The Right Way to Speak at Conferences

By the way, you have this one over here on the right way to speak at conferences. So you just spoke in Sydney this week and in—

Dallas.

Dallas, okay. I spoke in— I drove down to San Diego to support Tim Soulo's event. So let's talk about this, the right way to speak at conferences.

When I look at most people who speak at conferences, they just speak and they walk away. And when they speak, They focus on their message that they want to get across. The first thing you need to think about is when you're speaking is yes, you may have a message, but how can your message help the people in the audience resonate with them? And more importantly, how can they take action on them or change the way they're doing marketing or business or whatever you're speaking on, right? Coaching or health, it doesn't matter. It needs to impact them in some way. Not that, oh, this was just an amazing speech, I can relate to it, but like, This is what I'm going to do now. Like you want to empower them where they actually want to make change. That's the first thing. The second thing is people just walk away and they don't think about how the attendees, whether it's a free event or paid event, they may have spent money, but they're spending their time and they could be doing something else, but they chose to watch you speak. As a speaker, you should have appreciation of that. And you should go above and beyond to help them out when they come up to you after and they want their questions answered. So, like if someone emails me after, I will try, assuming I actually see it. If I see it, I will respond and I will answer their questions. Sometimes I do miss it because I don't know where they're emailing or it goes into spam, or maybe I just miss it because I get so many emails, but I do try to genuinely respond to everyone. And I do try to answer people's questions right then and there. So I remember one of the events I was at, I'm not going to name names, but one of the events I was at, they tried to escort me and they said, oh, we'll try to push, you know, get you to your room. And, you know, people started asking me questions and they're like, Neil has to go. He only has a few quick seconds and he has to go. And I'm like, no, it's okay. I'll answer their questions. Don't get me wrong. I could have just been in my room Watch some Netflix, or more likely I would've done work than watching Netflix.

No, more likely you would've done both at the same time.

That's true. Yeah, 'cause I always have, I usually have CNBC on the background while I'm working. The problem with Netflix is, is I had to watch a show like 10 times.

Love Is Blind, great show.

Is it good?

Great show.

See, those kind of shows you have to actually pay attention to.

Yeah.

So it's gonna be hard for me to watch that.

Well, we can debate that at lunch.

Okay. So, or you probably don't need to pay attention to it, but if you want If you want to really get all the drama that's happening, you have to pay attention. So it's just like, I believe that you should go to everyone or you should be available for majority of the people. It's hard with everyone depending on the event size and answer their questions. It's the right thing to do. I don't care who you are. You could be worth billions of dollars. If someone's taking their time to listen to you, you should try to help them out.

Yeah. So here's the funny thing. So for the Ahrefs event, because it's San Diego, right? And it was raining on Tuesday. I was like, okay, I'm going to speak and then I'm going to peel out and go, right? But I was like, no, but I still, I still left 90 minutes afterwards just to stop and speak to people, right? Because that's actually where the alpha is, the people that you talk to afterwards. You're actually building a relationship and you never know where these people are going to end up later, right? Some of these people that came out, it's like, oh, I was watching your stuff, our stuff in the very beginning since they're like 19 years old or whatever. And like, look at where they are in their career, right? And so I think for me, like one of the biggest dopamine hits I get from it is seeing people grow and I enjoy helping people. I think you enjoy helping people too. And so the right way isn't to just, you know, appear and then disappear and act like you have— you're too important for the crowd because you're there to deliver value, right? And that's part of the value delivering piece. So this is funny because we have a mutual friend that likes to go into events and then he speaks and then he just leaves immediately. And we had someone else speak about it.

We have a mutual friend?

Yeah, I'll tell you who it is at lunch. Where do they live? You know, they live in Beverly Hills.

In Beverly Hills?

Yeah, don't worry, I'll tell you after.

I can't think of who they are.

Don't worry, I'll tell you after.

I know him though.

Oh, you know him very well. Yeah. Really?

Thank you.

I'll tell you after, yeah.

I'm like blanking on a name. I know most entrepreneurs who live here in Beverly Hills.

