Eric Siu - Leveling Up - Making Business Your Favorite Game

Same thing, right? Sports is a game. Video games are also games, right? So everything I learned around, you know, resilience, teamwork, communication, all that type of stuff, but I learned all of that. And I learned at a very high level. I learned, oh, man, if I'm going to work with the team, I got to be on the best team, right? So I learned that element as well. And that actually translates into business. And so, you know, when I was playing these games, I was like, man, you know, if I can just apply this to real life, like, I think I'm going to be pretty, pretty good, right? Like, if I just wake up every day and feel excited, like that's what it is. And that's why to me, life is very much just a game. And ideally, you're playing it where it's a never ending game. You're not playing it to try to sell your company or whatever, at least in my opinion. That's not what I'm trying to do. And then progressively you get stronger and stronger.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Wiki wiki Wiki.

Yo, what is up? What is up? All right, it's your boy Joe and we are back for another episode. And today we're hanging out with a friend that we met last year. I think it's last year by the time this episode's going live. But it was February 2020, right before the pandemic hit. We were hanging out. Matt and I were in Florida at Rich Sheffrin's event. We're hanging out in his kitchen. It was at this Mastermind and we didn't know who the guy was in front of us at the time, but turned out to be. This guy's name is Eric Hsu and he's our guest today. We didn't know much about him, but we got to chat and we hit it off immediately. Soon to find out that the dude is doing amazing things. Runs a huge agency that works with big companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, Uber. It's called Single Grain. He also has a whole content intelligence software. Basically makes you look like a genius to grow your traffic. It's called clickflow. And he also is a partner and co host in Marketing School the podcast with Neil Patel. And he also has his own podcast called Leveling up. And basically it's 30 million downloads plus combined. I mean, the dude is a rock star in marketing in software and SaaS. And again, his name is Eric Hsu and he blew us away in this episode. The guy also has a book coming out. I think it's just maybe right after this episode drops, coming out on February 24th. It's called leveling up and it's a really unique perspective of how to look at life. So basically it's, it's kind of showing how a lot of us played games as kids and maybe we're still playing them. I don't right now, baby. Kind of wrapped up in that, but I can't wait to play games again. But how he's taken his experience from gaming, like really hardcore gaming, and even poker, like video games, poker, those types of games, and applying them to business and how he has been able to kind of identify these power ups, these moments in time in games, how he now realizes, oh, that allows him to think differently and he can apply that to business and life in general, to wake up and have a great time and feel like he's playing a game throughout life. Not only that, we broke down a ton of different traffic strategies. He went through some again, I love it because it's like this big way of thinking how you can think differently on how to acquire SEO traffic and it's not build it yourself. He's very creative in how he does this. It talks a lot about the beginner's mindset and actually approaching things in a different way of thinking that allows you to really elevate from the, from the rest of the folks around you and just so many other things. I think you're going to love Eric. You're going to love the stuff that we talk about. We cover a lot. So we have the action guides ready for you. They're free right now. Just two weeks of this episode going live. You can get the action guides. We took all the notes and all the tidbits that you could just swipe and deploy. You can get them for free right now@flowchartgroup.com that's Flowchart Group.

Just plug in your email address in there and we'll make sure to get those to you right away. You also get access to our Facebook group, which is packed with a ton of content, bunch of people asking questions and just giving cool tips and advice around marketing. Folks that listen to this show, it's also guests and Matt and I are in there as well. So if you have questions, anything you want to share, feedback on the episodes or cool ideas, throw them in there in the group. That's how you can connect with us. And you also of course. Get those action guides. So flowchartgroup.com and go there. And I think that's it. Let's go. Head over to Eric and strap in and make sure to stick around the end where Matt and I kind of debrief on this episode, and you'll hear our takeaways from this one, too. So. All right, that's it on. Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. Dude. It's been a while, huh?

Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course.

It's.

The world's gotten crazy, so.

Yeah, last February, we were just chatting. That was the last time we saw each other face to face. It was at Florida, of all places. I know you're typically in California and spent some time in San Diego, but then, yeah, the world shut down soon after. That was good times.

Yep. I think we. We did. We actually went to Florida. We were there for the Rich Sheffrin event that you were at. We came home for a week, went back to Florida for a few days for Pod Fest, then came back. And then I think two days after we came back, the world was shut down.

It's crazy. It's. Yeah, man. Well, at least we're all here. We're here, we're healthy, so that's good. That's what matters.

Yeah, man. And I mean, you. You're just. I think you're. I don't know, I feel like you're everywhere in the podcast, the growth game, the SEO game. I mean, I know you're teamed up with Neil Patel on. On a podcast with marketing school, and you have leveling up your podcast, and I don't know, it's just really cool you got the book coming out. I'm. I'm digging the concept of it all. The whole gamifying your life and business and all that. I don't know, it's gonna be a fun episode of kind of blending in that concept with business and growth. Super pumped for.

