Strategies to Thrive During the Times | The War Room with Eric Siu #04

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All right, cool. So we're gonna get started. Um, I've been doing these— I've been trying to do these every Tuesday at 8:30 AM Pacific. And, um, I do these right after my Peloton ride. So right, right over there after I finish my ride. So you can see I'm pretty sweaty right now. My face is a little red as well. Um, but yeah, I've been doing that to, you know, keep myself sane. And, um, yeah, you know, today I wanted to talk about, um, You know, kind of where my mindset's at. You know, given at least in America, we're probably in week three up down. People are getting crazy, being inside all time. And I think I'm in Los Angeles. Californians in general are have been pretty good at staying in so far. We'll see what happens in the next couple weeks. But yeah, I wanted to talk thing talk about the context of you know. Really thinking about how you can build something for the long term during time periods like this. Because if I think about, you know, the time that I took over my, my agency Single Grain, I took over the company about, um, 6 years ago, almost 7 years ago. And at the time it was a company that was completely failing and, um, I had no audience at the time. So I was building my audience at the same time that, um, I was saving the company. And some would say that You should really think about focusing on one thing at a time and then expanding. And I agree with that to an extent. I would just say that without me building the audience at the same time, I would be nowhere near I am right now. And I'm still, I'm always, it's always a continuous journey. I'm not saying I'm at the end of the journey, I'm continuing to grow, but I'm saying I do not have any regrets about building the audience at the same time that I was trying to save the company. Because you think about it, I was trying to save a failing digital agency. Our blog was only getting a couple thousand visits a month, so it was really getting nothing. I had no podcast audience. So I was, you know, the blog, you know, we're building, we built a content marketing strategy around it. We get 250,000 visits a month right now, which is not bad for a marketing blog. And then, you know, the podcast, that's led to me having 2 podcasts and then cumulatively get about 1.2 million downloads a month right now. And then the YouTube channel, although it's a much smaller thing right now, You know, it's taking time to grow and we're at about 33,000. We don't try to write like a bunch of, you know, catchy headlines all the time and, you know, trendy stuff. I mean, I just keep producing video and I know it's going to grow consistently.

So session has been started.

So apparently I might be in the wrong session right now, but someone's saying start the session. So not sure what's going on here, but let me just double check. Let me just click on this one over here. Apparently I might be in the wrong session right now, but someone's saying start the session. Oh, here we go. Cool. So Jonathan Coates, I can see you. Apparently I'm in the wrong session right now, but it's okay. Some of you can see this right now. Hello, Jason. And yeah, I mean, so my point is this, you know, to stop me from rambling, the point is now is the perfect time if you don't have any audience at all to build that moat. Because, you know, I always use this quote from the '90s. Bill Gates always said that in the 2000s or in the future, Most companies are going to be successful are going to be media companies, and you have to think of it that way. Because if you're going to do e-commerce, let's say you sell luggage, let's say you sell you sell bikes, whatever you sell exactly, you have to be you have to kind of stand for something and you have to be a brand. And you know, I think without being able to build that leverage, I wouldn't be able to make changes that I want to make right now. So let's say I took over the agency; I didn't build a brand. Now in times like this, where agencies are losing anywhere from thirty, forty to eighty percent of their business. There wouldn't be many options for me. The option would be, oh, we need to go get more business, right? And that's not the solution right now because people aren't looking to buy, let's say agency services. In fact, they're looking to cut down on, let's say marketing spend, advertising spend, whatever, right? But having an audience gives me a lot of flexibility because I can say, okay, what does my audience like? Well, my audience likes learning. And then there's a smaller subset and actually have a really big, much bigger audience around people that might be willing to pay $10, $15, $20 a month. And sure, I can keep the agency side of things because people are always going to want to work with the agency. But now's the time where I can make drastic changes because my audience has given me flexibility, right? If I want to do— before this craziness started happening, we added advertising to our podcast. We added an event to our podcast. So advertising, that's almost a 7-figure contract a year split between 2 people. And then We have our event, which we charge, it's a high ticket price, $25,000 plus for that event. But it gives me options. And my point is, if you build an audience first, and most of you that are thinking about starting a business right now, if you think audience first and then build a product, that's actually a better way of going about it. Because if you think about, oh, I need to make money and I'm going to go do this product, that's the wrong way of thinking about it. That's actually backwards, right?

Yeah.

But if you think about, hey, this is what I'm interested in, this is what I'm going to create content for, then ultimately it's going to work out at the end of the day. And just like business, just like investing, I mean, when you're putting time into content, you're basically investing your time, right? So you're investing, it's going to compound, and eventually you're going to be able to build economies of scale because you're going to put in the same amount of effort and your audience is going to get bigger and bigger. So it's going to be more and more impactful. Um, over time. So, you know, it's, it's important to think about that right now because when I think about me trying to save the business, you know, 6, 7 years ago, it was very similar because to me it felt like a downturn because everything was on fire. Now, you know, a lot of you might be feeling everything's on fire right now, but there's a silver lining to this. If you do not have an audience right now, you have some free time. This is the time to start experimenting. You, you start to see which channel is better for you. Is it video? Is it audio? Is it writing? Um, you start to experiment with that. You commit to maybe writing You know, one post a week, and then from there you can scale up because that's how I started blogging in the first place. And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, right?

Hello, Chris.

