This mastermind makes $35M/year, Positive and negative SEO rankings, Politics + marketing?, and more

So Neil, do you know about— there's this mastermind, it makes $35 million a year with 5 employees.

Sam Ovens' mastermind? No, actually he shrunk his down, right?

He shut it down.

Oh, he shut it down all the time.

He doesn't do it anymore.

He's focused on school.

Yeah. So let's start with Sam Ovens first. So he basically, he had a $30 million a year mastermind and like 5 employees. And a lot of money was being spent towards ads. I think he was charging like $30, either $35 or $50 grand a year. I know that's a big delta, but He would just run— it would be 2 live events per year, and it would be 2 virtual events. And you know how like I do my mastermind, right? It's like there's speakers, we do events and all that stuff. There's like, you know, there's nice hotel, blah, blah, blah. It's not like that. The way he did it, which is how—

This is Sam Ovens?

This is Sam Ovens. And then I'm gonna go to the next one. So Sam Ovens, he would have like 100 people or 150 people go to his office, right? And then everyone would just sit like a table, like an actual classroom. And then Sam's just like, All right, what do you guys want to talk about? And it's like, what's your problem right now? Just go down the list. What's your name? Oh, my name's Neil Patel. My problem's this, blah, blah. Just go down the list, right? Then he has a good sense of what everyone's struggling with. And he's like, okay, your problem's with YouTube. Who here is good at YouTube? Okay, great. Um, you, you guys are speaking on YouTube tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. And then he'll cover some topics as well, but he gets the mastermind to chip in. And lunch isn't anything fancy. He just calls in a couple of taco trucks. They eat the taco trucks, right? And they go back to learning. It's just like 2 days of grinding out on the business. And that's how it works. And then he'll do like a virtual session. I think He did like a call each week or so. This other mastermind, $85,000 a year. I'm not going to name the name because I'm not supposed to be revealing this.

$85,000 a year or $35 million a year? Or are you going to a different one?

No, I'm going to the same, the original one I was talking about.

So this mastermind is targeted towards, let's say like, uh, oh, it's $84,000 a year that they're charging, not in revenue. I was like, yeah, $84,000 is not $35,000.

$85,000. It's actually for a year and a half. So it's a weird model, right? $85,000 for a year and a half. And, um, let's say it's for real estate agents. It's not actually for real estate agents. But it's targeting industry. What industry is it? Real estate agents.

Is it really?

No, it's not.

Just tell us what industry it is. This is—

this will just reveal it, right?

So no, I don't know any of the masterminds.

No, forget about you. People are gonna like sleuth the internet, right?

So like— What general industry is it? Tech or marketing?

It would be more akin to like real estate. Yeah.

Okay, it's in investing.

Okay, so yes, you're getting closer. Okay. So imagine it's a mastermind for real estate agents, but it teaches real estate agents how to invest for themselves, right? So it's like—

It's like teaching people how to buy and flip homes and make money through real estate.

No, no, it's not actually a real estate industry. I'm just taking you down that path. Now it's confusing everyone. So let's just go with it's the— it's real estate.

We're playing a game of Neil's trying to guess what mastermind it is. But I think I'm already onto it. I don't know what it is. You're not— it must be on investing.

It is on investing, yes.

Yeah.

So this is a mastermind that teaches people in a certain industry on how to make more money because these people have made good money, right? Imagine if you work in like finance or something, you made good money, right? Finance is investing, but a bad example anyway. So what they do is it's 5 employees and same thing, they'll do like a couple events a year and they'll just be like, okay, here's how to invest, here's the— here's— forget about your 401k, here's how you actually should be investing. Here's some deal flow over here. Here's how I'm making this money over here. And that's all it is. And my friend was telling me, he's like, this is the best business ever. They're so chill, easiest thing. And I'm just like, yeah, masterminds are a solid business.

So I want to join this mastermind at $84,000.

No, you don't. You already have more money than all of them.

So I thought you— I thought it was about rich people talking about how to make more money from their money.

I'll tell you about it offline.

But anyway, so it sounds like they're trying to pitch people pay $84,000 a year and we'll help you get rich quick.

Not get rich quick. It's people in a legit industry that are middle-aged and these are all like good people. They're not like— they have money but they're not like wealthy. They're rich, not wealthy.

I wouldn't want to take $84,000 from them. That's a lot of money.

Well, good thing you're not running a mastermind. But I feel like I would feel bad. Yesterday, I was at lunch and then 3 of the 4 people had a mastermind. I was like, man, everyone has a mastermind.

Wait, who were you at lunch with?

I was at lunch with our friend Billy. Billy Bosch. Okay, cool. The other two you don't know. The other two are these gals that run different businesses.

Billy Billy lives in LA now?

No, he came back.

Just visiting.

He's he's yeah, he's like doing some business stuff.

Wait, I thought Billy ran a supplement company. What happened with the mastermind? What kind of mastermind does he run?