Let's do it.

Yeah, man. Take us. Because I'm kind of curious because I understand a little bit more from the leveling up. Just kind of doing some research there. Hardcore gamer back in the day, maybe still. But take us back a little bit in time. We went to ucsd. I remember that of all things, too. When we met at Rich's place, I was like, that's cool.

San Diego, so. UC San Diego. Yeah. I guess I'll go even further back thinking about my teenage years. So, you know, I'd play games like Diablo, Counter Strike Warcraft, Starcraft, all those games. Right. And then eventually I led to EverQuest, which led to World of Warcraft, and I spent a lot of hours, let's just put it that way, on these games. And I think the key thing is, you know, my parents, they thought I was like a madman, right. So they would take away my keyboard, take away my mouse, because they thought I was addicted to something that was useless. Um, but you know, when you think about sports, right, Sports, I think, how do you guys use sports? You guys are parents, right?

Yeah, yep.

Sports.

I was a lot more hardcore in sports before now, not so much. Yeah.

I mean, in San Diego we don't have much sports teams to really pay attention to, so.

Not anymore.

No.

So I guess in the context of looking at your kids wanting to learn, get better at sports, is that something you guys support?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, my kids are both in soccer right now, so.

Yeah, yeah. And why is it that you support them on soccer?

I just. Well, it's the contrast to the screens they usually use. Right. They like to play video games, their Kindle, that kind of thing. So we want to sort of counteract that a little bit with a little more movement.

Yeah.

Mine's a little young. She's only 13 or. Yeah, yeah, 13 months. So gymnastics has been her thing, but I feel like it's an expression, you know.

Got it. And what do you think the benefits is going to be? And I'll stop asking you guys questions, but what do you think the long term benefit is going to be of them playing sports?

Ideally, they're going to want to stay more active, be outside, play with their friends, social elements, all of that stuff.

I think it's a good problem solving type of activity.

Yeah. So same thing. Right. Sports is a game. Video games are also games. Right. So everything I learned around resilience, teamwork, communication, all that type of stuff, definitely I'm not as active. Hopefully VR can solve that later. Or I wasn't as active, but I learned all of that and I learned at a very high level. I learned, oh man, if I'm going to work with the team, I got to be on the best team. Right. So I learned that element as well. And that actually translates into business. And so, you know, when I was playing these games, I was like, man, you know, if I can just apply this to real life, like, I think I'm going to be pretty, pretty good. Right. Like if I just wake up every day and feel excited, like that's what it is. And that's why to me, life is very much just a game. And ideally, you're playing it where it's a never ending game. You're not playing it to try to sell your company or whatever. At least in my opinion, that's not what I'm trying to do. And then progressively you get stronger and stronger. So, you know, we were talking about before the beginning of this podcast, how you know, the progression is you go to school, you build the right habits, and then what you do afterwards is you get a job and then if you want to take it one step higher, you start freelancing. You want to take it one step higher, you start an agency, right? Or you can start a drop shipping business and then level up into actually holding inventory. And then you can go start like your own software business or whatever and then take it all the way up to like a network effects business, like a Facebook. But the sky's the limit because, you know, wherever you decide to go, there's going to be new obstacles to face and you got to level up and beat the bosses at each stage, right? So it's the same thing. And then, you know, I think about, you know, the power ups, right? Like this us talking right now, this is us learning from each other. And so every little thing, there's like little tweaks I add to the tool belt, little power ups I get. And that's the whole concept of the thing.

That's rad, man. Okay, so one of the things you mentioned, you know, wake up every day, pumped up, excited for life, but business and all that give us some nuggets around that because, you know, obviously now in COVID lockdown days, for a lot of us, it's kind of like monotony. So it's like, how do you, how do you bring in that excitement to your life every day?

Well, you know, what you said earlier, you're like, you work on a lot of different things, there's a lot of stuff going on. And so to me, each one's a different game, right? Because when I used to play games before, I used to like to switch around a lot because I get bored easily, right? And that's actually not good for business. Ideally you have operators running these different businesses. So I can, me as the, let's say the visionary, the strategist, I can jump around, right? And so for me, you know, worked on the book, the promotion, there's something around that, the software business or something around that, the ad agency, there's something around that, the, the two podcasts that I do, marketing school and leveling up. And then beyond that, what else is There. Oh, my God. There's like little things from within. Within single range. So there's probably eight or nine projects, and I just keep jumping around. And so the easiest way to think about this is if you look at Berkshire Hathaway, you know, Warren Buffett and their corporate office, they're not necessarily operating all of these. They might jump in from time to time and opine and nudge, and that's what they do. And one of my friends companies, it's called Tiny, they originally started out as a web design firm. They make all these profits and they just go out there and buy other Internet businesses. And Andrew, which is one of the owners, he just goes around and opines and nudges. And that's the game that he plays now. Right? He's leveled up to that and he gets to that game now.