Don't worry, I'll tell you after.

Are they in marketing and SEO?

Yeah.

Okay, I know who you're talking about. There's not a ton of us here in Beverly Hills. I don't know if they actually live in proper Beverly Hills. I could be wrong.

I'll tell you after. But anyway, my point is, it's like we've been speaking for quite a while. You've traveled, we said we were going to speak less this year. You just ramped it back up again.

Economy's bad. I don't have a choice.

Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, that's that. You highlighted another one here.

I think you— Wait, wait, before we switch topics, you were at an SEO event. Who are the rock stars who are well known in SEO these days? Because I haven't been to SEO event in, I can't even remember the last time I went to one.

I think, so in my mind, I think Kevin Indig is still great. So Kevin Indig, remember he worked at Shopify for a little bit. I think to me he's like an SEO influencer.

Tim is?

Tim Soulo, definitely. And then I'm trying to think who else stands out. Aleyda Solis stands out to me. Eli Schwartz stands out to me, even though he doesn't speak at a lot of these things. I think that guy that runs Graphite, that SEO agency, he kind of stands out to me too. I think his name's Ethan. I like the data that he shares.

I should check him out. I haven't seen his stuff. Yeah. Sam, who creates the Ahrefs videos, he's probably well known.

So I hung out with him. You want to know what's funny? So he's around our age, right? And he does the YouTube channel. I don't know if I should be saying this. We were just talking about how much we hate making YouTube videos.

We all do, dude. But we have to do it. It's like part of like life.

It's part of search everywhere. Like if you want to get found, like this is what you got to do now.

Yeah. So yeah. And YouTube drives, I think Tim once said, 10+% of the revenue or somewhere around there.

YouTube's huge for them. They crush it with YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. Like they, this is the difference between our YouTube channels versus theirs, right? I think yours is pretty good. I think mine's is like poo poo right now, but I look at theirs, they spend a lot of time on the, the idea, the ideation, which is what MrBeast does. And then on the packaging, I think most people in the SEO world, they spend too much. Oh yeah, I'm going to make a YouTube strategy for you. Let's focus on the tagging. Let's do keyword research. You're just thinking about like an SEO. You got to think about it natively.

So we spend a lot of time Thinking about the packaging, the editing, all that, and we have for a while.

We's not you, right?

The what?

We's not you, right?

I'm saying we as in NP Digital for my own channel.

Oh, got it. Yeah, so for your channel, but— Okay, go on, go on.

We spend a ton of time thinking about ideation, packaging, what will resonate. The problem is, and this is why I would say Ahrefs gets more success from their channel than I do from mine, It's, they focus on selling software from their channel. You agree with this, right? But if you look at it, they're not blatantly just shilling their software, even though it's good software. They're more so trying to educate first.

Mm-hmm.

Because of their price point, YouTube works really well for someone like them. Because we're focusing on enterprise and ideally trying to get multimillion-dollar contracts, YouTube is great for being top of mind, but it is not as big of a revenue driver as someone may think. So if you look at our channel, we track what topics from blogs, from content that actually create leads and eventually revenue. We also look at the type of stuff that our enterprise clients are paying us for and their big pain points. We try to create content around that. A lot of that stuff doesn't generate the most amount of views. If I talk about what is going to happen in SEO in 2026, that'll get 5, 10 times more views than some of my pieces of content that are really specific on, let's say, like ChatGPT. ChatGPT marketing has been beaten to death. I'm assuming you agree with this statement, right?

Mm-hmm.

