The best marketing channel, Greatest marketing myths, 1 person companies doing $300M+ and more

The best marketing channel is where people spend the least amount of time. So I had a little fun. I did a ton of Google searches. I looked at a lot of different websites to figure out where people are spending their time on the internet or using at least the pipeline, right? Like the connection. So people spend 2 hours and 52 minutes according to Statista on emails a day. Now most of that time on emails is just communicating, but Literally 2 hours and 52 minutes. They spend 2 hours and 37 minutes on streaming like Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, although it's called Max now. They spend 2 hours and 27 minutes a day on average on social media and search engines, a whopping 15.4 minutes a day.

Wow.

That's ridiculous.

It's a lot less than I thought.

I took the Statista number per month and then I had to divide it to get the daily time, at least for that one. Now, when people think like, oh, the ROI is where the attention is, right? In marketing, we always talk People talk about, oh, go where the attention is. But just because that's where you think the attention is doesn't necessarily mean that's where the ROI is. And a great example of this, what do you use email for on a daily basis? What's the main purpose of your email?

Communicate. Yes.

How many emails do you get a day pitching you something?

Too many.

And what do you do with most of them?

Ignore.

Do you even open them up?

Nope. Yeah, same here.

I literally mark a lot of them as read and then sometimes I get an email a week later from someone. I'm like, oh, this wasn't someone pitching me, they actually needed something. Let me open it up. You actually clean your inbox.

I just let it build.

Oh, I clean it every single day. I'm too OCD. Social media, people spend roughly 2.5 hours. What do you spend on social media?

Just mindless scrolling, right? Unless I'm on Twitter, I'm trying to learn.

Twitter, same here. But on Instagram, I just keep scrolling through the reels and I look for—

That's why I have that thing that prevents me from logging in easily.

I just don't log into my social media that often.

You're good about that.

Yeah. Yeah. And then Streaming, even though people are doing ads these days on like Netflix or on Amazon. Dude, I just upgraded my Amazon yesterday night because I was tired of seeing ads when I was watching Amazon. So I paid the $2 and something.

There's a new add-on for ad-free for Amazon?

Yes, $2 and something cents.

Wow. On top of the Prime?

Yeah, I was pissed off, but I paid it.

It's okay. Their actuary is like, this will be good for us.

It was expensive. Yeah, you're looking at roughly $30 a year. I didn't want to spend the money. Yeah, well, I'm sure you pay for every other No, I get a lot of them for free with T-Mobile.

You do?

Yes, T-Mobile gives you free Apple— what is it called? Apple Plus?

You use T-Mobile?

Yeah.

Who uses T-Mobile?

You get free streaming.

Oh, I didn't know that.

You don't want to— you have to look at the total price. What are you paying for your contract? The value you're getting from your international calls? And then you got to do a spreadsheet math to see what saves you the most money. All right. Continue. Okay, so streaming. Yeah, they're starting to serve ads. But like, dude, when you watch a TV show, you don't do tons of streaming, do you? You don't watch tons of movies.

I watch— no, I do. Have you seen Masters of the Air?

I have not. I saw parts of it, but I didn't finish it.

It's great. But anyway, yeah, I do watch stuff. I watch a lot of anime.

But when you watch that stuff, you're watching it for entertainment.

Yeah.

You're not watching it to buy something.

Yeah, I'm passively consuming.

Yes, same here. But when you do a Google search—

I have intention. Yes.

If you search for cheap laptop, you're looking to buy a cheap laptop. If you look for, you know, credit cards for people with bad credit, you're looking for a credit card solution. And you're not spending that much time on search, you're just clicking through to a website. But it's intention-based.

It's a great toll booth. Google is the greatest toll booth on the internet.

Yes. And I love it for that. So although people are like, oh, you know, the attention's on social media. But if you look at it from an ad dollar perspective, Meta in 2022 generated— because not everyone's done their quarterly earnings, but in 2022, They generated $113 billion in ad revenue. Do you know how much—

Oh, no.

Yes. Do you know how much Google generated during the same time period?

Double?

Yeah, pretty much. $224 billion.

