SEO Traffic Is Going To Zero, But The Best Marketers Will Make More Money

If you ask for it.

If you ask for it, correct? Right? And so whether— when I did a podcast with Gary Vee, I gave him the raw recordings. And then when I'm on someone else's podcast, they'll give me the raw recordings. Because if you do the raw recordings, what's going to happen? You're going to get a lot more reach, right? More reach than you would without having the other person take the raw recordings, correct?

In theory, yes, because they'll push it. And then you'll push it. And there's no rules on this, but I believe the common etiquette is when you take the raw recording, you tag them or you mention them in the social posts as well, which helps their podcast or their brand. So it's a win-win in theory.

Exactly. In theory, right? And so I remember when I did it with Gary, he took the interview and he published it to his channel too. And again, you're doing the podcast with the other person because you want to maximize reach, right? And when Neil talks about etiquette, It is kind of, at least in America, the etiquette is that you do that, right? And so recently I did a podcast with someone. It was a very high quality studio. And then I asked her afterwards, hey, could I get the recordings? She said yes. And then I thought there was going to be no issues, right? All that to say is they've kind of reneged on the deal. And then I'm just like, okay, let's just cancel the podcast. And then from that, that's when she got really pissed off and she sent this long book. And all that to say, guys, is if you're looking to do a collaboration with someone, you got to think about the goal at the end of the day. If the goal is to get reach, to drive reach, Then maybe you should do the things that are in your best interest to drive reach. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to handicap it, right? So all that to say is that's what really was grinding my gears before I started the podcast. And I'm waving this Chomps around right now because it was really grinding my gears. So anyway, wanted to start off with that. Neil and I just came back from speaking at Meetup.

Wait, wait, wait. Let's go back to that.

Okay?

Okay. So you recorded the podcast. Did you tell this person beforehand that you wanted the raw recordings?

I told her right after we recorded. I didn't say before.

That's fine. I, I, I think it's common for if you ask, you receive. Did she say no?

No, she said yes.

Okay. But when you emailed asking, did she say no?

In the email, it also said she agreed.

But you didn't get it. So why cancel it?

Because she's— she wanted to do all these other things around it where it's like, oh, we're only— we're going to give you the raws, but you can only publish 3 shorts. And you can only do this. And there's like all these conditions around it. I'm like, dude, man, come on. This is not like we're doing a deal or anything.

Yeah, this is too complex.

Yeah, just stop, man. Like, this is the etiquette. And so I'm like, at this point, look, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to— this is like, this is even a podcast episode for us. This is taking too much rent in my head. And I just like, just cancel it. Let's not do it. Okay. This pisses me off, but I just want everyone else to know that, hey, if you're going to do these collaborations, yes, you should absolutely do them. Just be smart in terms of how you collaborate, please.

So a few lessons for anyone listening is one, you should want to give people the raw recordings because the more people that have it, the more likely more channels and more people are going to post it to most social profiles, which means you'll get more views and branding for yourself. Even if you'll get extra 1,000 views or 10,000 views, something is better than nothing. The second is Never limit people on how many clips they can use. The more clips they take from whatever raw footage you've created, and hopefully they tag you. If they don't tag you or do a collab, but you're still in some of the videos, it's still branding. Again, something is better than nothing. And the more clips they use, the better off you are. Worst case, your podcast is getting branding. And the reason I say these 2 things is I think this person messed up in 2 areas. One is not understanding that giving more raw footage to other people actually benefits them. Do you have a larger social following than them, Eric, or a smaller one?

Yeah.

A larger?

Larger.

So if someone has a larger one, those are the ideal guests you want because that's going to help you grow faster. And again, you would never want to limit someone with a larger following or even a smaller following To post more content related to your podcast or your business because it just helps you grow.

Yep. Here's what I'll say. And so I'm going to give my meta lesson and I'm going to talk about the conference we went to yesterday. And then Neil, you can go do your thing. So what I will say is this, you ultimately want to be a giver, not a taker. Okay? So in this situation, and so the quote here from Zig Ziglar is, if you help people get what they want, you're you're going to get everything that you want, right? The more that you give, the more that you get ultimately. And so that's why in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, what is my give-to-get ratio? I want that to be at least 4 to 1, hopefully even 8 to 1. So every 4 gives that I have or every 8 gives that I have, there's 1 get that I get from it, right? And so oftentimes I'm not really asking for much. I'm trying to, even us doing this podcast right now, we're trying to give as much as possible. And so you don't want to be a taker, right? And in this situation, the biggest lesson for me is that Initially, this person then asked me to be on the podcast. I'm like, okay, don't really know who this person is. And then initially I'd said, hey, can we record at a studio that's near me for convenience? And this person, they go, no, let's go record over here in downtown LA. It was a bit of a— it took me like 50 minutes to get there in the morning and then 50 minutes back. So, okay, first you asked me to get on the podcast, then you asked me to go in traffic. And then when I asked for the recordings, you don't want to give it to me and you make this whole ordeal. And so that's like so many levels of taking. And then even right after I recorded the podcast too, She had asked me, hey, can you make an intro for X, Y, and Z over here? I made that intro, right? So I think it was like 4 takes. And then like, I don't know what I really got out of this. And I was just trying to get the recordings to even promote the thing. So in life in general, this is the life philosophy that ties into all this is you wanna give much more than you take. Because when you do that, people will see you as a giver. If you just take all the time, people can pick that up very quickly.

Yeah.

And that's why I have no interest with working with this person. at all in the future. And we'll just move on from that. So anyway, that's the right way to do these content collabs to maximize views. Just be smart about it. Think about what your goal is ultimately. That's all it is. Give much more than you take. All right? So Neil and I— Neil went to get some water too. That's very nice. Very nice. So yesterday, Neil and I spoke at the Social Commerce Summit in Manhattan Beach. So Stuart, our friend Stuart Johnson threw the event and he's going to be doing a lot more of these. And so That was his inaugural event. Neil, do we want to talk about any lessons or anything that came up from the speech? Anything we learned there? Because it was a quick in and out for us, but maybe there were some things.

There is, yeah. But first off, before we get into lessons, I had a question for you. Did the QR code work well for you at the end?

I don't know. Let me check right now. Did it work for you?

I have no idea, but I've been doing QR codes for years. I don't know when you started doing them. But it's been an amazing strategy for us to collect leads.

So I'll say this. When I did the one at HubSpot last year, oh, I see the bump. Okay. Let me tell you. Okay. So I got 65 subscriptions yesterday. And in the audience, maybe how many people do you think were in the audience? Because it was like a late night session. We did like 6:00 to 8:00 PM or so. How many people do you think were in the session yesterday?

I have no idea.

You got lucky there.

Maybe like 100 and something.

So Neil and I were speaking, right? But then there's only one main screen. And so I was standing in the middle the whole time. And so when I went up to my QR code, so Neil went right after me, right? I was like, okay guys, scan the QR code. But then someone, I didn't realize I was blocking it. And then someone was like, hey, you need to get out of the way. So I had to squat, but then you got the learnings from that. So you probably got more opt-ins, but yeah, 65 opt-ins, which is pretty good from a Yeah, no.

Well, once you started ducking, people started scanning again.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what I would also say when I did the one at HubSpot, so basically Neil and I are talking about when we do these talks at conferences, we'll put the QR code at the end to say, hey, if you want the slides, get access. And neither of us really hard pitch at all. And I would say from the HubSpot one, I think I got like 500 or so from my session.

The question for you, what fields do you ask for when you have people scan the QR code?

I forgot. I think it's— this one, we made it really basic, but I think the HubSpot one, we did ask for revenue size and employee size as well. And then the company URL or the— yeah, it was a— sorry, not company URL, but work email.

Yeah. We usually ask for name, email, work email. I mean, sorry, name, email, phone number, website URL, employee count, revenue numbers, marketing budget, So we're at 7, maybe I'm missing one. You will get a drop-off the more you ask. We just find that the drop-off—

Quality goes up.