It doesn't generate as many views, but we'll get questions from our potential customers or our enterprise customers, the ones we work with, they're asking us questions on like, how is ChatGPT going to be sustainable and what are they going to do? Right? Like they're asking these questions because it's like, oh, we saw a report that they're losing money. Or, you know, they're talking about, oh, YouTube's changing. What does that mean for me? So we'll talk about YouTube changes. But when you think about like, and I had a video on that and it only got 73,000 views, which is good, but the YouTube update that changes everything. And yes, it's on YouTube, so it's doing better there, but that type of content isn't going to be applicable as much to someone searching on YouTube being like, what's a YouTube SEO strategy or a hack, or how can I get more traffic or sales, right? And you know, like I had another video that did only 21,000 views, ads are going to take over AI search, and I end up breaking down ChatGPT, Google Perplexity. Most people don't care about that stuff, but our customers are talking to us more about ads in these platforms, and not all of them have ads, than actually the organic side. Because if you look at most of these enterprise companies, they spend majority of the money on paid ads. So we tend to create content that appeals to enterprises, and it's really hard to generate a direct ROI from YouTube and social channels because of the long sales cycle and how it's so multi-touch.

So what I'm hearing is, You are looking at maybe the blog content or whatever content that converts well on your website maybe, and then you're taking that and then that serves as maybe a baseline ideation thing for your YouTube channel.

2 things. So we look at what blog content they read to become a lead, and then we look at which of those leads actually converts into customers. Then we look at which of those customers are spending the most amount of money with us. Okay. Then we try to correlate back to, we don't look at just like one customer. We look at multiple data points from not just which ones are leads, but which ones are leads with how much of a budget.

Mm-hmm.

Because that gives you an indicator of how much they're willing to spend, what's enterprise and what's non-enterprise. What content are they reading before they submit an RFP to us, right? So we're looking at those indicators to see the type of content that's generating the most amount of revenue per contract. The second thing we look at is when we're talking to those ideal customers, we, you know, do you use Gong still?

Yeah.

Okay. So Gong records your sales conversations, assuming you're disclosing, you're allowed to, all that kind of stuff. You're not breaking any privacy rules, right? Ideally, you should be listening more than you're talking on the entry or opening calls. And Gong will tell you if your salespeople are talking too much versus listening. And Eric hit upon this a little bit earlier on, or maybe it was before we started recording. If you don't listen to people and you don't understand what issues they have, you're not going to know how to pitch and you're not going to know the rest of the sales process is going to be screwed up. Your first call should be a lot of listening. So we try to listen to the main pain points that customers have. And again, we do this for ideal customers. And based on those 2 variables, that is how we go and figure out what type of content to go and create on these social platforms. And a lot of them won't get views. Like for example, I put out data on how long does it take to meet someone at a conference before they close into a customer. A lot of our enterprise customers have been curious about this because they've been spending more on in-person events from a marketing standpoint, and they wanted data on this. So it took us months to do this, but we gathered enough companies that had data and then we were able to do a study on it. But the point I'm getting at is like, it got very terrible views. We didn't care that it didn't get 100,000, 500,000 views. It's for our ideal customer versus creating content on, here's a ChatGPT hack that'll get you mentioned in 24 hours. Like, that's cool.

Mm-hmm.

I bet you a lot of SMBs would love to watch that. And there's actually some hacks that we can go over. But dude, when we talk to enterprise companies, They don't care about any of those hacks. They're just like, here's a channel, it drives X percent of revenue. Here's all my other channels. People are saying this one, ChatGPT or Perplexity or AI LLMs, it's— they're going to be huge. How do we get more market share? You tell them about a hack, no one gives a crap. It won't process for them. Yeah, it won't process. They're just like, okay, we do $1 billion a year. This one channel drives $10 million. The rest drive $990 million. How do we go from $10 million to driving additional $90 million a year? So instead of a billion a year in revenue, we do a billion $90 million.

Mm-hmm.

Right? That's the kind of stuff they want to know about.

Yep.

And they know they're not going to get there with hacks.

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How is this structured? So we have a data and analytics team at NP Digital. It's automatically set up and it gets spit out into not Excel, it's a Google Sheet. So everything's in Salesforce, it's popped in there, but we actually use Google Sheets to look at and it changes every single week. I look at it more so on a monthly basis, but it changes every single week where it breaks down the type of content that's been creating the most amount of closes and updates on a weekly basis and it's cohorted out. Because the last thing you want to do is use data from 2023 and be like, wow, this drove a lot back then. We'll know what's driving revenue today. So that automatically tells our team what content is appealing and it ends up showing you revenue being closed and average marketing budget based on the content type for the leads that are coming in. So that gives us ideas. And then Nick Rochon from our enterprise team, because he deals with all the sales reps.