Yup. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense and, you know, it's— sure, you can get all the attention in the world. We can get hundreds of millions of views but the quality of the view matters. Like this is more of a B2B podcast, right? We don't talk about politics. We don't talk about, you know, so-and-so drama or whatever. We just talk about business, right? Gives us a different audience.

Yes. We've also found that if you just focus on what you're good at and nothing else, your audience monetizes way better than if you talk about everything.

I got one here on— this tweet is from Ross Simmons. So, biggest marketing myths you've been told. So I figured, hey, we might— let's just talk about some of the biggest marketing myths out there. What do you think are some of the biggest marketing myths? For example, number 1, people think SEO is dead. I've been hearing that since I started learning SEO in the very beginning. SEO is dead.

Number 2, email's dead. Is that on the list?

No, uh, no, it's not.

Okay.

Yeah, we should talk about that too.

Yeah, but what's his list? Read off his list.

Okay, his list is the best product wins. Number 2, build it and they will come. 3, more creative equals more effective. 4, good marketing equals immediate results.

5, nobody reads long form. Whoa, this is too fast. Start with the first one, we'll talk about everything else.

Let me go 0.5 speed. So people say I talk at 2x sometimes, but Number 1, the best product wins.

Which isn't true. A lot of people have built crappy products and they win. You can have the best product, but if no one knows about it or you're terrible at marketing it, or a lot of times, look at YouTube. They weren't the first player out there. There was other great players before them and they got bloody and lost.

That's why it's a myth.

Yeah, it's a myth.

Yeah. Number 2, build it and they will come.

Yeah, I learned that one the hard way. My first business, I built it and no one came to it. And then I learned about social media marketing.

First business?

No, first business was a job website.

Oh yeah, that's right. Because you got mad about Monster.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then you learned internet marketing. Okay. 3, more creative equals more effective.

No, you can build a ton of creatives and if they suck, they still suck. But at the same time, if you just have one creative, you do get fatigue. And if people keep seeing the same creative over and over again, it actually hurts you. So you need enough, but they all need to be good.

I think the theme from this session, today's recording is really just scale. How do you scale? Not only scale, but how do you scale quality? Quality content also means quality creative as well. How do you keep leveling up the output while keeping the quality high?

Yeah.

That's very hard.

That's true.

But by the way, the reason we like doing podcasts is because, because we have quality conversations with people and we believe that we're doing quality work. Naturally, the content should be higher quality than other people. And it's just easier to talk like this versus like having to come up with ideas every time. And then we just share the cool stuff that we're reading, the quality content that we consume, we try to make it into quality conversations. Anyway, next one. So, next one is nobody reads long-form content anymore.

No one reads long-form content. That's very false.

I read a lot of long-form content.

Yeah, me too. Majority of the content I read is long-form.

Yeah. What are you reading?

I read The Economist. Well, it's not really long-form, but I read a lot of like stats and data.

Economist is long.

It's not that long.

It's not?

It's longer than a New York Times article in many cases, but it's not like that long-form. A lot of the long-form content that I read is like when people do analysis on something. So, for example, Patrick Campbell is known for a long-form He did a great competitive strategy one.

It's super long. Yeah.

Yeah. When he talked about don't worry about your competitors, like, you know, that myth, like Amazon talks about, oh, don't obsess about your customers, not your competition. But that analysis was really long. So I read a lot of stuff like that because it gives insights on what businesses should be focusing on.

Yeah. Long-form writing, you can tell like the good writers, like Patrick's a very good writer. When you go very long, you're actually incentivized to share Really interesting data too. And you're going to pick out a couple nuggets that usually you might not get from a conversation.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so what are some myths that we think are— that we've been told? So SEO is dead?

No, SEO is not dead.

What else is— what else is dying? What else is a myth?

