Should you optimize for Reddit and Quora for higher SEO rankings?

The podcast interview format is becoming really stale. And I actually ran a Twitter thread the other day and I said, are interview podcasts getting stale? Yes or no? What percent of people you think put no versus yes?

Probably maybe majority put yes. And I would say maybe 60%. But whether people will say it's stale or not, if you look at your social stats, podcast interviewing has probably 10x your social stats.

Yes. So here's what I'll say. It was 82%, maybe not 77% or so. It said yes.

That it's stale.

That it's stale. Yeah. And, uh, it's interesting because I was just talking to— I did a podcast interview this week and Marie Forleo, she, she was like, yeah, that's actually— yeah, I can see the interview podcast becoming stale because she was just on a podcast where she did cooking. So someone invited her to come cook and they did like a show. And it was like 2, 3 hours of cooking, right? And Gary, as an example, he does 12-hour streams of him just working, right?

12-hour streams?

Because he's working all day. He's in the office, right? There's people coming in. It's like a muted stream and there's actually 100 people watching at a time. It's not a lot right now, but coworking is becoming a thing. So, people are trying different formats. I was talking with Brad over here from recordeditpodcast.com and we're talking about having an entrepreneur poker stream, right? It's not exactly interview one, but imagine you can see everyone's hole cards, you have different interesting So I think the formats are going to evolve very soon. And I'm just trying to experiment right now.

But when I look at what you're doing on social media, you're pretty much replicating the interview style. And I'm not saying you're copying anyone. You've actually been doing this for a very long time with Leveling Up.

11 years.

11 years. Wow, that's a long time. And if you look at your social content, last 30 days, last 60 days, relevant today, even though people are saying, It's old, it's played out. Your stats, would you agree with this, they're at least 10x better, no joke, at least 10x better than before.

Way higher. I mean, 12 million views in 30 days. It wasn't even close to that before.

So more than 10x. So you weren't even at a million. You probably were at close to 100,000 or 200,000, correct?

Yeah, 200,000, 300,000 or something like that overall. This is across all socials. But Neil makes a good point. So when you think about trends, I typically like to get on it. Like if I see something start to trend downwards, I'm going to try to make adjustments, right? Because by the time we wait until maybe it's 25% down, 30% down, we're already like a little late. So, I'm just trying to get ahead of it right now to experiment.

I don't think interviews are stale or old. I think the content in the interviews is the problem and that could be stale or old. Explain.

I agree with you, but explain.

So, if you look at a lot of the people that are on podcasts, People try to get well-known individuals, Gary Vee, Marie Forleo, Cody Sanchez, Alex Hormozi, Laszlo Hormozi, et cetera. People are going after big name people with huge followings and they continually interview. When they interview, they're asking the typical same questions over and over again. I used to do 2 to 3 podcast interviews per day of people inviting me on their shows. We've cut it back and we typically now focus on like The bigger ones.

And what do you think about the questions they ask you 90% of the time?

So, and funny enough, I was actually going to get to that. Majority of the time, call it maybe 70 to 80%, it's not 90, but 70+ percent of the time, the questions are around the same type of things. For example, what can people do with AI right now? What's new with SEO?

How—

what's 3 takeaways a business can do to really grow? And I'm giving generic type questions, but those are the type of questions that I'm being asked. And most of them are on those topics. So if one person asks like, what's new in SEO right now? Another person may ask like, what's an SEO tactic that companies can start leveraging if they're just getting started? Or someone else may ask, how do you grow your social media following? Like they're asking the same basic questions over and over again. It may not be the same exact question, but they're all similar. And that's the problem. If I look at my interviews that do the best, It's not necessarily that I plan on having them do the best or whatnot. It's the people interviewing me are asking really unique questions that most people wouldn't have asked before.

Yep. And I had this conversation with David Perell, the writing guy on Twitter, and he made a good point. Do you think, Neil, it's harder in a podcast situation for the hosts or for the guests?