Yeah.

You know, and he talks to everyone on a global basis. He'll end up telling me, because I talk to him multiple times a week, of the hot topics. So I take both those 2, I send them to internal team Salo. Technically, I don't send them to anyone. Salo just gets it. And then Salo starts parsing out, here are the main topics that people want us to discuss about. And on a monthly basis, there'll be around 10 topics. Then 4 of them get chosen and the content gets scripted out. Then I go into a studio and then I just go and record.

Yep.

And then the team goes and edits. I watch the video once after it's edited. I'll leave my comments in, I think it's frame.io is what we use. I'm pretty sure it's Frame. It's an Adobe product. And then it gets published. I don't check to see if they actually make the edits. I already know they're going to make the edits. So that's how the video side is done. For the data side, it's a combination of SaaLo and Kayo. Kayo works on, manages the software products, Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, all the data feeds that we're getting in and collecting from third parties that we pay for. SaaLo deals with the studies, the surveys, the vendors, the contractors that we're paying to help us out on that. So between both of those two, we end up getting the data, it gets pushed out from—

Yep.

Kayo gets it usually from engineers, SaaLo gets it it from, the vendors we're paying to help us execute on it. And then believe it or not, once we have the data, Salo himself goes and does the graphs.

This is what happens when you have a lot of competent people that you're— that it's like, it just, it flows, everything clicks.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And then Salo and I like, we'll have the data and he'll send it to us. And sometimes we don't use it because the research didn't come up with anything that's cool or interesting. It's just like, This is crappy data. I'm not talking about the quality of the data, just like crappy data.

It's uninteresting.

It's not interesting. So then some of those pieces get thrown away. And when I say some of those pieces, it used to be a lot at the beginning. I would probably say close to like 60%. We've gotten much better at picking topics that are interesting because we actually asked our data team, A, what are clients talking to you about when it comes to data and analytics? But B, what data do we have that is interesting? And I would say at this point, it's less than 20% that gets thrown away, but I know it's more than 15%. So it's—

That's a lot better than before.

Yeah, and our goal is to get it down to under 10%. I don't ever think it'll be at 0% because if it's at 0%, you're not pushing the envelope and trying enough new things.

Yep. Dude, speaking of which, you and I kind of texted earlier this week or maybe last week or so, And I've been looking at other agencies. Some are, you know, some are, you know, PE-backed platforms and all that. And they're saying that leads are slowing down. Have you seen anything in your— just talking to other people?

I have. And I asked my team and I think I pinged Salo or Kyle. I can ask Salo right now. He should get back to me pretty quick. For what timeframe do you want to know?

We're just talking Q3, Q4. So apparently these agencies are experiencing like a Q4 slowdown in leads.

And I think I mentioned you on this, Q4 is our busiest time of the year.

Yeah. Which is strange to me that I'm hearing this in other areas.

So for you, has it been slowing down?

For us? Yeah, I would say it's slowed down a little bit too. Whereas like last month it was really strong. So yeah.

I know from a new contract standpoint, August was a hot month for us and September was a really hot month for us. Yeah.

August and September were good for us.

And you're saying October, you're seeing a slowdown?

Yeah.

Let's see. Solo notifications are silent. Let's see if I can FaceTime audio him right now. Let's see if he answers.

While Neil pulls this up, this is real time. When you need something, this is what I do in Slack. I just hit the huddle button, just like Neil's just hitting the FaceTime button when he needs something. That's what you got to do. That's how you move things along. Because guys, every single week is 2% of the year. And when people try to delay—

Yeah, let me ask Kyle.

Yeah, see, and by the way, this is another thing. When you don't get what you need in an organization, you go to someone that— and not say— Salo's amazing, by the way, but sometimes you have multiple people you can go to. You want to create redundancies. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.