Yeah, no, that's actually. That's funny because he's one of the guys we. I don't know how we found him. It was like this article CEO of no. And we just like obsessed over it. I'm like, dude, this guy Andrew is freaking brilliant. I just love the philosophy.

So he's a badass. Yeah, no kidding.

Yeah. You mentioned Tiny. I was like, I know that name. Yeah. Yeah.

The CEO of no guy. And then I. And then we went down the rabbit hole and started listening to a bunch of podcasts with him. So pretty much kind of funny that you mentioned him.

Yeah. But I love that. Yeah, it's the aspect of just kind of dabbling around. But you're not dabbling, I guess you almost like go in with a new perspective, a fresh perspective, let's say, and a goal. I would assume with each one of these things as you're kind of bouncing.

Around, I think it's important to a lot of people, pay lip service to talking about a mission or a vision. And I think it's important to have a unifying vision. Because for Tiny, we buy wonderful Internet businesses. Or you got Constellation Software, we acquire and build and manage software businesses. So ours, at least at the high level, is we've level up marketing businesses because everything we have already is around marketing. Right. Like even the leveling up concept, we're gonna help build the right habits for people. But if you want to take it one step further, sure, I'll teach you marketing. And I'll teach you business too. Right. And eventually, you know, take it up to an income share agreement thing, which is like Lambda School. But that's all part of the game. Like, I just look at what other people are Doing what's interesting and how do I. How do I remix it and, you know, what are my areas of strength? Can I actually help explode it then? If it plugs in, it plugs in. If not, then I won't work on it.

Ooh, so cool. So take us, like, because I remember, you know, I think it was in the video on the. On your page, actually, really quick. Let's just say it was. Leveling up.com is how folks can go check out the book and see in detail in a video from you there. You mentioned how you're taking these little bits and bobs from a game or like, poker was. Was kind of a cool thing that you said how you took teamwork and getting on. I think it was what it was. Right.

Like, talk about things like, I guess a couple of aspects you pulled from these games that I'm sure a lot of our listeners have probably done the same.

Oh, yeah, totally. So the poker, not specifically teamwork, because it's inherently a selfish activity.

Yeah. I was like, wait, that's wrong.

No, it's totally, totally fine. So with poker, I learned resilience the most because there would be periods of times where I'll go to a casino every day. In college, where'd you go, by the way? One period of time. So first I went to UC Riverside. So I went to Morongo all the time. And then when I went to UC San Diego, I switched over to Barona. So anyway, the what I would. There's a period of time where I didn't lose for 60 days straight. Right. I'll just come in, and then the dealers would call me the kid who never loses. But it wasn't like I was really good or anything. It was just because I was really lucky. And so poker is very much a life of a game of variance, right? You're up and down, and sometimes you can bring your A game and you can lose for a year straight. And so what I've learned around that, around business, is that, you know, I would have these days where I would be on tilt so really frustrated, and I've learned to control my emotions a lot more when it comes to business. And I've also learned that you got to play, you got to have a bankroll to last for the long term. You can't just, you know, go all in bets all the time. Right. So there's a lot around business that I've learned from poker. And also there's. There's. There's also something to be said about looking at the people around you and also looking at, man, I don't want to become like some of these people that have, you know, gained a lot of weight and are really unhealthy. Right. Like, if you don't have your health, that's the first thing. No health, no wealth. So poker is a good example of that. And I'll give you one more example before we move on. What I learned from World of Warcraft is that, you know, if you want to be the best, sometimes you have to do unreasonable things. So, you know, getting called up at 3am by our guild leader to go kill this boss and make sure the other. To prevent anybody else from getting this boss out there, that's hardcore, right? You got this guy calling 40 people at 3am and say, hey, it's time to get up, like that. You got to do unreasonable things to get unreasonable results. So.

I never did that. But those were the raids, right? Is that what they would call?

Yeah, yeah.

When I think of that, I just think of that Leroy Jenkins video, dude.

It'S like we're talking Leroy Jenkins and imagine like someone else can come in and stop you. Right. So these are PvP outdoor raids. So this is against alliance versus Horde. If anybody understands.

I do not, but I respect it because I had some buddies doing it and I was like, I don't understand a thing you're doing. But I'm fascinated by the fact that so many people are collaborating virtually. And this before virtual was even really that easy to collaborate.

It's just getting bigger and bigger, these communities. Right. So it's the concept of gaming. It's just. It will become accepted because everything that's a toy. Before, like, games were a toy, Bitcoin was a toy, Snapchat was a toy, or now Snap, eventually they become accepted and adopted.

All right, so you mentioned kind of thinking about the emotion side habits and emotions, because those are all, like, very pretty tied in there. What are some habits that. I mean, you mentioned resiliency already. I guess some other habits that you kind of develop or you think are core principles that we can take from games or maybe swap games out with something else that someone can relate to that you now take your business?

