort by impressions, you know, top impressions going down. And then what you're looking for is pages that have a high impression count, but a low click-through rate. So you can see number 8, row 8 over here, it has a 0.02% click-through rate. What that means is, again, you're looking for things that are for us over here, maybe anything under 1% CTR that just tells you that you need to write a better title and a better meta description because Google is giving you the impressions. You're showing up in the search result pages, but your click-through rate is poor, which means you are not doing a good job of getting people to actually click through. Does that make sense? So what you can do is you can do an export here. And then, you know, this is free to do. Those of you that are getting maybe 25,000, 50,000+ visits, you know, per month from Google, this is what you want to be doing. It's going to be more helpful. So Google Search Console is great. It's free, but there are some things that are lacking. So that's why we developed a tool called ClickFlow. And I'm going to show you ClickFlow really quick and then we can, you know, hit Q&A and then we will be on our way. So let me stop my share really quick and share the new screen. Here you go. All right. Can you guys see my screen? Raise your hand. Great. So ClickFlow right here, this is a tool. The tagline is basically it helps you grow your organic traffic without the hassle of building more content or more backlinks. So this is what it looks like up here. This is a summary of how the tool has done in the last 3 months. So you can see 28,000 clicks gained. That's on a monthly basis. So basically over an entire year, I've gained about 360,000 clicks. If you annualize it, and then it shows you the CTR increase, so the click-through rate increase, and then how many tests that I ran and how many I actually won. So what that basically means is ClickFlow allows you to test different pages. It allows you to test groups of pages as well. And right here, I ran 23 tests and 18 of them won. And here's the estimated growth, monthly growth, based on my conversion rates and my lead value. So based on the traffic gain, I might gain $14,000 $14,000 per month. That's estimated. Okay, you multiply that over a year, that's how much value you've gotten from the tool. Now, the great thing about ClickFlow too is those of you that don't have time to actually make these, you know, title recommendations or, you know, come up with different ideas and make the changes, we have these expert recommendations over here that you can have teams of SEO people to help make the recommendations. You can just hit get recommendations. And then the experiments is where you really get the value from the tool. So our average CTR is about 1.44%. That means I should set my target threshold above that. I set it to 4%. Then it shows ClickFlow. ClickFlow says I can gain about 12,000 clicks per month, which means about $64,000 in revenue. And then from here, I can see what my high opportunity pages are. So look at this one right here. What is digital marketing? Google's giving me 21,000 impressions a month. I'm at 0.33% right here. If I can get to 4%, I'm going to gain 781 clicks per month. Now you tell me, you pay for this traffic in Google, it's going to be super, super expensive, too expensive. You're almost priced out. Okay. Now, if you want to test this page, you can go ahead and do it. I can test this single URL. Okay. I can run the test. I'm going to show you what that looks like in a second, but you can also test groups of URLs. So let's say you're like, you know, a really large site like Expedia, for example, you want to test thousands of URLs. Guess what? I can put in categories here. I can test different categories. Okay, and I can also add pages manually too. Okay, so those of you that actually think this would be useful for you, raise your hand right now. Okay, great. So, you know, again, this should be really for pages or sites that have, you know, 25,000+ visits a month from Google. But here's an example. I mean, look at this one. We ran a test. It was looking at the past 15 days versus the next 15 days. We changed the title. Here's the original title. Change it right here. Click-through rate shot up 47%, and then the clicks shot up as well. And then the idea here is that you don't have to do things manually anymore. You can see how things are going over time for that specific page. You can also see that every single change that's been— every single test that you ran will be recorded on that page automatically. And you can also see the top 50 keywords as well. Now, if I go back to the website, take a look at the completed again, click. Those of you that are probably wondering about seasonality, what I do about seasonality, you can just hit the restart button as many times as you want. You can restart the test. So anyway, I went really rapid fire today because I literally have a call in about 4 minutes. So I'm going to open it up for questions. But before I do, I am going to, well, I'm going to do a new screen share. And those of you that are interested in ClickFlow, we're in private beta right now. The quote unquote offer for you guys is to go in and check it out. Um, but if you're interested in it, just go to singlegrain.com/demo if you are interested in ClickFlow to see if it's a fit for you. So we're not necessarily letting everybody in right now. Um, it's only for people that we think are, that will actually get value from it. So don't get offended if you're not kind of, you know, if you're not selected, but, um, we're going through a very thorough process and, you know, talking to people. So we got people like, you know, people from like Expedia right now, um, checking out the tool. And a bunch of other companies out there. So I'm going to open up for questions really quick, and I'm going to check the Q&A. David just asked, is there a replay of this and your other webinar slides? You can go ahead and email, let's say, email Yue. It's yue@singlegrain.com. And we'll get you the slides. Scott just asked, how often do you update your content with tweaks? And should you resubmit the page to Google Search Console each time you update it? You can resubmit it if you want. We generally don't do that. For us, we're still working on a cadence, but we do it once a month in terms of, excuse me, updating. Neil just asked, what is most effective or more effective for lead gen, downloadables or blog post content? Both. I mean, you can add content upgrades. I like having the blog post first. That's kind of the foundation and then adding downloadables like eBooks. Maybe even webinars like this would be cool. Andrea just asked, is there a complete guideline given on how to use ClickFlow? If we do decide that the tool is a fit for you, there's a really thorough onboarding process and we will have a customer success manager from our team help you out. Good question. So when you're talking about doing ads and losing money upfront to making more down the line, can you predict ROI to a certain degree of certainty? statistical significance, and do you do that? So large companies like Microsoft, for example, they are going to have data analysts and even, you know, to an extent, even data scientists down the road making these projections and saying, okay, here's your— this is why investors, VCs in software as a service care so much about payback period. Because a payback period, let's say you get paid back on your acquisition costs in like a month or 2. If you spend $100,000 to acquire a customer, that's worth $1 million and you can get paid back in 2 months, you're going to do that all day. So that's on you to figure out, but the really good marketers have that figured out. Let me look at the chat really quick. Derek, any resources for video marketing agencies? I think we, I mean, we, if you search singlegrain.com, we have a bunch of content around kind of video marketing and we rank pretty well. Which platform is good to serve downloadables? I mean, LeadPages is good. You can use LeadPages. We use LeadPages. Newsletters, I don't think are dead. I think just the way people— like, there are some newsletters I look forward to every single week. One is from Heaton Shaw. So I'll write that in here. Let me do that really quick. So Heaton Shaw, and then we got one from Social Capital Snippets. I get that every Sunday, and that's— it's just stuff that is very forward-thinking and helps me make a difference in the work that I do. Anyway, Jay just asked, when is your marketing school lifetime course getting launched? The lifetime deal is actually only for the people that paid for it. Sounds like you did that. I'm actually talking with my team today, so that should be— you'll hear more news about that soon. All right, I gotta jump into my next call, but if you enjoyed this, if you want to check out the tool, go to singlegrain.com/demo. Thank you all. I love you all for giving me your time, and I hope this was helpful. Talk to you later. Bye.