The quality goes up and the revenue, we still generate more revenue than when we ask for less because it helps our sales team determine which ones to really double and triple down on and where to spend more time. And the reason I say why, the reason I make this point is You have to remember, yes, a lead costs money, whether it's your time or you're going to a conference or you're paying to speak or you're getting paid to speak, but time is money. Or if you're spending money on ads to get a lead. But people forget that when you have a sales team, it costs you money as well. Sure, you're paying for their salary, but if they're spending time on leads that are irrelevant and are never going to close or that aren't a good fit, You just wasted money as well. So you know you had to keep that in mind. But I would say the the there wasn't really any big learnings for me. I did notice one thing that would probably make you more money. I can tell you offline if you want me to tell you offline. But yeah, I thought overall was a really good event, good crowd. What I do wish some conferences would do, and this conference was great, um, I think it was called, uh, Social Commerce Summit.

Yeah.

Is they put the screen above you. I hate when the screen is behind me because then I have to move back and forth to make sure people can end up seeing everything. Um, and yeah, I did notice that because Eric went first and he was blocking a lot of his slides, not intentionally, there was just no choice because if you're standing on stage and the slides are behind you and the monitor is behind you you have to keep shifting back and forth. And because he went first, I don't think he knew or realized. And I kept walking back and forth to make sure that no matter where people were sitting in the room, they could see the data.

You got the learnings from the evening. So from me going first, you got to learn. Yeah. I'm like, dude, I got the guinea pig. You got the guinea pig off of me because you knew to get away from the QR code and then not to stand in the way. But that's the annoying thing too. When you're speaking at a conference, You don't want to be the one that's moving around all the time because you're going to get people to move their heads like this all the time. So that's why I try to usually just stand in one place, but that wasn't ideal for yesterday. I will say though, I think Stuart and the conference organizers, they did a great job, especially it being an inaugural event. I think there's something to be said that in 120 days he put this together, 700 people applied. And I think it's a good way to put together an inaugural event. He had some amazing people there. I was spending time with the president of I Am 8, which is the David Beckham brand yesterday. So I spent like a good, probably, I probably talked to him for like 30 minutes, an hour or so. Danny, if you're listening to this podcast, Danny's the founder. Had a great conversation with David. It was cool. So yeah, you do meet interesting people and then some people you're going to find time to spend, you're going to be able to go deeper on. And those are the ones that you're actually, you should follow up with afterwards. One thing we did say, Neil, is One thing that AI is not going to take away is community. And I think having that type of community, you're able to network with other people, make friends, and maybe start your own groups and hang out with these people more because it's very hard to find your own community. But nobody's ever— once you have your community, your relationships, AI is not going to be able to take that away. Yeah.

And some quick stats. We generated 5 book calls from the event. So 68 QR code scans, of people filling out the form fields. I think we have like 7 or 8 fields, it's somewhere around there. And out of the 68, 5 booked a call. We only show the call booking to a qualified lead or a lead that we think is qualified. So my guess is if we had 68 and you had 5 out of there, roughly 40% of qualified leads book it. So we had somewhere around—

16.

12.5, 13, or let's call it 12 to 13, usually based on our existing numbers, 12 to 13 companies that are qualified of those 5 booked a call.

Yeah. So Neil, my numbers are we had 4 people book a call, and then one of these was a very large company. I'll just leave it at that, in Asia, and basically 4 out of 65, so 6% were Qualified that booked the call. So we're sharing those numbers.

Similar numbers.

Yeah, very similar. But my offer is different now, Neil. It's more on the implementation side on the AI piece. So it's interesting because yours is still— Neil's slides, just so everyone knows, was very data-focused on e-commerce and I think he did a great job. And then mine was more focused on theory around more so AI implementation and AI change management. So different, but Both help business.

So yeah, but I think you can clean up if you just made one small tweak to your presentation.

Tell the audience, go do it.

Okay. So Eric has a great presentation.

You watched it?

Yeah, I was there in the audience. I was sitting in the back.

Oh, very nice. I was watching yours. I was the guy, you know what's funny? I was the guy that said zero in your very first question.

I know that. So Okay, so Eric's presentation, do you wanna give a context of your presentation and what it is? And then I'll tell you what I would tweak.

Yeah, so the context is a lot of people right now, like Shopify as an example, they're talking about how they have this river that lives in their Slack, right? That's kind of an ambient agent that people can ask questions to and they get things done a lot faster. Jack Dorsey from Block likes to talk about the world brain. We call ours Single Brain. And the whole concept is that you have all your data connectors tied into your Microsoft Teams or Slack. And your team can just speed up things a lot faster in terms of getting the data that they need. Excuse me. And then they can execute a lot faster. So that's kind of the premise of this unified brain, single brain thing.

Okay. And then within there, I'm assuming Eric, he teaches how to end up doing it, right? He talks about quite a bit of theory, but he breaks down some of the ways that you can end up doing this and other cool ways you can use AI. I know you gave an ad creative example as well. The presentation is great. The design is great. I'm assuming you used AI to design it.

You know what's funny? It was, I did the initial AI design using Claude Design and then I handed it off to a designer and she didn't like using the Claude Design piece, but it ended up becoming what it became. And I thought the output was pretty good.

I thought the output was great. I had no real feedback on your design quality other than it was good. I think your stuff is ahead of its time. And what I mean by that is it's really good. Companies should be doing it. They're just not adapting as fast as you are. I'm assuming you would agree with this. I agree with that. Hence you have the Single Brain division. So Single Brain is a spinoff of Single Grain. Call it a sister company or a subdivision of Single Grain. where Eric's marketing agency now helps with AI implementation. When you're giving all the examples and theories, I would have a slide right then and there that breaks down how it was implemented in a company and the results. And if you did it for every section—

Yeah.

I understand that some of it still will go above certain people's heads, right? Some people will get it, some people won't. But if you had a case study for every section showing the real results for different industries, so if it's e-com, focus on the e-com, you get what I mean. If it's a SaaS event, focus on the SaaS case studies. I kid you not, your booked calls would just go through the roof. And the reason being is people want it. They look at it as pie in the sky, like, oh, this is hard. We'll eventually get to it. Or maybe technology will make it easier. And Eric uses the example, which is spot on. He's not a developer, yet as a marketer, he's using AI and look at the results. But if you show the revenue or the conversion lift or the traffic lift or the lead lift or tangible versions for each step, hey, this is what we did with ad creatives and look at the results of before and after with our ROAS. I'm telling you, you would just start getting way more paid gigs from this. I'm not talking about speaking, the actual consulting and revenue side.

We should talk about that for a second, but let me react to that. So Neil's absolutely right. The more case studies you have, the better. The challenge right now, Neil, is all these people are in pilot and they are saying amazing things, but we need to wait a little longer because keep in mind, we've only been doing this for like 2, 3 months or so. And then the pilots just started like a month ago, but the early reactions have been really good. And so what Neil said is important. If you're going to speak or even do a webinar, for example, ideally you're layering in case studies as well, because even if you layer in case studies, like the organizer Stuart was actually concerned that I was going to pay Pitch heavy with my slides, which I don't think I did at all.

No, you didn't pitch at all.

Yeah. So anyway, all that to say is even if you put case studies in there, you're not really pitching, right? And I think that the smart move is you include case studies to build that authority, to build that credibility. And at the end, when you have the QR code too, people might book calls, they might not, but if they scan the QR code, your sales team will then reach out to those people and say, hey, by the way, here are the slides over here. And then you can have your AI come in and say, Oh, here's, by the way, here are the other angles where you can use this stuff too. And I think that should be included in the outreach too. So I think definitely you're right on that. We just don't have the ones that we need yet and those will come. So what did you see right after? I wanted to react to something else. What were we talking about?

For the event?

Yeah, for the event. God, I forgot. I was going to add something to it.

We talked about the presentation behind us and then we talked about the QR code.

Yeah.

And we talked about using case studies in leads to generate more revenue, or case studies and presentations to generate more revenue, which I think, you know, um, yeah, that was really all we talked about so far for the event.

Yeah.

But we're talking about paid. I think you were talking about if we got— if there's— you make money as a speaker or not.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we should talk about that. Yes, thank you. So, um, one thing is, so Neil and I, we've been speaking for a while now, so we do tend to get you For vast majority of cases, we do get paid sometimes. Maybe there's a strategic movement and maybe not so much. But in this case, again, they're very gracious to pay both of us. But I also think that whatever event you're going to choose to speak at, or maybe you're going to do a webinar collaboration, it has to make sense for your business, right? The biggest mistake I made in the past was, and Neil saw me make this mistake, where I would travel for half the year and And I'd go to all these random countries and it'd be really fun, don't get me wrong, but they wouldn't drive customers for me because I would go to Ukraine, which is beautiful by the way. This is before the conflict that they're having right now. I went there and don't get me wrong, I spoke at a tech conference there, but those people weren't going to buy from me in the first place, right? And so keep in mind, if you're going to speak somewhere, you want it to be connected to your business so you can drive leads or whatever it is that you're selling. Yeah.