I actually think it's harder for the hosts than the guests. You have to do tons of research and you have to come up with really amazing questions that A, they haven't been asked before, but B, people really want to know that from the guest. So you either have to not just do your research on the guest and what they're good at, you have to look at all the old podcast interviews that they've done, articles that they publish. Then you also have to start polling and talking to people who want to listen to that interview before it's even recorded and find out from them, On, hey, what do you want to know from this person that you've never heard them talk about before? And someone who does a good job of this is Sam Parr. I've seen on Twitter, I don't listen to all the episodes for My First Million. And, you know, I used to think that it was an interview podcast because they interviewed Syed, they interviewed me.

Until this week.

Until this week. And when Eric's like, no, they don't really do interviews. And I was like, oh cool, I learned something new. I'm not trying to diss them or anything. I think they do an amazing job. Their content's great. I more so follow Sam on Twitter than the actor on X over a podcast because it's easier for me to consume whenever I'm on the go. And I see him posting on X, hey, I'm going to interview this guest. What are some things you want to know that you would ask them or they've never talked about before? He takes the time not to only do the research, but to find out from people What they really want to know and what they're curious about that individual.

Yeah. At the end of the day, it's the— when you're watching something, hopefully when you're watching a podcast, you're looking for moments where you feel enlightened, where you're getting an idea, there's a light bulb that goes off. If you're asking the same questions, the light bulb doesn't go off and then no wonder why people drop off so much. And so, Neil's absolutely right. It's— as someone that's been interviewing people for over 11 years, it's a huge pain in the butt. To do a good job. Like sometimes I spend hours watching podcasts of them or, and then trying to figure out my own angle. It's a lot of work. It's exhausting.

But that's why you're getting 12 million views from all your social profiles. And I don't mean this in a bad way. I actually look at this as a really good thing. You don't have tons of followers compared to a lot of other people on social media, yet your view counts are through the roof, right? A, it shows that Followers aren't everything. And I know Adam Mosseri posted a Threads message about that the other day, which we can go over later on. But more so, your content's hitting. It's going viral because the people who are watching are engaging and they're very engaged, which means the research that you've done and the questions you're asking are resonating with a lot of people.

Well, this is basically the social graph versus the interest graph. And so the social graph back in the day, it used to be all about the number of followers that you have. Twitter, to an extent, it still is about the amount of followers that you have, But it's still, there's a little bit about how good the content is. But YouTube now, TikTok, Instagram, it is just about how good is the content and your stuff will take off. To Neil's point, I might have, I don't know, 300,000 followers or so spread across my socials. It's not a lot, but now that it's more about the interest graph, whatever people are interested in, it just means it's more about the merit of the video versus the number of followers that someone has.

And what Eric's talking about, interests, social networks have changed to a discovery network. They look at what content you engage with on a regular basis. And then when they have content that's similar, even from people you don't follow, but it has a super high engagement rate, they're more likely to show it to you because they know you'll engage with it. They don't care if you follow that person or not. They know if they show you engaging content and you follow that person, I mean, and you consume the content, you're more likely to stick on that social network for longer.

Funny enough, and this is actually, well, this is more ironic, but sometimes you just don't know what takes off. I keep talking about how social media is a slot machine when you're posting reels. And Neil and I were talking about, Neil was talking about how Tesla's a crap car, and then I was saying how I like Tesla. And then that video actually did a lot better than our other videos. And funny enough, Neil actually ended up buying a Tesla after that.

I still don't think it's a great car. It's not comfortable, but the technology is good.

He's voting with his wallet. That tells you guys everything.

They're giving discounts right now. I like the price savings. And I actually think they're really good cars for safety. Which is really important for me because of kids. And the self-driving technology is amazing. When I say they're not good cars, I'm only talking about one thing, the comfort in the car, like the actual seat isn't as comfortable as a seat like in a Mercedes or something like that. That's just what I've experienced. Other than that, they're good cars. That's my only gripe with them.

All right, real quick, I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners, to helping them scale. So you could be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency, and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now, what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share And you can, at least with the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video. Have you seen how much Reddit and Quora are flying after the latest Google update?

