Site removes ads and traffic explodes 113%, Sam Sulek's views are falling, Neil’s acquisition & more

I got this tweet over here from Ferry Cazzoni. He said, this is interesting to you. I'm pretty sure it'll be interesting to you. I removed all ads from this site and organic visibility exploded 113%. So, remember before we talked about the sites that got hit by the helpful content update, 97% of them had ads on them. So this guy removed all the ads, organic visibility went up. So his question here is, is this the end of ads monetized websites? Ad monetized websites. I set up a single variable test a few weeks ago. Remove all ads from website without doing anything else. No link building, no content change, no tech SEO change. Then wait for a few weeks. The initial results are in. The website experienced a massive boost in positions for all important keywords as seen in the images. Next steps, full UI revamp, content pruning, topical authority sculpting, relentless digital PR link building. Just link building. This website was once the leading tax calculator website in the UK. Then the search intelligence miracle happened and I've had to focus on the agency operations. I've abandoned the site. Now it's time to play with it and see if we can get Get it back to take the throne. So in this little thing over here, you can see the graph, Neil. You can see the graph moves up after the ads are removed. I think that's an interesting experiment.

Were the ads AdSense?

I don't know.

I'm curious if they're actually if sites are getting less traffic because of its AdSense.

You can way back machine this one. It's income-tax.co.uk again.

Income-tax.co.uk. All right.

So go before March of 2024. So the ads were removed in March of 2024.

March. So the ads were removed in March. So go February. Yeah. Income tax. All right, I'm going to go January because I can't get a February. Yeah, they actually have a February screenshot. Either way, let's see what they have on January 27th. The only problem with Wayback Machine, and I love it, it's just, it's slow. Website server is returning an unknown error. Great.

Don't worry, guys, this is worth it. We're going to see what kind of ads were removed. My sense is they're probably AdSense.

If they're AdSense, that would suck for Google. Okay, powered by Clicko. Agree and close. That's privacy policy. I can't see where the ads are being displayed from. I don't see any ads on this page. This is February 28th.

We tried.

Maybe there were ads, I just can't see it.

Let's move over to—

Because there's some areas that look like banner ads that have the size. It's just a bunch of, you know, like hexagons.

It could be he's using some like random network. Remember the guy Sam Sulik? The super buff dude?

Yeah, on YouTube, he has tons of views.

He's got 3.4 million subscribers. But what I want to call out here is that his views are declining. And so he's still doing all these workouts, right? And he's averaging like still 150,000 to 200,000 views per video, which is still a lot. 7 days ago, he got 500,000. But if you go back like 3 months ago or so, 3 months ago or so, he was averaging about 400,000 400K views per video and then somewhere at like 830K, somewhere at— but yeah, 3— like call it 400K views per video. So, it's going down. The average is coming down. And the point is being famous, it's hard to stay famous. We talked about the half-life of fame declining very quickly. It's hard to become like the next Oprah. It's just because the algorithms are going to favor whoever else is up and coming. And then someone— if you're not constantly innovating, you're going to fade. And that's why it's very hard to be like a MrBeast.

So it was funny. So over the weekend I did breakfast— or weekend?

No, Friday.

Friday I did breakfast with AJ. You know AJ?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I not know AJ?

Yeah, AJ. Oh yeah, that's true. You worked with him. But AJ films all my social content. So AJ tells me, hey, Neil, you had this post on social media how branding, your personal brand doesn't drive more than $10 million a year in revenue. And I was like, yeah. He's like, I don't believe that. And I was like, well, we ask people how they found us, why they buy. It's not perfect measurement, but it's as close as good as we can get.

Relatively.

Yeah. And he's like, I just don't believe it. And he's like, you know, anyone I talk to in marketing, they know you. It must affect your revenue much more. And I told AJ, I was like, dude, you know, when you were at Single Grain, because he used to be at Single Grain years ago, he was one of the partners. I was like, what kind of businesses hit us up? And he's like, well, there's a lot of people that were willing to spend like $5,000 a month, some $10,000. He's like, if we got like a $20,000 a monther, that was like a good-sized client.

Back in the day, that was everything.

That was everything, right? But there was rarely large corporations that were willing to spend an arm and a leg. Would you agree with that statement? Because you were there back in the day.

Yes.

