Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss whether it makes sense to buy attention through acquisitions and paid traffic versus building organic brand reach. They cover buying websites like AnswerThePublic and Ubersuggest, testing content spend, and targeting small businesses versus enterprise customers.
Chapters
Dude, let's talk about how we buy attention.
Yeah. So I think the old way, we've both bought websites before, we've both spent a lot of money on marketing, you know, perspective-wise, not compared to like a Microsoft, but for our own brands compared to most SMBs and mid-sized corporations. And back in the day, we would both buy websites for their traffic. And their reach, their Google rankings, their backlink. These days, I don't think you can buy attention like that because it's too fickle. You buy a YouTube following, does it just disappear overnight? Does the algorithm change where you can't get as much reach in the future? If you buy an Instagram handle, same issue. If you buy a site that gets a ton of Google traffic, same issue. What if the rankings tank? I'm not saying they're doing anything shady, but you can't control a future algorithm update or changes they want to make with AI. It doesn't mean social media is bad or SEO is bad. I'm just saying it becomes a riskier business purchase. But on the flip side, what I've seen really consistent from an attention perspective, of all the acquisitions that we've done at NP Digital, 2 of them were tool-based. One was AnswerThePublic and one was Ubersuggest. And no joke, for both those tools, almost all their traffic came from people just going directly to the site or Googling their own brand name. It wasn't for a keyword ranking for a random trend. It was all branded related. And I still think you should buy a lot of attention because you can use the attention to cross-sell into other products and services. But I think you have to be more picky with the attention in which it has to be really strong brand affinity because that's the attention that's harder for algorithm to kick out.
I'll tell you how I'm thinking about it right now. So actually, Sean Cannell spoke at the event here. So he talked about YouTube. So he's got like 4 million subscribers across his 2 YouTube channels, which is a good chunk.
That's a lot.
And he has like half a billion views overall. And he was talking— I mean, we both revealed our numbers. So you're spending about $60,000 to $70,000 a month on your content. That doesn't include, you know, maybe payroll and other things like that. I'm spending around, call it $20,000 to $25,000 a month or so. That's the cost of us creating content right now and that's how I see us Buying attention in a sense. But the other thing that we're considering testing right now, so I was just talking with Nick Shackelford. This is one of those little side conversations, but have you heard of Whop?
I haven't.
Yeah, so it's W-H-O-P. So you can basically say, hey, you put $10,000 up and they follow the Andrew Tate model. So the Andrew Tate model is you just pay a bunch of people to clip your content. I think this would work well for both of us. And so we've been talking with the Whop team. They're like, we're going to do like a $500 test, like nothing, right? And then they're like, no, it's too small. You got to spend more. You got to spend more. I'm like, of course you're going to say we need to spend more. So then we're like going to up it to $2,000 for a test. And I was like, Nick, how much— honestly, like, if I wanted to do a small test, what does it need to be? He's like, $10 grand. Okay, okay, $10 grand sounds reasonable. So basically what happens is you determine how much you'll pay. You might say, I'll pay $3 CPM, and then you put $10 grand up, and then people can come in and they'll start editing your content for you and clipping it and then putting onto social channels. And it's basically the Andrew Tate model where a bunch of people were clipping his content for like affiliate commissions and all that. That's the model, and that's how WAP actually was funded by Peter Thiel. Um, and, and they're, they're trying to do it like a payments arbitrage here, but, um, that's, that's the game. So I'm gonna test $10 grand, and then I'm— now I, I looks like you might test it too.
So WAP is a community where people just pretty much do the Andrew Tate model where they'll clip up your stuff and then post it everywhere?
Yeah, so it's basically a marketplace where editors can go and you can, you can basically— they can bid on your, your project, and then you can just say, hey, I'll pay $3 CPM and like get me these views. And then they— these creators, they get paid instantly to do this. And they will also be posting it to like different, different channels to try to get more views.
Are these junk impressions or you don't know yet?
I don't know yet. But the people that I've talked about, like the way Nick has talked about it, I'm like, it seems legit enough for me to run a test. So I will report back on this $10,000 test.
Yeah. The hard part for me is I found that most marketing methods that we've tested out really struggle on the enterprise end. They're just not as effective because enterprises don't want risk.
I don't think that works for enterprise. I think that works for you and me.