Yes, but you also know Google is buying data from them, those providers. I know Reddit for sure.

$60 million a year for Reddit.

Uh, I think they're buying data from Quora too. Google strikes deal with— is it Quora?

We have this chart. While Neil pulls this up, I have this chart on my screen, so— and we'll pull it up on YouTube if you guys sub to us on YouTube. YouTube Marketing School. But you can see after the update, there's a blue graph over here, Reddit is just flying. And then Quora is also maybe like a quarter of the size or maybe a third of the size. But fact of the matter is when you search things, you can see a lot of Reddit answers, a lot of Quora answers. And I think that's going to— you know what's interesting, Neil? We have people, prospects hitting us up now that want to optimize for Reddit to optimize for Google. And I'm just like, wait, what? Have you seen that?

I have not seen that, but we don't get inquiries for that. It doesn't look like, or at least I can't find here, Google buying data from Quora, but Reddit for sure we know of because they talked about that before the IPO. They are flying. If you look at what's happening a lot with search, it's turning into a question and answer game largely because of AI. We're seeing a lot of patterns of people using ChatGPT, asking a question and getting an answer, and they're expecting the same thing from Google. It's changing search patterns and behavior from what we're seeing. And why wouldn't Quora and Reddit fly in those scenarios?

Have you met Jim Yu from BrightEdge?

No.

Okay, so I was hanging out with him last week in Austin. So we had a little dinner thing. And BrightEdge, just so those of you that don't know, it's enterprise SEO software. And I think they do north of $100 million ARR, it was a pretty significant company. And he was sharing some data with me. So he's like, look, we're seeing a lot more data that indicates if we're seeing more queries with SGE in there. And so what we're seeing is if you actually want to rank for SGE, to your point, Neil, if you want to rank for SGE, you're trying to answer more queries and you're trying to answer more long-tail keywords. And we're just going to see more and more of that. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Share more data. So he's going to share more data with me and then we'll talk about it on this podcast if you guys subscribe to us on YouTube. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing some 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders if you want to hang out with amazing people. Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more and we'll see you inside.

And going back to the topic that we're talking about on social media, Adam Mosseri, who heads up Instagram and Threads, posted this: Follower count matters less than view and like counts. I understand why people focus so much on follower counts. They're prominent and easy to find. But if you actually want to get a sense of how relevant an account is, look at their how many likes, look at their how many likes, sounds a little bad. Look at their how many likes they get per post and how many views per reel instead. In other words, what he's saying is they don't care about follower count, they care about engagement. If you have, 100 followers and all of them engage, which is extremely rare because not everyone logs into the app every single day and uses it. What ends up happening is they are like, wow, everyone's watching the video. They all commented, they all liked and shared, assuming it's not manipulated. That thing will go viral and they'll show it to everyone.

That's kind of crazy. It's, uh, I mean, it's not crazy. It's, it's, that's par for the course. Again, it's, it's more of a, it's a, It's more of an interest-based graph now. And the engagements and the likes and the views are just signals for interest at the end of the day.

Straight up. I really do believe that that's the way social media is going to be for a very long time. Showing people based on who they follow is irrelevant because if people produce crap content— and what I've seen is, I don't have any hard data on this, but what I've seen is a lot of people who have a lot of followers, take things for granted and they don't try as hard to create amazing content as the people who are out there hustling and grinding it out to just get, you know, the first 1,000 followers.

I think that's the good thing about TikTok. It forced people to innovate. It forced these social companies to innovate and move towards more of an interest graph. But it also continues to force people to innovate on their content formats. Because, you know, when people start to see the engagement dip, everyone has good analytics. They can decide if they want to change things up. And that is it for today. And also don't forget, go to marketingschool.io/agency To learn more about the Agency Owners Association. That's where we help agency owners grow. And hopefully we get it to a place where we don't need to have ads on this podcast anymore. So yeah, there's that for you. Goodbye.