And I was like, if you actually look at my brand during COVID I was more up and coming and more people were Googling me on a monthly basis than they are now. Would you agree with that statement? So when you look at it, that was probably during the peak of my brand. Now maybe more people know about me because they've seen me, but I'm not like in the in right now where everyone's like, oh my God, Neil's a hot thing. From a popularity standpoint. Yeah, from a popularity standpoint. But right now, more larger corporations hit us up than ever before. And he's like, no dude, it has to be because they know you're Neil Patel and they want to work with you. I'm like, that has nothing to do with it. And we get hit up by more global 5,000 companies now than we ever did before. And no joke, they get on the phone, And they'll be like, you know, once they get basic questions answered and it goes into discovery and pitch and all this, who's going to be working on our campaign? What's their LinkedIn profiles? What's their credentials? What other accounts have they worked on? What were the results that they provided? Not just what the company has produced, but what are the people on their account? They never once say, hey, is Neil going to be on my account? What's his credentials? They don't care.

In the beginning, they might have, in the very beginning.

Yes, but they were much smaller corporations that hit us up. That's my point. We never got these size corporations at this scale.

Big corporations don't care.

Yeah, they don't care. All they care about is who's working on my account, are they smart, and are they going to produce results? That's really it. And I was breaking down to AJ, I'm like, no, you think branding has a big effect. It doesn't as much as people think, at least in B2B. B2C could be totally different, but in B2B, that's not necessarily the case. And I'm not saying I can build a more popular brand, but if my brand really was helping driving tons of revenue, you know me, I would spend tons of time on it and I would capitalize on it.

And a lot of money. You'd be spending a lot of money on it.

I was spending a ton of money. We cash flow extremely well. I would burn $1 million a month if I knew I could make more money on it. It's just not producing the ROI.

And guys, FYI, Neil's not being facetious here or anything. Like, I know Neil, when he bets on something, he'll actually bet hard.

Yes.

So it's just the reality, right? Think about business 101 at the end of the day. If you do right by the customers, you do a good job for the customers, they're going to come back to you in spades. They're going to want you to do everything for them, right? But if it's just you're popular, who gives a crap? It has nothing to do with them. Like, how do you help them, right? So it's— don't overvalue the brand at the end of the day. Yes, create content, absolutely, because marketing is getting harder. But after that, you just got to focus on having a good product and service.

It's like, just imagine working at IBM or some large corporation and be like, I hired Neil Patel. Look how well-known this guy is. And let's hypothetically say Neil doesn't produce results or I don't produce results. Their job is on the line. They're going to look terrible.

Yep.

But on the flip side, if they're just like, hey, Forrester recommended this company, they did a detailed analysis of all the top ad agencies and oh, look at these people on our accounts. They worked in our space before. Here were the results they provided for competitors. You know, we think this is the best shot for them to provide results for us. We have these 3 problems. They've solved these 3 problems for X, Y, and Z company, and this is what they produce and this is what the timeframe. And let's say it doesn't work out hypothetically. People are like, oh well, you made a calculated decision on who you chose. You went through procurement, you went through a lot of agencies, you vetted a ton. All right, it didn't work out, go find another one. But you're not that likely to lose your job over a decision like that. But over a decision like, I hired Neil because he's well known, well, you could end up losing your job. And even though I would say I'm good at marketing, and I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I really do believe I'm good at marketing based on the results. Just because you hire me or Eric or Gary Vaynerchuk or whoever, if you hire us 1,000 times, there's no way we're going to produce amazing results 1,000 times. Just like every other human, we're not perfect. People don't have 100% success rate at mass scale. So companies want to really vet and make sure they're picking the best fit out there so they don't look bad.

It's really a de-risking exercise at the end of the day. When they ask you, how big is your headcount? What type of accounts have you worked on before? Who's actually working on it? They're trying to make sure that their job is safe, right? And they also want, like, if you're working somewhere, what is your objective? You want to make more money, you want to get promoted. And so you got to think about what they're looking for at the end of the day, not how popular you are.

Dude, the other day we pitched a company, large corporation, and we were a finalist. There was 2 of us. We beat out a lot of the hold company or holdcos, and it was between us and Assembly. Assembly is owned by Stagwell, so they're publicly traded. And they literally got on the phone with us, a few of the people, like, look, you guys had better pricing. We liked your presentation more, loved the team. And keep in mind, we have 1,000+ people. And they're just like, we chose Assembly. And when we asked them why, they're just like, It was a safer bet.

Because they have a couple, they have like 5,000+ people, right?

Stagwell?

More. No, Assembly only.