And I still believe people just get that one wrong in which they focus on events that are potentially paying them instead of generating leads. You know, some of the best events that I've spoken at, I actually had to pay to speak, like literally pay to speak. Now imagine someone giving you $50,000 to speak at a conference and then going the other way, we had to fly to a country. Let's call it business class travels, $10,000, $15,000 right now because of fuel prices. And then you got to pay, call it another $25,000 to speak, plus hotels and miscellaneous and your team, easily you spend $50,000. So imagine going from getting $50,000 plus all expenses being covered to paying $50,000 in total just to show up and speak at an event. And you know what? The ones I pay to speak at are the highest profitable events we've ever done.

Well, give an example of kind of how you mapped it out. So you spent the $50,000, how much do you think you actually got short-term and then long-term from it? Like how much detail can you go into here?

I can go into a lot of details. So let's just use general numbers. Let's say I spend on average $50,000. We will only pay to speak at an event that has our ideal customer profile. And I'm not talking about the There's an event with 1,000 people and then maybe 5, 10% are your ideal customer profile. I'm talking about you pay for event and however many attendees there are, we usually look for big ones where they have like 10,000, 20,000 registrants. So that's how many people show up per day. And the reason I talk about per day is a lot of times event will say we have 50,000 people. And if it is, a 3-day event, they may have, call it 16,500, 17,000 people per day. And to them, they look at that as a 50,000 event conference because they're taking the number of people per day and timesing that by 3. We look at how many total registrations you have. If an event has 20,000, of course not everyone shows up, but the majority usually does by far. And we look for events that we're paying to speak at that have at least a few thousand or at least 1,000, and then we go from there. The second thing is ideal customer profile. We want at least 60 to 70% of the paid attendees or the attendees to be our ideal customer profile. We do understand there may be competitors or other people from other industries at the event or other service providers, but if you can get like 60, 70% of the attendees to be your ideal customer profile, you can usually get the numbers to pan out. The third thing is when we pay to speak, we want it to be a main stage. We don't want it to be an ancillary stage or anything like that. We find it not to do as well. We also don't pay for booths. We find that it's not as effective. The fourth thing is when we speak, we speak with just education, not pitching. And when you educate, we put a QR code at the end. We find that it helps collect enough leads if the talk Talk track is good. And then your goal is to close revenue from it.

Yep.

Because we mainly pick events or we only really pick events that are enterprise that we're paying for, our sales cycle is typically more than a year. For enterprise business, Eric knows this well, when you get a lead, you are only going to get a contract if they're in cycle to hire an agency and then you had to go through procurement and all this kind of stuff. So in essence, when you're paying to speak, they may already be with a competitor. For us, it would be another agency. So you have to wait for them to be out of contract. And enterprise, typically their contracts are multi-year. So call it someone may have a 3-year contract. They're not just going to switch right away. But if we look at the sales cycle and it being more than a year, if I spend $50,000 For an event, we usually over time can generate at least a few million dollars in contractual revenue.

There you have it. So let's just say $1 million for round numbers. You spend $50 grand or so. That's amazing.

We wouldn't do it for $1 million. We look for at least a minimum of $2 million.

Yeah. So, okay. You're looking for a 40x return long-term, like a 1-year return. Yeah.

But the numbers aren't as good because In agency world, and this is more so for everyone listening, Eric already knows this. If you close $1 million, when you're pitching, sometimes you have to travel to go to those, to that company. You got to spend time internally on a lot of pitch prep that costs a lot of money. So if you spent $50 grand just on the lead and you spend another $50 grand to close a million-dollar contract, the margins aren't good if you're only closing $1 million. You kind of need a minimum of $2 to $3 million for the numbers to be pretty good.

Yep.

Anyway, that's an annual recurring revenue. And then of course, hopefully they stay on for 4, 5, 6, 7 years. The numbers get really great there, but in the short run you do eat it.

Yep. So what is the lesson here everyone is one, you have to know who's in your audience, but also you have to know your gross margins as well, right? And then you have to know how the 1-year LTV of these deals look for you. And then you kind of map that out. So would highly recommend that you, Do this with the finance person on your team, or maybe you do this with your finance AI, but then have a finance person verify it. However you want to do it. But that's how you calculate the ROI of speaking at these events or even paying to speak at an event. Now let's talk about this real quick because Neil, we're both going to be at HubSpot again, HubSpot's inbound. And we consider that like a flagship event. When you've spoken at a HubSpot inbound or a web summit, for example, we've both been at the HubSpot. How do we think about that?

From a perspective of ROI generating revenue? I think every type of conference is different. We do have an SMB division. I would say your main focus, maybe the classification is different. What we call SMB, maybe you call mid-market or no. Right. So internally I think we just use different terms, but you would say mid-market, we say SMB.

Let's just go with that.

Yeah. And I would say HubSpot has more of those companies and we look at it as a great place to speak for branding. Right. And a lot of those people at those events switch around companies. A lot of them eventually go to larger companies. And if you did a good job speaking and they get to know you, Eventually they will hire you then. That's how we see conferences like HubSpot. I'm not saying it's a bad event. It is a good event. But we don't look at it as a direct ROI. So every time we go, we just look at it as trying to build a brand versus trying to collect revenue.

Yep. And the way I see it too is from a brand standpoint. So they will, going back to the earlier part of this episode, they will give you the raw files. They will give you the clips, right? And then you can decide what you want to do with those. And Again, I found that at least on X right now, when we put these mid-form horizontal clips for 2 to 3 minutes or so, those do really well. And then if you have— my hope is that when you're going to speak at these things, or even when you're doing webinars, that you're able to clip these out. Even Neil and I doing this right now, we're not in person right now, but these clips where I'm side view looking at Neil like this does pretty well too. Anyway, that's what it is. I think we can switch over to this piece over here. I want to talk about— did you see what the Condé Nast CEO said? He's basically saying you want to act as if SEO is dead. So this is the part that everyone missed about Condé Nast CEO. He's saying that you want to act as if SEO is dead. So I'm going to share my screen right now so you all can see this and we can react to this, Neil. And then I'll go first on this reaction. So look at what he's saying. So this dude, Roger Lynch, who's the CEO of Condé Nast, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, has directed all the company's brands to operate as if Search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says, the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. We took a snapshot of search results from 7 or 8 years ago, and what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the 10 blue links. Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get the sponsored stuff. Each of the last 3 years, we would do our budgets and we put forecasts of search traffic declining because we see the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative. Every year our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told my teams, assume there's no search. You have to have your business plan as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero. We expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic. So here's what I would say first, and then Neil, let's get your thoughts too. So my take on this is that I think it's a smart thing to act as if it was zero, but that doesn't mean you treat it as nothing. Okay? So you still treat it as part of your strategy, right? Because the understanding is AI overviews or LLMs, they're still grounding on these search results. These LLMs still need content from somewhere, whether they're grounding on Google, they're looking at YouTube, they're looking at Wikipedia, they're looking at Reddit, they're looking at TikTok, they're even looking at LinkedIn now. So you still want to have some type of strategy, but what I'm really looking at here is Neil, maybe 10 years ago or so, 15 years ago where companies bet their entire strategy on SEO, those days are gone. Okay? So I think— Oh, I thought you were saying something, but it's actually a car going by. So those days are gone. And I think you need to start thinking about the search everywhere strategy that we've been talking about for the last few years. But I think certainly having no expectations around search traffic, I think that's a helpful mindset to have.

Yeah, I— this Condé Nast example that you're using, I just approved the outline for one of my next presentations and it has that early on in my slide deck.

Nice.