He doesn't have a mastermind. The other two do.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do just go to marketing school dot io slash agency. Once again, it's marketing school dot io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

On the side note, you have something here that was really interesting. It has nothing to do with mastermind, but it was a tweet that Ross Hudgens put out.

Yeah.

What was the tweet? What correlates with positive or negative search rankings?

Yeah. I'll give some context on this one. So, there's this guy's website. I forgot who owns this website, Zippy. So, Z-Y-P-P-Y. I seriously forgot who owns it, but Ross Hudgens, he tweeted this. The tweet says, what website features correlate with positive or negative increases in traffic from recent Google updates? Do you have it open?

No.

Okay. So let me go through a couple of these. So Zippy did the work to determine this in their recent analysis. So this graph over here, and those of you that are watching on YouTube, make sure you go subscribe. It shows first-person pronouns, okay, correlate with— that's a win— firsthand experience. So like he—

First-person pronouns like he, him?

Yeah, that's where I like, I'm like confused. So maybe it's he/him. Um, firsthand experience is another one because E-A-T. Yeah.

Okay.

Cookie consent would be another one. Okay, so these are super positive signals. Okay, and then here's the secondary one. This is like pretty positive signal. So you have super positive, again, pronouns, firsthand experience, cookie consent. And then you have pretty positive would be like contact in the footer, any contact. Contact in the header and then call to action in the header and then social links in the header.

Social links in the header?

Yeah.

Would've never guessed in the header.

Yeah, but this one's the smallest of the other correlations. It's not like a huge thing. The other ones are significantly higher on this bar graph. And then let me show you the 3 that are— 4 of these.

We do, I think, almost every single one of those.

Including the pronouns?

No, minus the pronouns. We don't put— Can you test that? Well, I just put the articles published as Neil Patel.

Can you please test it?

Yeah, but I don't think it's going to affect my ranking.

No, it just— that's the number 1 right here. That's the highest one.

I don't think adding pronouns is going to impact rankings.

Hey, we're running a test here. I'm telling you, dude. We talk about being open-minded on this podcast.

I don't care what the results say. Adding a pronoun to a blog article, Neil Patel, he/him, is not going to affect my rankings.

Dude, look at this. It's the number one thing.

What is this saying? Causation doesn't necessarily mean correlation or something like that?

Yeah, but you can roll this test back anytime. Anyway, I'll leave it alone. Uh, okay, let me tell you the 4 most negative things here. Are you ready?

I, I could try it. I'll actually go and add—

That's up to you, it's your website. I'm just joking. But, um, okay, the, the 4 most negative things here are fixed ad in the footer, which makes sense. Okay, so like a Um, like an AdSense ad. Okay. Um, fixed video ads would be another one. And then the third, the third negative one would be stock images and also number of ads.

Fixed video ads?

Yeah. So it's like if you have a fixed video ad in the footer, like it's just like you like pitching something or whatever.

Okay, so wait, what are they again? Fixed video ad?

So fixed ad in the footer, fixed video ads, stock images, and number of ads.

Oh, okay.

Notifications are pretty bad too.

Notifications like push notifications?

Yeah. Yeah.

Or yeah, okay.

I can see it being a negative signal.

Okay, yeah, I can see it.

Yeah.

You want people to come back to Google instead of going back directly to website.

Yep.

Dude, it's just when you look at these algorithms, you know, it's not every change that they make impacts rankings, um, in a positive way or a negative way, but over time they keep tweaking it and it does get better over time, or so we hope. And it's funny, people put out these reports all the time, like doing certain things impacts rankings. Dude, if I had to put money on it, I would put money on that pronouns do not affect your rankings. I have nothing against pronouns. We use them throughout our whole company, but I don't think adding pronouns boosts your rankings or Google's like, they use pronouns, we're going to rank this site higher.

We could be reading this wrong. It could be pronouns for something else. I don't know. But like, it feels like it probably is like the, you know. Oh, okay.

So you're saying we could be interpreting what we could be interpreting incorrectly? But yeah, yeah, because it just doesn't sound right to having pronouns impact rings. That has nothing to do with signaling to search engines that this content is qualified or a user is happy. I just don't see it.

Well, Gemini's debacle didn't seem right either. That's true.

Yeah, you make a good point there.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency, so NP Digital. So Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode.

Oh, funny enough, dude, speaking about Gemini, you know, I've noticed something over the last 3 to 4 months, all right? In which, maybe even longer, like 6+ months, political issues are affecting where companies and how companies do their marketing. And I'll give you a great example of this. A lot of people didn't necessarily agree with Elon and they ended up pulling their ads from X. I get it, right? But it's going further than that. I was talking to someone today and they spend, call it $4.5 million a month on ads. That's a good-sized budget. I'm talking about just digital ads. TV, probably another like $3 or $4. So this company, all in all, including internal marketing expenses, then if you talk about things like SEO, CRO, organic, social—

$100 million.

