Signs we're actually in a recession, Effects of ChatGPT on Upwork, The perfect webinar, and more

So Neil.

Yes.

Do you think we're in a recession?

In the United States specifically?

Yes.

I don't know the economic classification of recession because I thought it was 2 negative quarters of GDP. And I thought we already hit that. But then they said that we're not in a recession. And I'm not that smart.

So, you know, I don't know.

But I look at it as the market sucks, whether you want to call it a recession or not, the economy just sucks.

Okay, Neil gives a practical answer. Now let me give you— let me give you a more— there's some, some, some numbers over here. So right Right now, Japan has all-time high stock market, I believe, or they finally just crossed, like, right? So they're doing well now. And then also stock market-wise, their unemployment level is pretty low. It's like 2% or something like that, right? And they're in a recession. Now look at Germany right now. Same deal, all-time high stock market, unemployment is low. Same thing in the UK.

Germany announced a recession?

Uh-huh. Germany's in recession.

And then their bank had issues too. Did you see the article on the bank?

Deutsche Bank?

Not Deutsche Bank. I forgot what one it was, but something about taking reserves or whatnot. I don't know the exact—

So the UK, same deal. All-time high stock market, unemployment low, in a recession. So has there been any other time in history where those 3 countries have been in recession and the US has not?

I'm going to take a guess with no based on exactly how you're asking the question.

Exactly, exactly. But the other thing too is like The, the, the economists have been revising numbers. So, they'll say all these numbers, right? And they'll go back months and revise the numbers. So, they could— 2 years could go by and be, oh yeah, by the way, 2023 was recession. So, like, who knows what's going on right now, right? So, well—

The recession is, uh, past-looking too. They don't classify recession based on what's happening today. They classify recession, if I'm not mistaken, at least in the US, when they look at 2 quarters, that's 6 months worth of data in the past.

I was looking at it too, by the way. So now that you— now that I'm like, oh, they can actually revise it, you just do whatever you want, right? But 2020, that was technically a recession. And then actually, in early 2022, it was— there's 2 quarters of negative GDP too. They just don't really talk about it.

And by the way, do you remember back in the day? I don't know who was in office at this time. Maybe Obama. Yeah. And this has nothing to do politically, but they ended up changing how they count unemployment. If you're unemployed for a while and you stop trying to actively look for a job, we don't consider you unemployed anymore. Do you remember that change? That was years and years ago.

Basically, you can FUBAR all the numbers just to make your— you have to market yourself really well. This all ties back to marketing at the end of the day. It's the story that you tell. And if you can adjust the numbers, then like you can tell whatever story you want. Yeah.

I believe the economy is bad. No matter what anyone says, I believe just the economy is terrible for most countries. You look at places like India, they're booming. It's ridiculous. Did you see the announcement that Apple ended up making, or it was on CNBC this morning?

No.

Apple now generates more sales in India than any European country.

Wow. I didn't know that.

Yeah.

That's crazy. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back Back to the show. Dude, speaking of jobs, um, there's a, there's a bar graph I'm looking at over here. It's a— it— so the title of it says Change in Number of Upwork Jobs Since ChatGPT Was Released. So graphic design up, web design up, web development up, writing down 30%, um, social media marketing down like, you know, 5% or so, video editing production, it's green, it's just gone up, right? Customer service down 20%, translation down 20%, accounting up, sales up, backend development up, market research up.

So it is affecting content.

Yeah.

And customer service is what it sounds like.

So content, customer service, and translation is a big one too. And social media marketing.

I don't really count social media marketing at 5%. That's not much of it.

Yeah, but I mean, it's still going down. It's like—

It's going down over what period?

Um, tough to say. This is— it doesn't say what time.

Either way, The content that ChatGPT produces right now, whether you have a paid version or free version, or Gemini produces, is not that great. You know, it's going to be really hard for someone to persuade me otherwise because all the data shows it's not that great.

Yeah.

And we run a lot of experiments with it. Again, paid version of ChatGPT, free version, uh, Gemini, it doesn't matter. It's not bad and it's improved a lot and you're already seeing a reduction. Just imagine Once the AI is able to produce much higher quality content. And my example of a high quality piece of content would be like being able to write something that people are like, oh wow, I haven't heard about that before, see it before. It's new, it's fresh, it's written really well, doesn't have a ton of inaccuracies. It's long, it's detailed, step by step, includes videos, includes images. Full-blown production and it'll get there. Look at Sora, right? That's all going to be helpful for content production. Look at what they can do with images. Like you start adding all this together, I think you're going to have an amazing tool to create content. Not yet, but you will within a few years. And when you combine that with already the job reduction, I'm curious to see what happens over time.