And it breaks down how they try to look at it as single-digit percentile. One caveat I want to give you here is for everyone listening, Condé Nast is a publisher. Their monetization model is very different than Most businesses, right? Most businesses that I know are not publishers. I agree it's really hard for publishers. If you're an e-commerce, you're selling a service or a product or whatever it may be that's non-publishing, I think SEO traffic is still really valuable, but you don't need the views that a publisher does. A publisher typically makes money from ads, so they need the traffic to then go sell ad inventory, typically on a CPM basis. A company, you don't need the traffic, you need the sales. And what I mean by that is if someone does research on your company through an LLM or even Meta's AI or through an AI overview and they see your brand, but they don't click over right away, right? Because typically when people did research in the old search model, Let's say there's 10 blue links. They may click on 5 or 6, decide what site they want to go with, and then they go back to the website. So they clicked on those 5, 6, then they go back to the one where they want to make the purchase. In today's world, if they don't click but they understand about your brand and product and the reviews and the ratings and what others think, and they know they want to go with you, it's okay if you don't get all that traffic, but you should still be able to generate more sales. Not the same amount, not less, You should be able to generate more sales with even less traffic. That's a pattern we're seeing when people are doing their marketing right. So in a non-publisher world, you still need to rely on search traffic, whether it's from an LLM or traditional search engine, but more so you need to make sure that your brand is visible and the sentiment and the context of what your brand or your products or services are stated is very positive. Compared to your competition so that way you get the business and you don't need to just measure traffic. You need to also measure visibility in this new world and sentiment.

Yep. So what I would say, I mean, there's always been talk of the death of SEO. Okay. I think there's always been about adapting. We've said that for as long as this podcast has been going. It's just a matter of adapting because the game board is constantly changing right now. I'm going to go to the other side of this, Neil. Let's go to the death of another channel over here. So this is regarding the death of email, okay? So which is really interesting because email is like, I think when you look at the return on investment, what is it like 36 to 1, 40 to 1 or something like that? So Tomasz Tunguz, who's a popular venture capitalist. So he says, nobody will open Gmail 5 times a day in 5 years. The average knowledge worker receives 121 emails a day. That's one every 4 minutes during work hours. The inbox is a conveyor belt that keeps accelerating. You open Gmail, you read, you decide, you respond one at a time. But the belt doesn't wait, it just moves faster. So obviously today, the way we triage our email, Neil, is we just decide what to read, what not to read. And Neil actually has a, I think you're like an inbox zero freak. I just let it compound. And so I would just say this, you look at this chart over here, AI email architecture is this. You get 121 emails a day per person. You have the AI process over here. So skills and roles, on-device models, workflow triggers. And then maybe the AI will process 115 and decide how to auto-route it or draft responses and handle it for you. Then you have 6 that are high priority. And it's really every day, Neil, when you think about my email inbox or your email inbox, there's only a couple that really matter. Or maybe it can go into the tens or so, tens, twenties, thirties, maybe a little more than that. But you're not necessarily processing 121 important emails a day. And so that's what's interesting to me because email marketing has been so huge. And now that you have the AI processing here, how do you make sure that whatever you're sending is ultra important where you can get past the AI processing? Because that's what it really comes down to from a marketing standpoint. What do you think?

Yeah, I don't see emails being dead. I think they're really valuable, but I do agree in which you may only get 10, 20, 30 emails max a day that are really important that you need to go through, assuming you're a larger organization. If you're getting 100 emails that you have to go through, that's super unproductive of A, your time, and B, that means your management and the other people in your organization aren't able to solve their own problems and they're bringing you into too many things and you probably need some personal change.

It means you're not good enough.

Yeah, like you shouldn't be on that many email threads. Um, but yeah, dude, on a daily basis Do you remember how I used to get over 1,000 emails a day?

Yeah.

No joke, over 1,000 emails a day because of the blog. Now I don't know how many I get. I know we have also filtered emails. So speaking goes to Marina and not me. Support goes to a different email. So a lot of the emails are diverted, but to my inbox, I know I still get more than 100 a day. I do know I get less than 200 a day. It's somewhere within that band. Weekends are less than 100, that I know for sure. But if you're talking about just Monday through Friday, assuming no vacation, somewhere between 100 and 200. On a daily basis, there's not more than, call it like 3 to 5 that I really need to handle that are super important.

Yep.

And there's probably another 10 or 15 that need responses, you know, that I need to really check up on and stuff like that. Now, when I'm giving you this 100 to 200, I'm not including, you know, getting, hey, you know, uh, hey, this is Amazon emailing you, check out this new sale or promo, or this is Legion Athletics, check out this protein powder for sale. I'm not including those in emails. I'm talking about actual work-related emails. But yeah, I, I think people are emailing more than they need to, um, not from a marketing standpoint, but I do believe they're also with email, like people just don't know how to prioritize their time and focus on what's important. And speaking of email, there was a guy that you talked to named Matthew Paulson. I think we both follow him on X.

Matt Paulson, yes.

Matt Paulson. And he had this strategy that has helped him generate, I think Eric mentioned yesterday at the event, what was it? How many millions? He's pretty public about his numbers.

Yeah, he's pretty public. I think in public he said $40 million, $50, $60 million. Let's just say something around that range, $40 to $60 million a year. And he's been running this email list newsletter MarketBeat for quite a while. And he has this concept known as the Make Money Button. And the way the Make Money Button works is if you opt into his investment newsletter, right? They give you tips and things like that. If you click 3 emails within the first 7 days, you get put onto this Make Money Button list. Okay? What the Make Money Button list is, it has your primary offer. So you can have different products and services. So you might get one, here's a product service offering over here because you're very engaged, right? open rate's going to be extremely high. And I implemented this make money button and our open rates on that particular segment is like 85%, Neil. So then it goes one offer, you get another offer 2, 3 days later and another offer, and you could just keep going through all your offers. Now, the way it works is after you go through that sequence, you are on a cooldown for the next 30 days or so, or you can be a little more aggressive and say 21 days. Now, after 30 days or so, You click 3 emails again in 7 days, guess what? You go right back onto the Make Money Button list again and you cycle through. So you should probably be adjusting that segment and updating it every quarter or so because you don't want to burn people out. But the whole idea here is that if he's added a lot of value and clearly you find a lot of value in his list, then he will auto-segment you into this other one and then run you through that. And I think that's been genius. And he said that's made him millions and millions of dollars.

And I'm assuming his Make Money Button messages are different the second time he puts you on, right? Because I'm assuming that if you do the same message over and over, they don't work as well. And I'm assuming it's different offers, different products.

He runs the same. Same.

Yeah. So he doesn't change up any of the copy or anything like that?

I would recommend changing it every quarter or so, but I've ran the same copy over and over because I literally just copied his segment because he put it up on X and it's worked well for us.

So yeah, no, I believe it works. We do something similar on our end in which we have a drip sequence. People go through the drip of our most important emails and we sprinkle educational. And then when we're seeing people engage every week outside of education, we'll pitch them an email for one of our products and consulting. And then the third one is a webinar. So anyone who's engaging, we try to push them on those 3 things Once a week. And we constantly have education. We constantly have pitching every week. We rotate up the webinars, we rotate up the consulting pitch, and we rotate up the product pitch on a weekly basis. And we found it to work well.

Neil, let's talk about this because people talk about the death of email, right? And sure, I think AI filtering is really going to get more aggressive, but if you're constantly focused on education and adding value, and making sure that, okay, yes, you're absolutely teaching, you're sharing numbers, things like that, and you get them interested enough in your other stuff, that's cool, right? Because that is interesting enough where people want to continue to open your stuff. But if you're constantly pitching all the time, then of course you're going to get filtered out. But if they tell their AI, hey, I really like this email list over here from Neil. I really like this email list over here from Eric, because they're constantly providing value, then sure, you can maybe get past the filters, right? So we'll see how this goes. I don't think email's going to die. I think people are so used to using email. I think a lot of these things take a long time to die anyway. So I would just say focus on adding value because I look at Neil's talk yesterday, I look at my talk at this conference. I've never really been a pitch guy. Neil, I don't think you've ever really pitched hard. Whenever I've tried that, that just never worked out well for me. So at least that's what works for us.

I've tried pitching hard. Remember the Agora days?

Yeah, but that didn't really work. That wasn't you.

It wasn't— yeah, sure. I pitched hard for other people, uh, due to partnerships, and it did generate more money from the same emails to the same people than when I didn't pitch hard.