Yes, but it's owned by Stagwell. So someone's going to look at it as a whole company. And I don't know how many people Stagwell has. I can't find it on LinkedIn. But they're a much bigger corporation. My guess is Stagwell has 10,000+ people, if I had to guess. But either way, right, like even at our size, yeah, it says online, 10,000+ employees. Even at our size, we lose deals to others, even if they say we have a better pitch. And I don't know if we have a better pitch. I'm just telling you what they're saying. They're just saying, hey, you're not the safer choice. And it was funny. We pitched a large publicly traded beauty company, one of the largest ones out there. We also lost that. Funny enough with that one, one of our Employees, his wife works at that corporation too. And she asked him, she's like, oh, why didn't you choose NP Digital? They said, great pitch, loved them, too risky. I didn't want to bet my job on them. I want to go with a big holding company because if it didn't work out, at least my job's not at risk.

That's a good one. I didn't want my— I didn't want to bet my job on them. So it's like, are you good enough for someone to bet their job on?

And it's very rare. They're just like, I don't want to get fired. The economy is shaky. They're just like, nope, I don't want to end up choosing. They're really happy with them. They're like, yeah, it looked like they would do better work, but I didn't want to risk my job on NB Digital.

De-risk, that's the key word here.

And we have over 1,000 employees and it's still risky. That's what I mean in B2B. It's not just about, oh, is Neil well-known or Gary well-known or Eric really well-known? Dude, a lot of these companies are going to be like, oh, I'm going to go with WPP. They have over 100,000 employees. It's a safe bet.

Yep. And hopefully, you know, that, that, I think that measure, that proxy changes in the next decade or so. I think it's going to take some time to change. But the proxy that you have more employees is safer, hopefully that shifts. It should be more about value generated, but it's never about what should be. Sometimes it's just about the perception.

What's funny is I think we're going to get a lot less of that within 3 years because our growth is still really good and we've been acquiring a lot of businesses. So I think within 3 years, we'll get a lot less of that. But we'll still get that for the really big campaigns when someone's like, I will spend $100 million a year on agency fees or whatever. So I think we'll get it for really large accounts. Um, but then we're going to have the flip side problem. Oh, we think you're too big and we're not going to get the attention that we deserve.

Yeah, yeah, it goes both ways. There's always trade-offs at the end of the day. All right everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside. Did you see that GPT-4o destroyed an HOA?

No.

Oh, you didn't see this? Oh, you'll actually like this because sometimes you have to deal with HOA, you know?

Yes. So Eric is talking about homeowners association.

Yes. Go. Do you want to explain it more? I'm going to read this.

Homeowners association is like when you live in the condo building. So I live in a condo building here in LA. There's 50-something units in this building, we each pay a fee each month to help maintain the building. And collectively, I don't know what they collect, maybe $200,000-$300,000 a month to help pay for maintenance and staff and concierge and And all that kind of stuff.

They probably make a killing off of it.

I don't know. I think they break even.

Okay. But this is a different— this is a brand name over here. But let's— there's, there's dirty HOAs. You know this to be a fact, not that you had to deal with this in the past, right? So this person, Nikki Bacher, Knickerbocker, said this. So I began receiving unsubstantiated HOA violations, as in my property is immaculate. And there's absolutely no reason to be receiving these things. And I used it, we, to begin the process of documenting these actions and investigation strategy. The management company, so the HOA did this, they sent a bunch of these PDFs that were nested into inconsistent directories with about 30% duplicates and tried to just basically get them off the case. It's like, we're going to give you all these documents, these files, you're never going to review it. So this person went into, they wrote a script to gather the documents, convert the PDFs to text, and remove the duplicates. With the clean TXT files, we wrote another script to concurrently call the GPT-4o API using OpenAI to extract consistent data from them using JSON. The cost was $9 in API fees and only took a few minutes of time. With the new dataset, we ran analysis to find the enforcement anomalies. We then took the data subset and dumped it into a Google Map. And just like that, we have proof of targeted and selective enforcement. And then eventually they got a video showing that HOA Karen ran up to the house and tried to like take a picture or whatever, and they took a picture of them doing it. And then now they're going back towards the HOA. But that's, that's the power of ChatGPT-4o. And this is just the beginning still.

That's crazy. But yeah, some of these HOAs get really carried away and they're just like, oh, you're not allowed to have guests at your house. You need to notify us before you're allowed to have guests. And it's like, screw you. I bought the home.

I own this house. Yeah. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Joe Biden, um, I don't know if he's still hiring, but he was hiring a meme master. Guess how much the salary was?

$50,000?

No, $85,000, but still not like amazing, you know what I mean?

Yeah, but it's government. Well, actually, it's probably his campaign people.