Yeah, sure, for sure. I think persistence is probably one of the most important things. One of my favorite quotes from. From Winston Churchill is, if you're going through hell, keep going. And I love that. Right. I think most people see pain as this, like, really negative thing. As long as it's not physical pain. It's all designed to help make you better. Right. So I think, you know, if I decided to. And I'm sure this is the same for you guys. My first podcast, leveling up. After the first year, I was only getting nine downloads a day. And after the second year, I was only getting 30 downloads a day. And mind you, I was spending six hours a week editing, reaching out to people, doing the interview, doing all like, I was doing it all on my own. While I was trying to save Single Grain, everything was on fire.

Your agency. Yeah.

So my mom. My mom would probably be like, you know, you're an idiot. What are you doing? Like, stop. You're not getting any results here. Right? But I think persistence is one thing, but also understanding to optimize for the right thing. Because what I was optimizing for was the learnings, right? I was learning for free from these millionaires, billionaires, bestselling authors, and all that wisdom came over to help me save my business ultimately. And, you know, every now and then someone would say something nice, that's great. But eventually I kept going, and that's how the audience grew and that. And I was able to parlay that podcast into marketing school.

So, yeah, I mean, we could definitely relate to that. As far as the podcast growth, I mean, but we did exactly the same thing when we started this show. We've been podcasting since 2010, but we started this show four years ago. And when we started this. This show, we said, if this show never makes money, how do we make it a success for us? Right? So our goal, to use this as a tool to network and get to know as many people as possible and also to learn from anybody that was willing to come on and talk with us. And that's how we started. Over time, it eventually grew and made money and built a brand for us. But that was the initial intention. We went, what would we be able to keep doing even if it never made us any money, but still be a win for us?

It's such good upside. I mean, free education, free networking with some of the smartest people in the world. And it leads to. Some of my best friends have come from podcasting, and so I just like, you know, Naval Ravikant talks about four forms of leverage, right? You got code, capital, labor, and media. Right. I think everyone needs to think about how they can build that media moat around them.

So, yeah, smart.

Have you read the Almanac of Naval yet?

I have it. I always have the stack of books. And, like, whoever recommends something on a podcast, I just add to cart on Amazon, so that's good, man.

Yeah.

The Almanac of Naval is so good.

I saw that you were reposting some naval stuff. I was like, I like Eric even more. This is good.

I'll tell you what, like, okay, if you look at the books on your shelf over there, what percent of them have you actually read?

This is Matt's shelf, so I can't answer that.

Probably 20%.

Okay, that's perfect. Right. Because most people, when they ask that question, it's a very judgmental question. Like, how many have you actually read, Matt? Right. But then you realize I got this recently. Nassim Taleb says you should have an anti library, meaning that the bookshelf you got behind you is that's used for research. Right. It's not some ego thing. It's like you're using it to get smarter. And so if you have a lot of information back there, it's all recommended and vetted. Look, you'll come to it when the time is right. So I think a lot of people just need to reframe and I guess maybe this is another power up reframing certain things and then you'll probably become even more powerful.

Yeah.

When it comes to books too, I'm a big fan of like, if you get through the first couple chapters and it's not really grabbing you, you're not getting great information, move on. So like, I'll do that a lot. I'll get recommended a book, I'll buy the book, I'll get it. I'll read the first couple chapters. I'll either go, A, I kind of get the thesis of what you're trying to say here. I don't know if I really need to read on or B, like this just isn't grabbing me or maybe I don't agree and I'll just, I'll put the book on my shelf and be done with it. And I think a lot of people that that's painful for them to like buy something and not finish it. I'm totally cool reading a chapter or two going up didn't give me what I wanted. Put it on my shelf. Maybe I'll need it in the future.

There you go. That's another reframe thing. Right? And another one that Naval does actually is he just treats each chapter as a blog post. You don't need to follow everything sequentially. Like just jump around. And he reads multiple books at once. Right. Which it seems intuitive to me and probably to you guys too. So anyway, it's a lot of reframing.

Another good example is Derek Sivers I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, like he's so similar where what you just said, blog posts and sequential. I mean he like basically packaged up in these new books. A lot of blog posts, but freaking brilliant. Very simple. But yeah, it's along the same lines of naval in different form of course, but so cool, dude. I love the concept of power ups too, and just actually noticing how you can upgrade your mind, your life, emotions, all that stuff. Do you track this somehow? I'm sure you have because you've written a book now on it. But how can folks kind of identify their power ups and really maybe keep them in mind? Because I think a lot of folks maybe just don't recognize them or they don't consistently keep them going.