But you also kill a lot of goodwill too.

I, I do believe you kill goodwill. I don't have the exact data on it, but it just Forget the revenue side, it doesn't feel right.

Exactly.

That's what I'm thinking. It doesn't feel right.

Yeah.

Yeah. If it doesn't feel right, it's just like your soul's not in it, your heart and soul's not in it. And then eventually I believe you'll see a revenue decline from it.

Yeah. It doesn't feel right. It also kind of feels exhausting too. So I just like teaching and I like seeing when people have a light bulb moment in their head and they might take whatever they do with it. And sometimes they become customers and they don't, right? But I'm a big fan of, and I mentioned this when you're away for a moment, but the more you give, the more you get. You help others get what you want, you're going to get everything that you want, right? And so it's almost like the goodwill comes back to you. It's like a wake that you leave, a goodwill wake where you're driving a boat or something like that.

Yeah. But if you look at the contrarian viewpoint, and let's keep using Agora as an example, Agora has always pitched hard and they continually do. And they've done it for more than 10 or 15 years or however long they've been in business. Bill Bonner is one of the richest people in the world, right? I think just his real estate portfolio in Baltimore, because he picked up stuff for like a dollar, you know, when the city was just giving it away, and then he had to gentrify the buildings. Um, his real estate portfolio is massive, his castles and all the businesses. When you look at Agora, all the divisions, I don't know what they generate now, but when I used to be closer with some of the people in marketing there Again, they have different divisions. Like they used to have Agora Financial and Stansberry and Money Map Press, and the list goes on and on. They're generating over a billion a year in revenue and maybe some years closer to 2. And the reason I point this out is Eric and I don't pitch hard, but we don't make anywhere near the amount of revenue that Agora makes, right? I don't know Eric's revenue, but I'm pretty sure if you combine his revenue and my revenue, we're much smaller than Agora.

Yeah.

In totality by far. Um, so even though we don't like pitching hard, there's a lot of people who make much more money than we do pitching hard. Uh, we're not saying it's right or wrong. We both just choose not to do it because it just doesn't feel right for us. But for others, it may feel right.

Yeah. If it feels right for you, more power to you, do it. I think you just got to do what's true to you. I think if there's anything we've learned in our, you know, roughly 40 years of, of living kind of around the, the same Time, but you got to do what feels good because it's going to be more long-term. If it doesn't feel good, then you're not going to be able to do it for long-term and it's going to suck the soul out of you. So one thing I want to talk about with email too, by the way, do you want to know how to send 1 million emails for $100 a month? Yes.

Wait, send 1 million emails or have a million contacts? Just to be clear on this.

Send 1 million emails per month. So obviously when you're paying a lot of these different services, it gets pretty expensive when you're sending a million, but I'm going to show you how you can send a million emails per month for $100 or less.

Ready?

Yes.

Okay. I'm ready. I'm actually paying attention to this one.

All right. Well, wow. He admits he doesn't pay attention.

So, all right. No, no, no, no. But like, I'm, when I say I'm paying attention, I always pay attention to Eric. It's more so I'm getting close to my screen because I want to actually see how I can say there's a discount Neil's in.

All right. So yeah, 6 figures a year. Here's how you can send 1 million emails a month for $100.

Okay.

So if you're sending a million emails per month using Postmark, That's $1,206 per month. Okay. $1,206. If you use Resend, it's $650 a month. You SendGrid, $600 a month. Use Cloudflare, $354 a month. If you use Amazon SES, and I don't know what SES means, but it's $100 a month. So SES and Cloudflare are now the cheapest email providers, right? So he's basically saying, hey, look, so Amazon has this, Cloudflare just launches for $354 a month or so. But it's getting cheaper to send emails, which makes a lot of sense because AI does make things deflationary.

So my viewpoint is I'd rather spend, I don't know how much I spend on email, but call it over $100,000 a year, substantially more than that. I'd rather spend 5, 6x this than to take the $100 option. You want to know why?

Stability, reliability?

No, I bet you Amazon is very stable. The problem with email is all about deliverability. It's actually very hard to get your email into someone's inbox. So what I do is I look for email providers that have shared IP addresses and they let me pick which neighborhood I'm going to be on. So think about who the other parties are that are sending emails. Would you agree as marketers, we're probably more aggressive than most businesses, even though we just had a discussion how we don't pitch hard?

Yeah.

Okay. I agree with you on that too. So what I do is I look for a shared IP with people who don't send hard emails at all, and they try to just send educational and they barely pitch anything. Because then when I pitch and I'm harder, yeah, my deliverability is still great because the other people on my block or my IP address Are much cleaner than I am.

Yeah.

I pay extra for that, by the way. So look, I look for that in any email provider that I use.

I think that's a great tactic to use. I would also say this, Neil. I mean, look, levels here is when you think about Cloudflare, they should be, and Amazon, there should be pretty good deliverability. He's like, look, it's all the same, but obviously you have to do your own research here. And then you have other people like Nick Gray, Cloudflare deliverability should be very good in S tier. So I, oh, look, Syed, our friend Syed here. Uh, came in. I think Syed launched something over here. Oh, we should talk about this. So for transactional email, if you guys are interested in trying out SendLayer, I can probably give you a better hookup rate for bulk email. And we are not a reseller of either of those. Oh, that's interesting, right? So I don't even know what SendLayer is. Um, I know, I know. Oh yeah, yeah, look at this. Reliable email deliverability made easy. Look at that.

So anyway, he's an investor. Is he an investor in it?

It's probably in his portfolio, but I think it's, look, that is a big thing. And I do think it's worth, if you're listening to this right now and you're starting out, it's probably worth checking out Cloudflare and Amazon. And then Neil, maybe you can test it on one of your smaller things, but it's interesting to me. Look, we're paying $6,000 a month for 8 million emails on Mailgun. And this guy's like, bro. So anyway, I think before you make the change, yes, look into deliverability. It's not always about price. You want to make sure In my mind, sure, stable, secure, reliable. But in this case, Neil's right, deliverability too. Yeah.

Okay. So check this out. On Eric's screen, you can see how this X post got 2.2 million views. I believe it was 2.2. It's kind of small for me to read.

Yes. Is that correct? 2.2. Yeah.

So we all talk about posting on social media, whether it's X or whether it's LinkedIn. You don't need the follower count to do well. You can just do what Syed did. What Syed did is, and I don't know what his follower count is, but it's probably decent. But what he did is he went on a thread that was really popular and blowing up and left a comment about another product. When he left that comment, how many views does it have or does it show, Eric?

Yeah, it does show. So just so everyone knows, Syed has 106,000 followers on X. And then, so he posted and 1,800 people saw that. That's a lot.

And that's 1,800 potential customers. So you should go and see what threads are really popular in your space and just go and respond. And I don't know why too many people don't do that. It's an easy way to generate more revenue through social. And everyone's like, oh, I don't have the followers. It's not going to work. You don't need any followers. You just need to ride the coattails of other popular threads and leave a response that's helpful. If you notice here, Syed's response, he talked about a product. He talked about how it's a better deal, if I'm not mistaken, than the others, and it's reliable. And it wasn't too aggressive, but it was very relevant. If someone was talking about using AI and how AI is changing the world, and then he's just like, oh, you should check out this email solution, that's too aggressive, right? And that's not related. Syed's not doing that. But the example that Eric shared is a prime example of what people should be doing with social media to just drive more sales if you don't have followers.

So Neil, you know what that's called?

Responding to, participating in the community?

No, it's called reply guy. So a reply guy is someone that just sits on like X or LinkedIn, for example, just replies to relevant posts. So being a reply guy in the beginning when you have no followers, to Neil's point, Will get you a lot of views. And sometimes I would reply to someone and someone's like, oh, this is how I'm using AI. And I think this is a couple months ago when my X account wasn't really doing much. I responded and whenever I replied to someone, I would get 40,000, 50,000, 70,000 views or so. But whenever I posted something from scratch, and this is months ago, I would barely crack 500 views or so. Now it's a different story because I think the algorithm's moving in my favor. And now when I post it, but I had to be that reply guy initially and then I had to be a lot more consistent and then you start to get the reach. And the other thing I'll say too is you don't necessarily need a lot of followers for a lot of views today because the way X works or the way like a TikTok or Instagram Reels or Facebook Reels, they just, they call it, it's not just social media anymore, right? We call it, it's more based on the interest graph, right? And so if you post something really good, it's going to get a lot of views. And it just, followers don't matter nearly as much as they did before. I think even when you look at like a YouTube, like a short, for example, YouTube long form, I think followers still matter a little bit, but not as much as before, right, Neil?