Email marketing is dead? People still open up emails. I don't know how companies can run a corporation without email. Dude, you know, it's funny. Like a year and a half ago, two years ago, maybe more, three or so years ago, I was talking to Tai Lopez. At the time, he was acquiring a lot of companies like Dress Barn, Pier One, etc. Right. And they're like, "Cool, let's communicate on WhatsApp with all like people in your company and my company." I'm like, "Dude, no one uses WhatsApp for this." I'm like, "People use email. It's an old school channel. It still works." He's like, "Ah, no one really uses email." I'm like, "No, no, no, people are using." Who said nobody uses email, Tai? Like for internal communication. Yeah, right. He was like—

You were telling— you were talking to Tai?

Him and his team.

Okay, got it.

Not just him, but they were telling me that like, oh yeah, people more on like WhatsApp is a new way. I'm like, dude, in business, people still communicate by email. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it.

It was not going away. Like all the Gen Z people, they can say whatever, right? Or even millennials. But Gen Z, they're coming into the job force. And it's like, when you come into job force, who are your superiors? There are people that use email. So then you're forced to learn email. And it's just, it's like email will never die because like, for a while, because it's something that you can control. And then usually what happens with email, if you're delivering good content, is you can just ring the register every now and then. Like it's good for that.

What Eric means by ring the register is you can send out a promo selling them on a service or a product and then cash starts coming in.

Here's what I think we should talk through is ROI must be known for everything. And I think 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, when I was learning marketing. I was like, oh damn, man, the new marketing, everything's going to be trackable. But we're in a world now where it's like, maybe not so much.

Well, laws are changing, so it's becoming hard to track everything. But Eric and I also through our career, we've learned the value of a brand. People buy Nike shoes because when people want shoes, they just know Nike. When people want a credit card, they look at Visa, Amex, MasterCard because they're just well-known brands. When you want an electric car, people think Tesla because they have the brand out there. Brand's powerful. If when we look at the biggest companies we work with, or majority of the companies we work with on the enterprise side, majority of their revenue comes from just people knowing their brand.

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 to the show. This can be the, the last piece over here. This tweet's from, um, Alexander Volodarsky, and his tweet says this: I'm obsessed with one-person companies and can and keep track of all I can find. Here's the full list: Stardew Valley Game generated three hundred million dollars in revenue in six years. One-person company.

Digital and what? What do they do?

It's a game.

There's only one person.

Yeah, search it up. Stardew Valley D E W. Stardew Valley Game.

Stardew Valley. Has anyone even heard of this game?

I haven't heard of it. Uh, Rego Apps generated approximately $100 million in total revenue. Digital Inspiration builds Google plugins and generates $10 million in revenue per year. That's already 3. Plenty of Fish— don't you know that the owner, the founder of Plenty of Fish?

It was a one-man shop.

It wasn't one man. Um, he later— so, okay, initially it generated $10 million in annual revenue with just the founder. Later he hired more employees and then sold it for $575 million. Yeah, yeah. And that guy was like hardcore in the affiliate space too.

Yeah, it was good for him.

Yeah, but what did you find about Stardew Valley game?

I've never seen it, but I'm gonna show it to everyone on the screen. It's a farming game where you farm vegetables.

Yeah, it's like FarmVille.

Yeah, it's like FarmVille. Yeah, good for them. I've never played this thing. I also don't really play games. You play games, right?

No, but we tried. I can't. Business is too fun. Business is the ultimate game.

But you used to play games.

Yeah. Oh, hardcore. And you know, BuiltWith, obviously, they generate $14 million in revenue a year and it's one person.

Really?

Yeah.

It's still one person?

Yeah.

Oh.

I see the wheels turning in your head right now.

You know what they're turning for?

Yeah, I know, I know, I know. See, that's why you guys can keep listening to this.

Let me send out an email today.

Uh-huh. And then here, let me see what else might be interesting to you here.

I probably won't get a response, but I'll send out an email.

Tools for wisdom makes two million a year. That's not for you. But anyway, oh, Milled is a search engine for newsletter by Chaz with an annual revenue of one million dollars.

Milled?

Yeah. I'll send you this tweet afterwards. You can see all this stuff.

That's cool.

Yeah. Anyway, so you got anything else?

No.

All right. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. It helps us grow. And if you're an agency owner, Agency Owners Association, go apply. Markingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you tomorrow.