For personal brands.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah. So I'll let you know how it goes.
Yeah. Yeah, dude, speaking of personal brands, I was flying yesterday, my flight was delayed. So Eric sends me this video that one of a big personal brand ended up doing. And they say they have this business, whatever the business is, is related to businesses or investing or whatnot. But what's funny is, is like I went to their site and I looked at it and everything was selling info products and courses and workshops. And I was like, at the end of the day, you are what you sell. If you truly made your money from investing, you would have an investment website. If you truly made your money from courses, you would have a course website.
All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Media. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. You know what the thing is? You look at Warren Buffett, you look at Charlie Munger, they teach for free, they teach for fun, and you can tell they're not looking to get anything from it.
Yeah.
And that's an important thing because I don't know of any investor— like, you know a lot of investors, I know a lot of investors. I don't know of any investor that needs to sell courses or, you know, masterminds and things like that.
Yeah, it's like Peter Thiel. If he was to speak at your conference, do you think he really cares for a speaking fee?
No, no, he would only want to do it because there's interesting people to hang out with and that's worth way more to him.
Yeah, he'll take his own jet. If he's taking his own jet and that costs an arm and a leg, speaking fees aren't going to make up for that.
Well, you know what they say, if it smells funny, then, then, then what?
It usually is.
Yeah, or it smells fishy. That's what it is.
If it smells fishy, usually it's fishy?
Yeah, yeah, something like that. But it just, it doesn't— like, the story's got to add up, right? Like, yeah, you share your struggles, I share my struggles, and it's not like everything's rosy all the time. And I don't, I don't think we try to pretend like it is rosy. Um, and we just have a conversation. And by the way, we— you met Josh. So Josh, he's the guy that was like, we just really enjoy it when you guys share stories. Um, Oh, you know what? You know what one of our other friends said? So this is in the elevator. He's like, you know, you guys have the best marketing podcast out there. I truly believe it. But you know why I think you don't get more views? I was like, why? He's like, because people are racist. I was like, I don't think that. But like, but I think it's an interesting take.
It's an interesting take. I don't think really.
But you know what I want to test in a couple of years? I want to test making AI avatars where it's perfect, 10 out of 10, where you become a model and I become a model and the voice becomes like a sexy girl. We just have our marketing school at different types, different colors, different races, different genders, everything. And we just see which one performs better.
I think people just want to hear from us. Um, and I think the reason we don't get the amount of views that some other podcasts do is because we tend to focus on marketing instead of focusing on things like fashion or television or politics.
That's also okay. So, you know, there are some marketing creators out there like, um, Zoe Unlimited. So she's great. She talks a lot about the brand side of things too, right? Then you have, um, I think it's Alex Garcia. So Alex Garcia, he has a good Instagram channel, but it's highly produced marketing content where he's talking, he's teaching a lot of the When we started our very first episode, do you know what our most successful episode is?
It's probably a tactic or strategy.
Number— episode number 1, how to learn marketing. But that's a very broad type of marketing tactic topic. The way we talk about it now relates to a lot more around business operations, and that's a much smaller group.
It is. But when I saw your speech today, it hit me. I didn't say anything to you, but it hit me. We used to talk on very similar topics back in the day. And when you look at what you spoke on, it was on AI, but very specifically, it was very tactical and strategy. Would you agree with that? More so tactical, like how to get stuff done?
Yeah.
All right.
Yours has changed.
Mine's changed. I used to be very tactical. I stopped and I really mainly focus on strategy and nothing else.
I think that's better for enterprise.
Correct. Yeah. And I learned that tactical is better for SMB.
Yep. And I think this group, to your point, is more mid-market SMB level. Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you have to tailor your talk to whoever it is. You have to know your audience. That's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you're a part of enterprise, people talk like when they talk to us about Carrot, it's like, yeah, you know, we need air coverage. What does that even mean? Like, air coverage means, oh, you just want a bunch of ads where you don't measure it. That's what air coverage is. Air coverage means you're spending money and you don't want to look at the ROI. Yep.
Yep.
That's what it is and that's how they like to talk. There's a lot of enterprisey language, you just have to know who you're talking to.
Yeah.
Yeah. All right. All right, guys. So, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Let us know what you think about this episode where we recorded with the DJI Osmo. I set this up myself. We got another camera over there. So, that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.