Followers matter very little. So social media has become democratized. It doesn't matter if you have a million followers or 100. You guys have all seen the girl that says, I'm looking for a guy in finance, right? 6'5, blue eyes or something like that that went viral. And then she did a song, I believe with David Guetta. Uh, you guys have all seen the guy who's drinking cranberry juice and longboarding on a skateboard or whatever it's called, a longboard, because his car broke down. And then everyone started buying cranberry juice, and then I believe they bought him a new car or truck, right? What I'm getting at here is these people didn't have a lot of followers, yet they went viral and they got millions of views, if not hundreds of millions of views, and created internet memes and sensations. What happens is if you have content and you put it out there, it doesn't matter if you have 10 followers or 100 followers. What the platforms all do is they show it to a small group of people that they think would be interested. If every single one— I'm giving you extreme example— watched it, liked it, commented, and shared it, they did all 3, then after they showed it to 10 people who do that They'll start showing it to 500 or 1,000. Now you may not get all 1,000 to do that, but if you had 20% like it, share it, comment on it, and watch it 3 times, it starts going viral because the engagement is high and the platform knows that people love that piece of content. So they share it to anyone that they think would be interested. That's how their algorithms typically work.

Yep. I would also say too, I mean, uh, you've been doing this for a very long time, but when you post something and you want Like a YouTube, a new YouTube video, like you'll hit your email list and it does give it a nice initial boost. That goes a long way as well.

I stopped doing that.

So how does it— so it's just pure organic now? Yeah.

So what Eric's talking about is I would publish YouTube videos 3 times a week, and this was before they introduced Shorts. Now I publish YouTube videos daily. Majority are Shorts and my longer form are longer than they used to be. And when I used to publish them, I would send an email blast in the first 24 hours because the way a lot of what YouTube's algorithm works for both the searches, because a lot of YouTube traffic is actually driven not just from people discovering the product in the sidebar or the video on the sidebar, at least for the desktop version, they also discover it by searching on YouTube and then you want to rank. If you do well in the first 24 hours, Your rankings go up, they recommend you more, and your video tends to blow up. So what I would do is I'll take my email list the hour that the video got published and I'll push it out. What ended up happening is, is over time as my email list grew, YouTube believed that me sending an email blast was spamming and they felt like it was bots or I was trying to game the system, right? In theory, I was spamming. using the algorithm to my advantage, but they thought the traffic was fake. And what we saw is they would stop counting the views because they thought it was bot traffic when it was real humans, and it would actually hurt it. So I stopped. When my email list was smaller, it worked well. But when I started blasting out videos to like 2 million people right when I published the video—

Yeah, it's too— you need to do segments.

Yeah, like, oh, this is traffic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, I've never tried it with that. I, I should go back and try it with a much smaller segment of my list, but I'm too lazy.

Yeah, well, I think someone on your team should, but probably you're the only one that has control of your email list still, right?

No, I don't send out my emails. Uh, I do review all of the emails. Yeah, so, so like, check this out, and I'll actually share this on screen. I think this will be interesting for you guys to actually see my workflow. But like, check this out.

Hope you're doing good.

This is from Colin. This is literally yesterday. Here's next week's emails and charts for webinars. All right. I go through every single email and I go and edit them every single week. I get one group of emails coming from the consulting side of the business. The other arm of my business is software. I get another group of emails once a week for the next week for all my product-related emails. And I literally go through every single one for the subject line to the copy to the CTA, and I modify every single one.

Wow. So yeah, in theory—

I don't send them out.

Someone should help you segment just for the hell of it, just to test it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you're right. I should do that. I want to talk about this because we're talking about X right now, and I found this really interesting. The part that everyone misses about the measure of X account can be determined by what it opens for you in terms of real life, in terms of the doors that it opens. Let me share this with you. Really, we can talk about how this applies beyond X as well. Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X, which ironically, you know what's funny? Elon gave him this job to be head of product at X because he's so good at X, because he was so good at posting before. He still is. The value of an X account can be measured by what doors it opens for you in real life. So you look at this, 3.4 million views on this one. And then Gary Tan of Y Combinator is like, it's priceless. Strip mall guy. And you have Nicole Benham here. And then all these other people, it's like, oh my God, it's changed my life. Even your brother here, Dr. Parikh Patel, this guy, he's like 100,000%. This guy over here, your brother, right? So anyway, all that to say, is that I think about this, Neil. I think about, I'm going to share a couple examples and then we can go beyond this. But recently a lot of engineers have taken our Beat Claude challenge. They've all come from X. Okay? We've had an intern recently join us who's amazing and he came from X as well. And he actually applied using X and he wrote a thread. And I think about the people that I'm able to talk to through DM, whether it's popular creators or venture capitalists or entrepreneurs, All that comes through X and it's all because you spend the time to actually create something that actually intrigues someone else in terms of thought-provoking statements that you put out there. And you also get to test your thinking out there when you're on X. You can test whether you're thinking is right or wrong. And for me, I personally like writing a lot and I think you do as well. And so it can be X, it can be LinkedIn, it can be whatever it is that you have. It could be YouTube or whatever. But I do think for me, the way X is able to expand your reach to the right people at the right time and really smart people hanging out, I think it has been immeasurable. So let's talk about X and we can talk about how this applies for everything in social.

Well, first off, did you try pushing it to LinkedIn? And is it mainly X driving the results for your Beat Claude challenge or you just mainly pushed it on X?

I've pushed it to LinkedIn as well. The funny thing is LinkedIn, you have to get in the algorithm's favor. I'm not in favor with that algorithm right now. And so whatever I push to LinkedIn, it gets like 5 or 10 likes, but whatever I push on my X account can go up to like hundreds of thousands of views. Got it.

Well, yeah, that makes sense on why you're getting more applicants from X.

You know what's funny though? When I spoke to Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew, and now he has that AI consulting firm, 10X. So he says that X is really good for engineers, hiring engineers, which is exactly what happened for me, right? But LinkedIn drives a good amount of, like a lot of pipeline. I'll just leave it at that kind of broad, which makes a lot of sense. But like obviously he's in favor with the LinkedIn algorithm right now. So how's your LinkedIn doing right now, by the way?

I haven't checked either, but I do know LinkedIn drives, because I get reports from my team every single month. LinkedIn drives a lot more leads than X does by far from what we're able to track.

Yeah. So, and we get a good amount of views on both. Yeah. Do you, do you have a rough idea of how much more, like a multiple?

On LinkedIn over X? Uh-huh. It's not that much more.

Yeah.

I get a report on that on a monthly basis too. It's not like 10 times more or anything like that, but the lead count from X, I mean, from, that's a view count, right? But from a lead count perspective, it's more than 50x on LinkedIn over X.

Wow. That's a lot. Yeah.

I think it's actually closer to like 56 or 57x.

You know what's funny? Because Neil, when you, when you posted to LinkedIn, I'm going to pull up your LinkedIn and let's just take a look at it, right? So your posts are just reposts from your other channels, aren't they?

Uh-huh. So it's the same stuff as X and all the other channels.

Yeah. So I do that, right? And here's the— okay, let's look at— I'm going to look at Neil's and I'm going to look at ours. So let me share my screen over here. So let's do a little analysis of our socials and we can even talk about how we would improve each other. So Neil, you see yours?

Yeah.

Okay. So this is short form over here. Neil published this 5 hours ago. Neil, just for context, Neil has 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. So 45 likes, 20 comments, 4 reposts, and literally I'm sorry. It's not like the caption's amazing or anything. It's just like a normal caption. His team still uses tags. You probably don't need tags anymore too, but hey, 45 and 20, not bad for 5 hours. This will probably get, I would say, 150 or 200. What do you say?

I have no idea.

Okay. Let's look at some other ones here. 19 hours ago, he published this chart, 51 likes on it, 22 comments. Then let's go down a little more, 5,723. Okay. But I would say that it, I think Neil is, because he's reposting, it's almost like a slot machine. Okay. This kind of looks like a slot machine too, but like this one will get 216 and 72.