If you want a meme dealer, like the meme dealer drives so much reach, you're not gonna get an amazing meme dealer for, you know, If I was him, I would spend half a million dollars on a— Yeah, on a meme dealer. Absolutely. So, you know, if we talk a little bit about Trump, we should talk about Biden too. So there we go. And did you know that there's a webinar that created a $200 million a year business?

No.

So, by the way, this guy might speak at the event next year. You know who this guy is? Russell Brunson. So here's the webinar that created a $200 million a year business. So Russell Brunson of ClickFunnels Basically, their software is a software that helps you make funnels, landing pages, and things like that. And he's always used the same webinar ever since, like, really when I was like 28 years old or so. So maybe 10 years ago or so, he's used the perfect webinar formula where he like— and you actually use the perfect webinar formula too.

Yeah.

Where you stack the different value and then you just keep giving value. And then it's like, what about this? I'm going to add this over here. I'm going to add this over here. And it's like— and then it's like, here's the value of this. It's $20,000. But I'm going to charge you only $500 for this, right? And then everyone just buys at the end. The way he built his business, like ClickFunnels was struggling in the beginning, but using this webinar formula, he's just— he just kept doing webinars and then he made an offer where he bundled his software, right, with all this other like courses and all that. And he sold it for $1,000 or $2,000 or whatever. And that's how he made it his business, right? So was it true SaaS at the end of the day? I'd say yeah, but I think it's a lot of marketing that went into it. And it just goes to show you that there are different ways of growing a company.

Let's see if I have this text here with Ryan Deiss about talking about webinars. My text—

Like Perfect Webinar?

Uh, no, I'm— I had a text conversation with Ryan Deiss. This was—

And just so everyone knows, Ryan Deiss, uh, digital marketer.

My text messages are gone. They delete every 30 days to save space on my phone. Yeah, but, um, so Ryan Deiss and I were talking about webinars, call it a few months ago. I had a company in Canada who was looking to create a webinar And I haven't done webinars the Russell Brunson style in ages. It stopped working for us a while ago. And I was like—

You were selling something different too.

I was selling something different. I was asking Ryan, I was like, hey, who's a great person to create webinars? I know this company who's looking to hire someone. And he's like, honestly, what's industry? I break it down. He's just like, honestly, webinars don't work that well to sell most products. He's like, they just don't work like they used to anymore. They're played out. And I was like, all right, so what works? He's just like, oh, VSLs, infomercials still work, especially if it's B2C. He's like, the reason webinars work really well for, call it, people like the Russell Brunson, is because it's biz op. You can make money if you're selling something that can potentially make people rich. That stuff converts really well. If it's not that you're going to get rich, these webinar formulas, they don't work that well anymore.

You should explain biz op because it's an internet marketing—

Biz op is like, if you look at Russell Brunson's pitch for ClickFunnels, he used to do pitches like, if you sell enough ClickFunnels or join ClickFunnels affiliate program and you can retire for life and you don't have to work anymore. And he would pretty much break down, if you can generate X amount of sales per month and they keep paying, you get paid a commission and you can just live on a beach. He's pretty much pitching the model of this can make you money. People want to make money and they want to make money with the least amount of effort. Those pitches do really well in webinars using his formula. Doing normal B2B stuff doesn't work as well if you're not promising like that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I think what's worked well, I think what fits both Neil's and I's personality is just doing a webinar to teach and not necessarily asking for a hard, like, give us some money right after. That's— I've seen it work well for me. I think it works well for you too.

But it doesn't make as much money compared to if you say like, The average person who signs up for this webinar, I'm making this up, is making $1 million within the first 6 months. Is that going to be you? They were only taking on 80 people. Click here now to sign up.

Yeah, there's a— it's a different audience at the end of the day, right? Yeah.

And I'm not saying Russell is doing anything that aggressive, but I would consider ClickFunnels pitch more biz-off.

Yeah. And it's a different type of pitch. Well, look, it's again, going back to what we said earlier in this podcast, it's what works for him. And yeah, it's different. Right.

And he's made good money doing it, right? And it's just like the— also the other thing that you have to realize, if you go the biz op approach, if you look at ClickFunnels, you can generate revenue really fast, good margins, but you're going to have higher churn with the biz op crowd because it's like versus getting Apple, who's a multi-trillion dollar company, to sign up and pay $1,000 a month. They don't care about $1,000 a month. It's such a drop in the bucket. They'll keep paying for a long time. But you get a smaller company or a 2-man shop signing up for a product that costs $1,000 a month, even $500 a month.

By default, even if they fail, you turn like— yes, there's a lot to take into account. So even if your product's good, that's what I mean. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and also go to marketingschool.io/agency if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster. So that being said, we'll catch you later.