Thank Chris said I just fell in love with you yesterday. Thank you. I'm in love with you too. And guys, feel free to ask your questions in here. Apparently, I screwed up the the the live that I had scheduled. But so, but yeah, I mean, look, I know for a fact that no matter what I do, let's say. Agency business fails. In fact, you know, if I looked at all my other businesses, the the SaaS business, the education stuff, the podcast advertising, the event stuff, maybe the event stuff, it we can postpone, so we're not really losing revenue there. But the thing I'd be worried about right now is the agency because the way we've been doing things, I'll be very transparent, is you know on the 250,000 visits a month we get to the blog, we try to drive most people to a free consultation, and it's like 0.03% of people. That actually end up converting into a free consultation. So not many people are converting into a free consultation. In fact, in terms of qualified leads, we don't get a ton of those given on all that traffic. So you can say that traffic's actually under-monetized. So what we're doing instead now is we're saying, you know what? We're going to try to drive people to an application instead. And when they fill out the application, we'll find out where they are and then we can push them to the right offer, whether it's education stuff, whether they're trying to build an agency, Whatever it is exactly, I'm going to drive into that application and then the salesperson will figure out what offer to put in front of them. So we might have 3 offerings, right? One's on how to grow your agency. The other one's on how to grow your business. So the Single Grain services and those are basically the main things. And what I would say is if you're looking to grow your agency right now, you can always book a call with myself one-on-one. We're actually doing this for the next couple weeks. If you go to singlegrain.com/call, You know, you could book a call with us and then we could have a strategy chat with you on that. But yeah, I mean, look, we're still keeping the agency, but we're going more aggressively on the education stuff that, you know, we've been meaning to pursue for a while. But, you know, it's during peacetime, it's hard to make these drastic changes because you're going to affect people at the company, people that have work, you're going to affect them, right? But during times like of war, you're allowed to make drastic changes. And that all comes back to— you know, having that audience in the first place. So, you know, you might say, hey, you know what? I don't like creating content. I'm not that type of person. Well, I don't like, like, I don't necessarily gravitate towards creating content. I, what I do enjoy is I enjoy teaching because I articulate my thoughts better and I learn more. So it's, and I, you know, at the same time, people get the benefit from that. It's one-to-many, right? Sorry, I just spit all over the camera. But yeah, I mean, you gotta think about it. At the end of the day, when you're creating an audience, it's not really about you. It's about what you're going to give other people. So if you feel like you're too early in the game right now, still you can document your journey in the early days. You can definitely do that and you're going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. And eventually you're going to have the expertise to be able to teach and you're going to have a point of view that some people are going to gravitate towards and some people might hate. And I would argue that as you get bigger, you're going to get more and more haters. And I think haters are a beautiful thing because haters tell me for the most part that you're doing the right thing because There's no one person in the world that everyone loves. There's just no such thing. So as you're getting more and more haters, you know, you're building that, you're building the audience. You kind of know you're doing the right thing unless you're getting like too many haters. Maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe, maybe you are doing something wrong. I don't know. So let's see. Chris said it was in the Thinkific training. Are you using the same funnel right now? Yes. Video about my funnel. Funnel mails. Yes. And then Abel asked, just did today, buddy.

That's awesome.

And then, and we have a question from Dim Rajan. I'll just call you Rajan. How AMP works? I mean, what I would say is if you're using WordPress, you can just use like an AMP plugin. But AMP is just, you know, it's basically, it's accelerated mobile pages. It just makes your experience on mobile when people load up your pages, it loads a lot faster. It's a nice experience, but I don't like it because it takes away control that I might have in terms of having being able to collect emails and having specific forms on the page. So I don't really like it. I used to have AMP. I don't use it anymore. And then Chris asked, would the leveling up standard package help right now, or is it more long term? Chris, I'm not sure what you mean exactly on that. So the leveling up is that's kind of our marketing training. I guess my question for you, Chris, would be what is the most important thing for you right now? Are you trying to grow like a consulting business? Are you? Trying to learn marketing, like what's your number one challenge? And then I can help answer you there. But yeah, I mean, guys, like the fact that I'm doing these lives right now at 8:30, I have an all-day meeting in in a couple minutes. I'm doing these because you know it continues to build goodwill and it continues to compound. So no matter what, you know, people always say that the best time to start is yesterday, but the next best time is today. So I don't care who you are. Like when I first started speaking, I I would. I would speak to a crowd of like 20, 30 people, get really nervous, and I would just keep thinking about myself. I'd be all sweaty at the end. And I realized after my first talk, everyone came up to me and they're asking questions. It was for them. And if you could just keep thinking about the other people, what value they're going to get, or if you document your journey similar to how Gary Vee does it, you're going to see over time, you do have a lot of insights to share and people can kind of learn from what you're doing. And I think that's really helpful and that takes a lot of the onus off of you. And I think—

Yeah.

You know, you don't need a camera like this. You can just use your iPhone or Android device, whatever you want to use, and you just start shooting videos and look, it's going to be embarrassing in the beginning, probably, unless you're like a natural. I would just say I just go and do things. I always like— my learning curve is always like, you know, it's always like this and all of a sudden it just shoots up, right? So I always suck in the beginning. Like, I suck most people in the beginning. Yeah. I think I said morning, but in the beginning, podcasting, didn't know how to interview people in the beginning, but I got better and better over time. You study other people and you do that, right? And if you see a bunch of people doing interview podcasts in your niche, maybe you do something else. Maybe you do a daily podcast like how I do with Marketing School, like 5 to 10 minutes a day. And yeah, I mean, I think there's really no excuse. I think if you want to build leverage right now, forget about what you want to sell. Unless you're really passionate about like selling, I don't know, you know, electronics or whatever, but you build your audience first and then everything else sorts itself out afterwards. That's why a lot of people, I think during periods of time like this, they're looking at, you know, what, what businesses can I buy right now? What media properties can I buy right now? That's the leverage because if you