Yeah, well, I think if you're playing Super Mario, you understand that whether you're Mario or Luigi, if you eat a mushroom, you're going to grow or you eat the feather or I don't know if you eat it or not, but then you get a cape and you can fly around. And so I think these power ups are universal. Like we talk about things such as having a growth mindset, right. That to me is very much a power up. Or one of the chapters has something about ethically stealing, right. So if you think about everything around you, it's just a remix, right? And Steve Jobs said this, like the microphone you have in front of you is just an improvement or iteration on something from the past. And so I think the premise of the book is understanding the concept of power ups and that there's endless power ups to collect, right? Because in the book I have 15 in there, but there's way more than that. If you have that right mindset and you just go think about collecting more, collecting more, and you have a beginner's mindset, to me, you should become the best version of yourself. Because people always say this, right? If I can do this, you can do it. It's like Mark Cuban has said that before, but it's like, is it really that bad? No, it's fun as hell once you think about it.

And you mentioned beginner mindset too. I don't know if that's naval that talks about that or someone recently.

Well, beginner's mindset, a lot of people definitely is a sort of Zen philosophy, definitely from Buddhism and stuff.

Yeah. So I mean, that's. How do you. Do you have any tips on kind of anchoring yourself in a beginner's mindset when you're going into things?

So this is weird. Maybe this is Asian culture. But growing up, my tiger mom used to give me the beat down all the time. Right. You're not. You're not good enough. Who do you think you are? Blah, blah, blah. But like, that to me is so. It's so motivating and it's so energizing. And so to me, I've learned to reframe that as man. That's power. Right. Give me more. So when someone writes like a negative review or what, I'm like, give me more. Right. Like I'm so excited because it actually, like, it gets me to do better. So. You know, by the way, I lost track of your question already.

Beginner's mindset. So kind of like how you. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So when.

When I think about beginners mindset, we.

Let me think about this a little bit. I had it and I lost it. So give me one second.

Sure.

I don't think that I know too much. I don't think I'm that good. And I also don't think I'm that bad either. So that's the way I approach it. And that makes it a lot easier. Right. Because it keeps me humble and it keeps me even keeled. And that's how you got to keep going. Because the moment you start to think that you're amazing, the moment you start to become too full of yourself, that's when things start to fall apart. Right. And so I've learned to keep myself even keeled because the mo. Like every single time that I've learned to take my foot off the gas pedal, then it's like, oh, well, that's why. That's what happened. You got to. You got too complacent.

So, yeah, yeah.

I think, I think for myself, one of the things that I tend to do is I constantly try to find ways to challenge my current beliefs or like what. Like what I think is the way things are. Right. So like politics, for instance. Right. Like I have a certain set of beliefs I'm constantly seeking out. Like, how do other people think that way When I think this way and I'm constantly searching for, like, sources of counterintuitive information or not counterintuitive, but like counter to what I believe information. And I think that's a really good way to constantly stay nimble is to have this sort of mentality that my opinions and my beliefs on the way things are could change in an instant.

Totally. You know what it is? It's strong views loosely held. Right. And I don't remember where I got that from. But it's just understanding that, hey, you can have a strong opinion, but constantly be ready to update the software that you have. Because our mind is very much just software. So you want to keep updating it over time.

Yeah, yeah, we're constantly programming. So it's what the inputs are. It's how you are open to the inputs. Yeah, it's very cool. And I know you have an agency and you have all. You have software and you've worked with a lot of interesting people, and I think it's probably similar to this because we used to have an agency and we would have it mainly to learn and to learn what's happening, like what the new tactics, strategies, maybe mindsets. Is that kind of how you see your agency or what's your philosophy?

Yeah, I can give you the story behind the agency. So Neil Patel, my podcast co host, actually used to be a partner in the agency. And so I came in as a number two to help save the company when it was a failing SEO agency. Couple algorithm updates hit and things weren't working anymore. So agency was falling apart. And so I ended up negotiating a deal where I bought the company for $2 out of pocket. That was 3. $2 out of pocket.

Wow.

Yeah. And so $1 was for 10% of Neil shares and another for another partners, and then the rest were through the profits of the company. And I put a contingency in that if the company failed, I would own nothing. So to me. And you talked about thinking about things, right? Like, the way you think about things is so important. It's how you're programmed. But I was like, man, you know, like, everyone's like, thinking, I'm an idiot. Neil's like, you should get out. Like, there's no brand equity here, blah, blah, blah. And I knew I could get a very good job. And I was like, no. Like, it's asymmetrical upside. If it works, I'm going to be able to take all that cash flow. It's not like I love the agency business model, but I'm going to take that cash flow and invest it into other areas. And if I lose, I don't lose much. So heads I win, tails I don't lose much.

Well, you're a gambler, or at least you were back then. Poker. So, you know. Exactly. Oh, that's brilliant, man. I love that. Yeah. And then you've connected with some amazing companies. I know you have Amazon, you know, Airbnb, Salesforce. Was that all through the agency as well?