There's actually a nice framework now because right now whatever ChatGPT or Gemini outputs, it's like, okay, right? The question is, okay, whatever it outputs, how do you write something that's like 10 times better than that? So how do you skyscrape whatever the output is? And that's going to be something way better because whatever it is that they're outputting, they think that's the best result, right? The AI thinks it's the best result. So just do 10 times better than that. Easier said than done, but it makes a lot of sense because like, for example, if I type like, tell me about George Washington or whatever, right? It'll just give me like some generic answer. Just do 10 times better than that.

Yes. And you can also ask the AI to keep making it more detailed and thorough. But what we found is when, even if you split up a piece of content part by part and you're having AI help you section by section, which is what Jasper originally did to get the content length that writers really wanted, the issue that you end up having is you get a, a lot of fluff, a lot of duplication, and you get a lot of, um, like it doesn't hit hard, right? In which it doesn't just get to the point, doesn't have a lot of meat. It has a lot of filler and that's also fluff, but The points just don't hit hard. Like when you and I create a presentation for a conference that we're speaking at, we think about the storyline, what stats and data are we going to show? We think about, hey, when the end is coming, how can you end with a big bang? Like those kind of things matter when you're writing content as well. And it's hard for AI to produce that, at least for right now.

This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders. And Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year. Usually during August. And past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it. And then you can apply and we'll see you on the other side. I did a co-webinar with Nathan Latka's Founder Path yesterday.

Okay.

And how'd that go? He set it up really well. It's probably the best webinar setup I've seen. And so it basically drove like, I think 40 or 50 leads for us, which is great. And then maybe 4 or 5 of them were MQLs, were like super qualified to work with us, which is good. There's the business result. But the way it works is you go into it, this guy, you know how Tony Robbins, like when he was doing the virtual ones, he had like screens everywhere. So he had some type of setup like that. And you can see he's like, everyone, he's like, everyone, turn your camera on. And then if you don't turn your camera on, I gave Danielle, who's his marketing leader, Instructions to remove you from the webinar, right? And there's like—

Well, that's not nice. Why would you want to do that?

It's not, but it keeps them there. So you have 320 people on the webinar, which is a good amount of people, right? Um, and then, then he like hypes things up and he's like telling a story in the beginning. He's like, I'm going to show you, uh, stats on this company over here. Stay to the very end. So he's like hooking you to the end, right? And then he's also asking you questions during the webinar. He's like, hey, tell me what revenue you're at right now. So, cause he, his whole thing is like lending money to these companies, right? Tell me what revenue— what are you doing to grow right now? Are you trying to grow right now? So he's— but he's not doing all the questions at once. He'll do one in the beginning, maybe the revenue question, and then like 25%, he'll ask another question, 25%, he'll ask another question. And then what he did with my section, it was really quick. It was maybe 10 minutes or so, but he was driving it. So I was sharing stuff around like AI-assisted content, programmatic SEO. Boom, it moves to the retention.com CEO. He shares a bunch of stuff he's doing on how he's spending like $400 grand a year.

Let's back up here. So the webinar was you, Nathan, Me, Nathan, and the retention.com CEO. Okay. And who hosted the webinar? He did, I'm assuming?

He hosted the webinar.

Yeah. And then you guys— he's not part of retention.com, I'm assuming?

No.

Okay. So retention.com—

You mean as an investor?

No, I didn't know if it was a similar company. I'm—

No, no, different company.

I don't know much about retention.com.

Yeah.

Retention.com, I'm assuming, promoted the webinar?

Retention.com promoted the webinar. We promoted the webinar.

To your email list?

Uh-huh.

You guys both on there? You guys talked for an hour, including Nathan and both you guys? Was it Q&A style or was it presentation style?

I only had 10 minutes in there. The retention.com CEO also only had 10 minutes in there. And then Nathan, most of it was him driving stuff, but he kept changing the context and switching things. He was sharing stuff around ClickFunnels, then he was sharing stuff around, hey, this is a good company to buy.

What's an example of like stuff about ClickFunnels?

He was sharing stuff around like, oh, this is how they grew in the beginning. And eventually they had to— I forgot what he was teaching exactly. But I know for retention.com, He was showing numbers around how they struggled in the very beginning and then how their revenue grew from like, you know, $10 million to $22 million or whatever, right? So he tries to share a lot around numbers, but he keeps people hooked. He's like, stay till the very end and I'm going to show you a business that's available for sale right now. And he shares this newsletter, this marketing newsletter called Stacked Marketer, and then just shares how much revenue— it shows the full P&L, right? And it keeps people interested, it keeps people hooked. And that's like the fact that I'm even talking about it right now means that he's done a pretty good job.