This one will get 1,000. It's not even that. If you look at the topics, the topics are very specific to our ideal customer profile. So like, if you look at the charts, those few examples, they won't get tons of likes because they're tailored around local businesses and ideally ones that are franchises. Because that's what we're trying to get for leads.

Yeah. Well, what I'm calling out now—

Right. So if I go more—

So, so check this out. You see, yeah, I mean, over here, and then, but you have 200, you have 4x more. This is what I'm calling out. So I'm calling out like there's a luck component to the post. You just never know what's going to do well.

No, but that video is more generic than the ones that are charts. Like specifically, that video was more general for anyone.

Yep. Okay.

So this one over here— This, this I know. Those charts that are very specific, that are industry related, drive more revenue than the stuff that gets like 5, 10,000 likes.

Oh, this is a YouTube video. That's why. This is published from YouTube. Correct.

It's more generic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's more larger.

The charts are for a webinar that is specifically around franchises.

Yep. Okay. So let's continue. I want to look at more over here. So This is more about AI overviews, right? How to show it more. Okay. And then—

And that's commercial terms. That's not just— and the reason I'm cutting you off here is I want everyone to understand, I'm like, if you look at that, how often are ads showing up in AI overviews for commercial terms, right? This would be e-com, people selling services. So I'm trying to target people who are specifically my ideal customer. This is more e-com than general. And what we found is when we get very specific, like the other ones were like franchises and multi-unit location local businesses, we generate way less likes, but we generate substantially more revenue than something that gets 1,000 likes.

Yeah. So let me just simplify this for everyone. So really what Neil's saying is, okay, some of the content might be wider TAM. Okay. You have Sam Altman in there, you have Elon Musk in there, and some of it might be a smaller TAM, but they have more money and it's in his ICP. That's what he's targeting. And so the engagement might be lower for commercial terms or things like that. We're talking about small business franchises, right? So by the way, I'm looking through this. I'm sure you have one. I'm going to look for one that just really took off. 184, 75, 179 or so. I think if there's anything to call out, it doesn't hurt you to repost these things. And I think you're posting what, like 3 times a day or something like that? Is that what it is?

No, 2 times. We're about to kick it up to 3 times.

This is a YouTube video that Neil published. This one got 500 likes on it. Okay. So he tracked which brands show up in ChatGPT. Obviously this is a wider audience. And this is like a breakdown of how ChatGPT is showing up in search, I think, or citations. So anyway, all that to say, let's just, I'm just going to look at today and the last 24 hours. So 5 hours ago you posted one. Okay. 19 hours ago you posted one, 22. So In a 24-hour period, you posted 3. That's what it is. Yeah.

But if you just break it down, we just post 2 times a day.

Okay.

We post morning and afternoon.

And by the way, like I wouldn't even, when people say, oh, like you should make sure that maybe you're only posting 3 times a week for the LinkedIn algorithm, because they don't like you posting that much. I don't know, man. Because you're posting twice a day. So.

Uh-huh. But what we found is if I post more wide audience stuff, and I know Eric used the TAM, TAM stands for total addressable market, but it can be interpreted in a few different ways. There's TAM like more population, okay? We don't focus on what appeals to the most, to a bigger number of people. We focus on TAM that is more dollar-oriented. So we optimize for what will drive the most revenue. Because if you look at, let's say, franchise businesses that need marketing, there's not as many businesses out there that are actually franchises. I'm not talking about a Domino's, like one actual Domino's. I'm talking about Domino's, the parent company, right? That's who we'd be targeting. Or Everbowl, the acai bowl company that our mutual friend owns. And when you post content like that, we do not get the amount of views compared to the more generic stuff that's quote unquote more beginner-ish marketing. But what we find is it drives a lot more revenue.

Yep. This is funny because we do get leads from LinkedIn, but you look at what we're posting here. It's like, it's a lot of the Shorts, right? That are kind of repurposed from this podcast. You might get 6 likes on this one, 676 impressions, 6 likes on this one over here, 4 likes, 300 impressions or so, 182 impressions. But then when you click over to my X account, which is over here, it's like 22,000 views, okay? This one, we're live right now. And then some stuff, whatever, but like 1,500 views here, 9,000 views on this one, 5,000 views on this one, 800. So I have an easier time on X and some of this stuff will get like 100,000+ views or so. But I just keep going, right? 10,000 over here, 5,000 over here.

But look at the titles of this stuff that's getting the views. What are the titles?

I can't read them. It's not specific to my audience, right? So this one's like more general population, anybody that's using AI, right? This is how I saved money on my token optimization. This one over here is smaller TAM over here, 3,400. Traditional SEO is dying. And I just kind of quote tweeted this, right? But I would just say Neil's right. What I think we're getting at here, and maybe what you're getting at, is more so you don't want to publish stuff just for the views. Because once— if you get too focused on, fixated on the views, it ends up becoming an audience capture thing where you want to focus more on that audience and, and, and trying to please everyone, right? But if you try to please everyone, it doesn't help you grow your business the best. Correct.

And that's what I found because I used to optimize for the views and we used to get way more views. I get algorithms also change, so some of it could be that. But deliberately, we started getting more specific with our content and our webinars. We used to have webinars where 15,000 people would show up live, literally 15,000 people live. I'm not talking about registered. I'm talking about actually showing up during the hour we're doing the webinar. And what we found is when we had topics that were really broad like that, we generated very little qualified leads and that turned into very little customers. When we started doing webinars that had half, one-third of the people show up, but it was more specific, or even sometimes one-fifth of the people show up, it's only a few thousand. What we found was we generated less leads. They were much more qualified and we generated more customers. And the customers actually spent more money with us per customer, right? The average order value or whatever you want to call it. Versus going very broad with our messaging.

And how, so what data are you, I'm assuming, because this took you some time to switch. I don't know necessarily when you made the switch, maybe like what, 3, 4 years ago you made the switch. What was the methodology just so people can copy what you did there?

So when you get the views, what people don't talk about and it's hard to measure is there's some sort of There's some sort of brand value component to it. The more people see your face, your logo, your business, or hear about it, there is some value. Even if they're not your ideal customer right now, they may be your ideal customer later on. It could be that their business grows, or it could be that they move jobs, or they get rich somehow, or whatever it may be. So we weren't sure if going broad or going narrow would generate us more revenue in the long run, right? So what we decided to do was we were posting once a day on social media. We decided to post one more time a day that was more specific. And as we started seeing the real revenue benefits from it and the brand benefits from it, we started then posting both more focused content around our ideal customer profile. Not every single day, but for the majority of our content. And then eventually we transitioned to trying to fully do that majority of the time. When I say majority, like 85, 90% of the time. And we found that model to work really well. And what we found on the brand component side is less people are actually familiar with our company because of it, or at least we're not top of mind as much for many companies. And back in the day, I would get Instagram messages and direct messages on other platforms being like, Oh, my dream one day is to grow my company so I can hire you to do my marketing. Once we get big enough, we're going to end up hiring you. Now we get way less of those messages, but we get messages from larger corporations asking us specific questions related to problems they have in marketing, and we generate way more leads and we're building a stronger brand with our ideal customer profile. While before our ideal customers weren't really messaging us on social media because the content was too broad.

Yep. So I think at a very meta level here for everyone to think about is you really have to understand the business that you're in. And again, like we have seen, we've seen mutual friends, Neil, that have just chased the views to the end of the earth and they become very popular influencers, so to speak. And they have millions and millions of followers, but it distracted them from their main business and their main business kind of looks like a Frankenstein now. Yeah.

Yeah, I, I agree. I've, I've tried chasing the views. Eric's friends— I've had dinner with some of Eric's friends and be like, oh, I read your article, you know, the one you wrote on like what, flying business class, or how you spent all this money on Tom Ford and, you know, fancy clothing companies and what it did. That was so cool. Like, no joke, some of those articles got millions and millions and millions of views, and so many people would stop me on the street, be like, oh, I read the article about You, you know, buying more designer clothes didn't generate crap in revenue. And at the end of the day, I might still make money.

Did you meet this guy at my mom's funeral? The one that said that he read your article?

No, this is when we were in Vegas and we did lunch at Aria and you were gambling before dinner.