Yeah.

So, like, you get connection it's almost like you're. I mean, you have a podcast, but another form of the podcast where you can really dive deep with them.

Yep, for sure.

So I'm curious, with single grain, what kind of things did you do to turn it around? If all of these algorithms were the. What you were doing wasn't working with the new algorithms, like, what did you do to shift it around?

Yeah, I'll be the first to tell you that. Like, I'm not some type of business genius or whatever. In fact, like, again, like, I like to think of myself as, you know, you want to be like the idiot in the room. Right. So what happened in the first year? And by the way, they hired me because I helped turn around a company that was already doing well in tech. Right. So I thought I came into this, you know, my poopoo doesn't stink. I came from tech. You know, I'm a badass. And so what happened was I, once they took the company over, I promptly tanked it all the way to. All the way down to one employee. Right. So we tried to switch SEO to doing content marketing as a service because it seemed like a natural progression. But I read this book called Let My People Go Surfing from the Patagonia Foundation.

Yeah.

And I took it literally. I was like, oh, yeah, let my people go surfing. Don't micromanage. So I didn't come into the office, didn't come to office, didn't build a culture. Everything fell apart. And I was just. It's all on me, right?

Luckily, as I was trying to turn the company around, I was doing a lot of guest posting. So we actually managed to get a high ranking on, like, a marketing agency type of keyword, which allowed us to get like, the Ubers, the Amazons of the world, and that brought us leads. And so what I did was I did a slight pivot at the time where I was like, okay, we don't have anybody to fulfill services. Let's go refer these leads out. There's actually a San Diego agency we'd refer it out to. We take 25 to 30% of the affiliate commissions, which is a good chunk. And, you know, we would just make affiliate money off of it. And so that translated into like, you know, 500 grand a year, which is great. But then we realized these agencies couldn't retain a client. So it's like, you know what, let's just do paid advertising. It's very black and white. So we turned it around to a paid advertising agency, and that's most of the Work that we do right now. And, you know, I think. Did you have a question around kind of the. What makes the agency special? Was that a question or no?

No, I was sort of asking what sort of things you did when you came into Single Grain to sort of flip it around.

Yeah, got it. Okay. So that's one of them. We switch over to the paid media. And then more importantly, we decided to focus on SaaS, because I speak at a lot of SaaS conferences and all that. And so we did that. And then also, how do we flip the model? How. How do we create better incentives? So one of the things that we do is we have a pay for performance model, meaning that, you know, you pay. You say, hey, Eric, we'll pay you 500 bucks per lead, and I get the lead for a hundred bucks, I'll collect the 400 bucks in between. I'm sure you had a lot of affiliate marketers on this, but we specifically want to work with SaaS companies because, you know, that's a model that they're usually not used to doing. Right. So it's combining the world of, you know, you want to call it affiliate marketing or Internet marketing with the tech world, which is kind of the line that I straddle.

Ooh, that's interesting. Yeah, we're playing in that game as well, but in a different aspect as like kind of connecting promoters, aka affiliates and whatnot with SaaS companies and created a platform. Partner up with some other folks.

We'll have to learn about that.

Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that later because it's very in line with what you're saying. That's fascinating. Man, this is cool. All right, so shoot. I had a question now that just completely blinked. Well, I want to talk about the growth stuff, but really get into, because you're all about, obviously SEO. You have countless. I mean, you're partnered with Neil, so I know he's deep in the content game. He's one we've studied from years and years now, paid ads. So I don't know, I'm just. I don't know exactly where to start with this because I know there's some really just solid principles that you live by that you run your companies by.

But let's start here. So, like, one of the things that you said you like to talk about is the, you know, the timeless tested growth marketing principles. So maybe like, maybe can you maybe sort of give us a table of contents of what maybe some of these principles are and we can just kind of dive into a few of them, totally.

So I mean some of the ones are probably common too because I think I have a good sense for your audience. So let's just get this one out of the way. Most people in tech, I would say, do not understand the most important thing for a creative, whether it's your ad or your copy. And it's like, dude, if you don't focus on your creative, all your downfall metrics are going to go down. So that's why you have people like Russell Brunson. He constantly has over 600 AD results in the Facebook ad library. You see people, most people have like less than five and you know, it's. But when you focus on that, you click the rates higher and all your down funnel metrics are better. So it's like, okay, if you know that creative is number one, you probably have to learn copywriting. Okay, what books do you read? Maybe Breakthrough advertising, maybe the 16 word sales letter which we got in Florida.

Albuquerque.