Yeah, he did a good job. And what's funny is when you talk about ClickFunnels, ClickFunnels at the beginning, I don't know if you knew this, grew through affiliate marketing, like just crazy promos. I remember when they did, Russell spoke at, I think it was Grant Cardone's event. They put something underneath everyone's seat. They've done a lot of clever stuff to grow. I don't know what they do now, but I'm assuming they slowed it down on the affiliate stuff because I'm assuming those users were churning like crazy.

For sure. Actually, this is what he brought up.

You just jogged my memory.

I think Nathan, when he was referring to Russell Brunson, he was just saying Russell Brunson is really good at getting OPT, other people's traffic, right? So whether it's through affiliate or promoting or speaking at things, he's really good at doing that. And he gets people riled up and then like they start, they end up paying for ClickFunnels. That's how they grew really big.

So yeah. And then he created the ceremony too, like the— it was a 2 Comma or 3 Comma?

2 Comma Club. Yeah. Like that's a whole nother thing we can talk about later. But the other thing I'll end it off with on Nathan Latka is he was like, So, he sends a message to everyone after. It's like, hey, hope you enjoyed the webinar. Here's the slides. Would you like the video as well? It's like, yeah, of course you want the video, right? Oh, okay. If you want the video, I'd appreciate it if you would leave a Trustpilot review over here, then I'll send you the video. Something like that, right? So, it's like it keeps you going. It's like there's a thing after thing after thing.

Yeah, it's good marketing. We just send people like, hey, you want the video? Just go to YouTube. It's there. It's livestream or go to Twitter or wherever we put it.

On your Neil Patel channel?

Yeah. And we're just like, here you go. You can have it.

If you're going to look at it, just go to his Founder Path channel and he's, he posted it there today, I think. And just like those of you that want to do a webinar, just copy this way. That's the way to do it.

Yeah. The only part I didn't like is you're making people turn on their video. We tend not to do that. And there's this like, what if it's a mother there and chilling with their kids or someone feeding their kids or, you know, having— because people are in different time zones, someone's having breakfast with their family.

Some people weren't happy. Some people were like, oh, oh, really? Camera on? Okay, I'm out. They put it in chat.

Yeah. So we don't try to force any of that. And we also try to offer recorded version and we don't like asking people to do anything for it because it's like, if you're giving enough value, what we found is you'll generate the revenue from it.

What, so what kind of results do you typically get from your webinars?

I actually did a presentation that didn't work. I actually put it on Twitter earlier today. So our webinars, we've changed our strategy. We used to get, 4,164 signups per average.

That's a lot, everyone.

On average per webinar. We now get 12,223 people on average per webinar signing up.

What happened?

Do we do the Twitter strategy? So we take, we put out a lot of content on Twitter because it's one of the only social networks that don't, that doesn't penalize your X if you put out tons of content. We test different hooks, we see what works the best. We then create short-form videos from the best performing ones on a daily basis. We then create a weekly blog post based on what performed the best for the week from all the Shorts, which is just the same copying of the X posts, the highest performing ones.

Yeah.

And then on a monthly basis, we take the 2 top performing Shorts out of all the networks because we use the same video across all, you know, 5 platforms. X, we don't post the video version. The 5 platforms are Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And we then create webinars on it. So the title, Or the hook, whatever you want to end up calling it, resonates more. And what we found is we've gotten a lot more signups. So it went from 4,164 signups per webinar to 12,223 on average.

And that's because you changed the headlines and the hooks and all that stuff because of all the testing you do on—

On X.

Okay.

And if you don't have X traffic, just run ads to your posts on X and you'll quickly see which ones do well. And X may still be doing matching on advertising funds. So that can help a lot. And our average revenue per webinar went up from $158,346 to $460,254.

How are you, over what time period are you tracking that? Because yours is like, there's a sales cycle, right?

Correct.

Yeah.

2023 to 2024. But when I say 2023 to 2024, we excluded, A month and a half of 2023 that we started doing the new approach. So we moved that in the bucket of 2024. Our calendar year for our organization starts in October.

Yeah.

So because we founded the company in October, so even though taxes we file in January, we actually looking at— we look at our years from, I forgot, October 17th or 27th or something like that to the next October. Wait, so, so that's 2023 to 2024. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, it makes sense. So what was the revenue again?

Per webinar, it went from $158,346 to $460,254.

So that's the headline, how Neil Patel makes $460,000 per webinar.

It's not really Neil Patel. We got a whole team and they help with the production.

NP Digital makes $464,000 per webinar.

And I'm not the only one who presents on there.

We have some great team. NP Digital, that's the headline. Okay, cool. All right, anyway, that's it for today. We went a little over as well. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to register for the Agency Owners Association. That's the group that Neil and I run for agency owners, and we have remarkably a lot of interest in it. So we're capping the number of people for the first thing that we're doing. So yeah, go there and register, and we will see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.