Yeah, they're probably spending somewhere around $100 million a year. That's a really good-sized marketing budget. You can assume if someone's spending $100 Plus million dollars a year as a multi-billion dollar company, which they are funny enough, not publicly traded. And they were telling me there was this one website that was producing a ROAS of around four and a half to five x, which is massive and is highly profitable based on the industry that they're in. And that website. is a website where people can contribute whatever articles that they choose. And someone, one of their internal teams, like, we're pulling all our ads from this website. And I'm like, well, this website, you're spending around $300 grand a month. That's not the biggest chunk of their ad budget, but you're talking around 3% a year. I was like, why do you want to pull it from this website? I'm just curious. I'm trying to learn. And they're just like, oh, someone wrote an article on that website with different beliefs. And I'm like, but this website has tons of content that is guest contribution. It's not even a journalist or whatnot. They're like, we refuse to do it. And I was just like, okay, have you reached out to that website and talked to them about this and not showing your ads on certain sections or certain areas? Now I get it if people have a stance on certain things like war or whatnot.

Principles.

Principles. But this article wasn't harsh. It wasn't talking about crazy political stuff or gender stuff. It was just a viewpoint in life. And they just disagreed upon it. And it was around kids and education and what you should be teaching them based on history and what you shouldn't be. So then that way, um, there's less—

That's an opinion piece.

It was an opinion piece. So that way there would be less hate or discrimination in the future, um, or racism or whatever you want to call it. And I'm not sophisticated enough to tell people what they should or shouldn't do. But it was an opinion piece, and the piece didn't say this is how it should be. They were saying these are the real options. Some schools are doing X, Y, and Z, and some schools aren't. Data will tell over time. And they did at the end talk about what they think is going to win and why, you know, pretty much based on their own beliefs. But that pretty much said cut them off from advertising. And I was just like, Wait, you should, A, talk to the website if you don't believe in it. And what I'm seeing here is like little things are causing people to adjust their marketing and not necessarily do what's best for the business.

Right.

If there's hatred out there or a website has clear racism, I would agree, money is not worth putting your ad on a site where someone is just bluntly being racist.

Right.

But if someone just has an opinion piece talking about how to solve racism, which is what it was about, and it wasn't about like, hey, you're racist, but they disagreed with how they should solve racism. I'm like, you shouldn't stop advertising because of that.

Yep.

And these kind of things are going to affect how a business performs. And funny enough, when I took the call, I know the owner of the company and I know a lot of the people in the executive team. The person who decided to pull it is mid-level. I'm not going to say anything because it's not my place, but if The executives of that organization knew what was happening, they would be pissed. They're just losing a lot of their return on their ad spend because someone doesn't want to do something that doesn't go against what the company believes in.

Well, the good news is, again, like, this is not a political podcast, but where it was swinging pretty heavily towards the left, now it seems like it's coming back towards the center, which is good, right? But you still have situations like this happening.

But this isn't left or right. Like, if I talk to any Democratic or Republican, majority, 9 out of 10 would be like, what's wrong with this piece? Probably 99 out of 100 would be like, what the hell was this piece?

You did say this is like political things are leading to decisions like this.

Yes, but this article was about how to stop racism and racism is bad and they want to end it and they're coming up with different solutions. This person in marketing didn't believe with their solution and their solution, I'm not saying is skewing left or right, it's just idea of how to stop racism and what to teach our kids or not teach our kids, um, to help reduce racism in the future. I still think racism is a problem today, right? Depending on what state you are in the United States or country.

It'll always be a problem.

Yeah. There, you know, there are problems with racism. Um, and hopefully one day, you know, it'll get better and better. Um, like with my kids, they're not a specific race. They're mixed. Right. And we try to teach our kids, it doesn't matter what skin color you are. color someone is. You don't judge them based on their skin color. You judge them for who they are and their actions and how they treat other people and if they're good. But all I'm getting at is, dude, people in organizations are changing things drastically based on their beliefs. And a great example of this in mainstream media is Gemini. Gemini, you know, wouldn't create Caucasian people. That must have been a few people who decided that.

Did you see the prompt? It was one, it's like, show strong Black people, right?

And it made an image for strong Black people.

It's like, show strong white people. And it like, it's like, no, um, it's good. It's important to be diverse. And like, it couldn't, it couldn't form the image.

But that means someone programmed it and someone must've made that decision.

Yeah.

If I had to bet on it, that wasn't corporate Google. No, that was some individual person or 2 or 3 people that decided. And what's scary about this is you're having people in these big organizations change your trajectory because of their own political beliefs. They're there to work to do what's best for the company. I do agree. If someone was doing something bad politically or says something that's harmful to others or could cause death or any, you know, bad to someone, you shouldn't support them with money. It's not worth it. But it's just like, if someone's not doing anything bad and you just like, politically, I don't like you, it's like, that doesn't mean you should start pulling your ads.

Yep. Anyway, that's a good place for us to wrap. Excuse me. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. That is the group that Neil and I run to help agencies like yours grow faster. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.