Oh no, no, that was dinner. That was dinner at Aria, dinner at Catch or something.

I don't know where the dinner was.

It was dinner with my high school friends. It was a bunch of girls, right?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was years ago, like more than 10 years ago.

Close to 10 years or over 10 years ago. Anyway, so that aside, let's move on to the next thing. Neil, you'll like this one because I've been sending Neil these stock charts where these things are going parabolic. So I want to emphasize, this is not financial advice. I'm going to show you a couple of things over here. And funny enough, Neil, I told someone yesterday, I showed him these stocks. He immediately told his wife to go buy them. I was like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, it's not on me, man. Okay, so I'm gonna— I want to talk about how this AI stock is up 1,100%. There's another one that's up 5,000% year on year, and what this tells you about business and marketing. Okay, so there's a business and marketing lesson here. Um, let me go into it right now. So check out my screen. So this guy over here— all right, I'm going to share my window. So What is the smallest object, Neil, that if it stopped being made tomorrow would freeze the entire AI industry by Friday? Just give me a quick answer. Do you know what it is?

Memory.

No, it's a polished piece of indium phosphide the size of a coaster grown in a furnace over 2 weeks, made by exactly 2 companies in the world that are not Chinese. It's not a chip, it's not a GPU, it's not a model. Okay, so check this out. It's this thing over here. You see this? So this thing is extremely rare. Again, there's no— It's a circle. Yeah, it's a circle, right? So that's what Neil sees on the screen. So this guy over here has done a lot of research on indium phosphide. I think I'm pronouncing that right. But 2 years of pulling on the story brought me back to the same conclusion. The 2026 to 2030 AI buildout is gated by 4 physical constraints and almost nothing else, okay? Number 1 is indium phosphide wafers, 2 credible non-Chinese suppliers in the world, which we just showed you. Advanced packaging, 4 companies on earth that matter. Power, okay, industrial gas turbines sold out into 2030, 3 vendors at scale. And you have critical minerals, Chinese pause on gallium, germanium, and antimony. I don't know if I pronounced that correct. Export controls expires November 27th, 2026. So let me show you something, Neil. Do you see this?

Yes, AXT Inc. Their stock chart is through the roof and it is 8,484%. Growth in the past year, I believe it is. I could be wrong on this.

Last year. Yeah. One year chart. One year. Check this out. Check this out, Neil. You see that? You see the different? Watch. Watch.

Wow.

Right? So they are an Indian phosphide maker, but they do have ties to China. You can see Beijing over here. But isn't this? Okay. Now I'm going to show you one more. This is one of the other ones, right? Wait.

What's the revenue? Is it grown like crazy? Let's go back to the other one. What's the revenue? Go to the more scroll. Yeah, uh huh. And then scroll down and then change it to annual.

Okay, look at this. So change it to to twenty eight, twenty three, twenty six million in March. This is quarterly. We can switch to annual. So annual income. There you go. Here. There we go.

So they've grown, but not that much.

No, they're actually doing less revenue now. They've gone down.

Yeah.

$137, $141, $75, $99. Okay, I'm going to show you one more, Neil. This one's one of the American— or not American ones, but, uh, yeah, this is American actually. So based in San Jose, check this out. So last year they grew 1,100%. This is Lumentum Holdings. Okay, if we look at MAX, it's, it's a parabolic chart as well. Okay, so if we click on them over here, right, let's go ahead and click on financials. Let's go to— let's look at this annualized Look at this, Neil. So $1.74 billion in 2021, then $1.71 billion in 2022, $1.77 billion in 2023, $1.36 billion. So they went down in 2024 significantly, then $1.65 billion. So here's the thing, but investors are realizing this is majorly bottlenecked and this is one of the core suppliers. And that's why these stocks, you look at the story, that's why the story is going up so much.

Yeah, the story is causing it to go up.

Go ahead, finish your thought and then I'll go.

I would say just be careful financially with this stuff.

So here's what I would say, and I want to tie it to business, and then maybe we'll have time for one more episode after this. But one, the story matters a lot.

Okay?

The story can help with your valuation, and that's why they're up like 5,000% or 1,200% or 8,000%, whatever it is in the last 12 months or so. Story matters quite a bit. But also when it comes to business, you have to think about the bottleneck. So Jeff Bezos used to have all of his managers, management team read the book The Goal. And that entire book is talking about bottlenecks, okay? You're always going to have bottlenecks in a company. One thing's going to be holding up, like one critical process could be holding you back, right? And so you always want to be stamping out the bottlenecks in your company, the bottlenecks in your marketing too. What's stopping you from getting more leads? Is it something around sales, for example? Is it something around your outbound, for example? Is it something around follow-up? Is it something around speed to lead? So you always have to be stomping out bottlenecks in your marketing and your business. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to move the supply chain forward. In this case, if any of these bottlenecks get screwed over, then the AI supply chain is messed up and that messes up Everything for the world, right? And so I think this is a meta lesson in storytelling and also in bottlenecks.

Yeah. And for the last episode of today, before we finish up, I wanted to talk about rebranding. Sometimes it's actually worth changing your name and we'll use Eric as an example for this segment. And the one that many of you guys are familiar with is Intercom. So Intercom for a long time was known as that website chat and people just message you from there. They wanted to create a new product and they released it as Fin. The reason they did it is so they can have an AI-first product. They don't have to deal with old legacy stuff and it's actually worked really well for them. We've talked about it in past episodes how they've skyrocketed their growth and the revenue and some of those numbers are public on X. Eric actually did something similar and he has been for 6 months or so. Maybe my timing is a little bit off, Eric. His agency Single Grain is known for digital marketing consulting. Eric's been spending a lot of time on AI and wanted to get into quote unquote AI consulting. If he just redid the Single Grain website to be focused around AI, I don't think it would've done well because the agency's been around for a long time, right? More than 10 years.

Since 2009. Yeah.

All right, so way more than that. So 2009, you heard about your company? What, uh, 17 years?

17 years. Yeah. And I took over in 2013.

So I think if you ended up doing that with Single Grain, it would have been a harder sell, but you didn't. You ended up creating an offshoot or a new company called Single Brain that just purely focuses on AI implementation. How would you say the— what lessons would you say you've learned from the branding shift or change? Now, to clarify here, he still has both companies and he still does both services. It's just he has an offshoot brand for the AI consulting. What would you say is the pros of doing it that way versus the cons of not just choosing single grain for both? And if you had to do it all over again, would you do it the same way?

So Neil, when you think about the brand Kleenex, what do you think about?

Tissue paper, toilet paper, like Kleenex.

Yeah. Toilet paper or paper towels or something like that, right? But mostly tissue paper, right?

Yeah. Sorry. I didn't mean toilet paper. I meant for when you sneeze, your nose.

Yeah. Or when you think about Nike, it's mostly shoes, right? And so when you think about MP Digital or Single Grain, MP Digital is marketing, Single Grain is marketing, right? And so the reason why I decided to do Single Grain is because Single Grain is a lot of the, to Neil's point, it is the AI implementation. A lot of the stuff that we're doing internally, that people are asking for. And what I would say, Neil, is it becomes a lot clearer to people when people come in for the singlebrain.com website. It's very clear on what they want. They want either AI strategy or AI implementation. And it's very easy to just focus the conversation on that. Now, when we tried to do it initially on the Single Grain side, it's like, okay, you want these marketing services. By the way, would you like some AI services too? It confuses the discovery call too much.

Right.

So it's much easier to focus it on one thing like Kleenex. Oh, you do tissues. Google, you do search engines. Okay, Nike, you do shoes, right? And so that exercise, like we tried it initially to kind of mix it up. You don't want to mix it up. You want to keep it focused. And if you're able to keep it focused, that makes it easier for people to buy because the more confusion you add, the tougher it is for people, the tougher it is for you to get a sale.

Yes. And I think it is a good strategy. We did something similar. We bought a company called Yodle Mobile that's just known for app stuff. And we never changed the name to NP Digital. And when we acquired it, it started growing faster. And we had an internal discussion like, why? It's known specifically for this. They've been around, I think, almost 20 years or somewhere around there. And I'm like, ah, leave it. It's growing faster. Don't mess something that's not broken. And especially when it's known for something very specific.

Yep. So there you have it, uh, guys. Hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later. Let me