Yeah, yeah. So that's the first thing, right? It's like, yes, you should need to have a swipe file all that. But I think one, one nugget that might be helpful for everyone is just understanding that, you know, you can go to sites like microacquire.com or you can go to like Quiet Light brokerage or whatever, go buy websites that have good traffic. If you're already spending a lot on ads and you know, maybe you, maybe a website's getting 500k visits a month and it's doing a million a year, 200k in profit. Maybe you can buy for $600,000 in America, at least you can get an SBA loan, right, that will fund 90% of the purchase and you put 10% down and there you go, you got something, right? So I think people need to think of M and A, not just as an M and A thing, but as a growth thing. So that's one of the things, right? And that actually ties in with SEO because a lot of these websites are under monetized because they focus on adsense revenue and that's a poor way of monetization. So where can you arbitrage that and where can you take these assets over?

Dude, okay, now you're speaking our language. Now you lit us up because, yeah, I mean we're one of the guys that pops into mind. He's been a, I think probably a buddy of yours, Roland Frazier, and you know, he talks all about this and that's what lit our minds up to like, oh, for email list growth or community building or whatever. You're trying to acquire. It's like you could do it for no money. Down, down. And that was one of the techniques is SBA loans as well.

So I've been through his program too. He shared his 200 things, and I'm just like, this is the stuff that I've been doing. But it's all outlined, right? So it's amazing.

Yeah. The epic challenge. So if anyone's interested, we'll link it. Because I know we've touted about that man, like, man, that is just like expands your mind in ways and it's general principles that you can apply to any business for sure.

What I'll say too, is on the topic of SEO, because I think a lot of people try to avoid SEO and they think it's this black magic thing. Even people in tech, too. But, like, if you have a good asset from an SEO perspective, It's driving maybe 50, 100,000, 200,000 visits a month. You can plug that in with a customer data platform. Right. You can start to enrich all the IP addresses. You can drop them into a sales enablement tool, and you basically have an automated sales system right there. And plus, you have all this retargeting data. It just gives you an unfair advantage. People are just like, oh, I don't have the time. Like, I'd rather spend the money on ads. But the problem with that is you're not building an asset for the long term. If you want to think long term, if you want to think like an investor, you got to have SEO in your toolkit.

Oh, man. It's. For the longest time, we ignored it, even though we were kind of doing some basic SEO principles. You know, like, Matt, you've been doing written content for a long time, so you kind of had that. But we didn't check the analytics until maybe a few years ago. Now we're like, whoa, SEO is the number one traffic driver for everything that we do and the podcast. And still to this day, and that's why we love the podcast so much, is we actually deck out our show notes where most podcasters don't. And we're like, dude, that is the number one thing you should be probably optimizing outside of audio.

But does that work well for you guys? The show notes?

Yeah, it does.

For us, Google Search is our number one traffic source to our content. And really, it's just optimizing for the names of our guests. So we'll have guests on and a lot of people do searches for the guest name. And we're Usually on page one for most of the people who have been on our show.

Yeah, so I have that. So you guys are probably using, like, a rev or something like that and then just dropping the. Is it the show notes or is it. Is it the transcript?

So we do show notes. We don't put transcripts on ours, so.

Got it, got it, got it. Okay, there you go. The transcripts don't work well.

No, we haven't seen transcripts work well. Basically, the way we're doing it is every show notes page, we see it as almost a sales letter for that episode.

Right.

We're persuading you to listen to that episode, but we are kind of making sure we're hitting all the right keywords and all the right H1 tags and tagging our images correctly and doing all that kind of stuff.

Smart, not fancy, man. We're just doing Yoast SEO and some simple stuff. But, you know, it's consistency.

Well, I think the fancy thing is you guys are, like, adding a bit of copywriting flair to it to make it attractive.

Exactly. That's it. Yeah. It's just to tease people enough to click. But it just happens to SEO. Yeah. Yeah. Really well.

Well, speaking on SEO, is there. Is there any other, like, sort of common guidelines, principles that you would tell people around SEO that maybe you see a lot of people do wrong?

I think, you know, around. I mean, obviously, SEO is getting harder, right. The serps are getting, you know, smaller and smaller. I think the most important thing Neil and I talk about about this a lot is diversifying once you got a channel that's working. So, you know, when we think about doing this right now, we're going for. We're doing this interview. There's. You guys are sharing nuggets. Maybe I might be sharing some stuff. And, you know, Joe Rogan does this well, right? He chops things up into different clips, and he's got a JRE clips channel that has, like, 5 million subscribers. So how do you repurpose and how do you go omnichannel? It sounds like this crazy word, but, you know, at the end of the day, this piece that we're making right now can easily become 40 or 50, 60 pieces of content. And I still don't think enough people are doing that. And, you know, look, if you're gonna spend an hour, I guess this is three hours right here. One, two, three of us, right? That's a lot of time. Like, we want to get. We don't want to get maximum leverage. So if you're trying to do SEO, you got to think about what else can I do to gain to go even further.

So, yeah, so what would you recommend? Because we do a lot of repurposing, this might be a little selfish question that our content manager, Jacob's listening to right now. So thank you. There you go, Jacob. But yeah, what would you do? And I guess taking a podcast like this or any kind of content, what's your process?

You know who has a. Have you seen the Gary V? He has this PDF on creating 64 pieces or 82 pieces of content.

I forget what it's called, but yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's basically that because one guy that used to work for me actually works for Team Gary now, so he's really close to him, and that's his entire playbook. So how do we take. Let's just give a practical example. Again, this interview. Let's chop. Let's take this video. It automatically becomes one podcast, and we can also chop six different pieces for igtv and then maybe some clips for Instagram, maybe some stuff for YouTube stories, which becomes LinkedIn stories, which becomes all these other stories. And then what we're doing right now, you guys are doing it already. It becomes a blog post. Right? And then you can put paid towards it, and then you can try to drive them to a call to action afterwards. So it just seems there's this entire funnel, we call it content sprouting. So seed sprout. Right. Pollinate, which is promoting, and then you monetize it, which I forgot what the word was for that. But then you have harvest, which is monetization.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah.

Is that where the quick sprout term came from for Neil, is from that concept or.

No, no, no. Yeah, it's completely unrelated.

Okay, gotcha.

Old school man.

By the way. Oh, one more thing on SEO, so I'll tell you, there's a lot of people doing this right now, and we're doing this as well. Once you have a strong enough domain authority on your website, let's say a domain authority, just how strong your website is scored on a scale of 1 to 100, if you're above maybe 70 or so, chances are whatever you tend to publish is going to rank right. So whatever we publish around marketing or maybe even, like, you know, different martech tools will rank well. So we're from an affiliate marketing perspective. You want to generate more cash flow. I'll tell you, one company right now, they do their main business, does 25, $30 million a year, but then they're like, hey, why don't we just add affiliate to our website? That thing's kicking out maybe 200 grand a month. Right. And so if you was at 2.4 million in free cash flow right there, you can go take it and invest in other areas or just pocket it for yourself.

I'm sure our listeners are tired of me saying this or us saying this is like you don't have to be an affiliate marketer to actually do affiliate marketing. It's just a bolt on thing. Like you have existing content and all this content out there in the web, like start linking it up and then maybe point some people to it as an extension of your offer. Just like free cash flow.

There you go.

That's it, man.

Can you tell us a little bit about clickflow? Because the description on here is content intelligent software which helps you grow your traffic while looking like a genius. So could you dive into what clickflow is and what it does for people?

Yeah, I mean we created a tagline because I think it's easier to understand. But it's basically content marketing and SEO software that allows you to, let's say, let's say, let's say, Matt, you're writing an article and maybe you don't understand much about SEO. You don't have time to do keyword research and all this stuff. So if you're writing something and you have a tool next to you, if a tool next to you telling you that you should be adding these keywords to your post, that's a helpful, that's a helpful guiding tool. Right? And it'll also grade your post on readability and all that. So that's one of the features that we have, it's called Content Editor. And another one of the features that we have is basically we'll show you when you decaying traffic on your content. So when you're losing traffic, we're gonna tell you, hey, you're losing traffic here, you should go do something about it. Whether it's, you know, add more content, build more links to that page, not enough people are tending to their garden. So we're trying to fill the gaps on, you know, things that most people don't cover. And the final thing I'll say is we allow you to do title and meta description testing to get a higher click through rate on the serps. So those things combined with, you know, we're trying to improve our reporting is just really, we're gearing it towards content teams that are spending at least, let's call it five grand a month on content.

Oh, that makes sense. I'm curious about the title thing. So when you split test titles with SEO, wouldn't the fact that the title is changing affect the ranking of it because you're using different keywords within the titles? How does that work?

Yeah, it's a tough thing because sometimes when you try to change your title or meta description, Google might not necessarily take it and they're doing this more often than not. So that's why it's not one of our main features. But a lot of of people like to use it that way. To your point, there's a lot that goes into it from a statistics standpoint that's beyond my pay grade, that it's like, okay, have you accounted for seasonality? Have you accounted for this? Have you accounted for that? And I think what one of our engineers said was like, you know, based on this Bayesian statistics model, you know, that's, that's where we have it covered. So again, beyond my pay grade, but that's what I got for you.

I like the fact that it sounds like the tool monitors previous content and kind of gives you the updates because that, that seems like a big, low hanging fruit for a lot of folks. We have so much content out there that we're sitting on. But if you optimize or do these little tiny tweaks that maybe Google's looking for nowadays, it can totally change everything. Got some thoughts on that?

Not enough people are updating their content. Some of our best performing pieces is just every now and then we'll add a paragraph to it. And I remember looking at the analytics, I was getting 2,000 visits a month and we add a paragraph and a couple months later, 4,000, 8,000, 10,000. Now that post gets like 35,000 visits a month.

Wow. And that's, yeah, it could just be a tiny tweak. I mean, that probably relates to comprehensive content and all that kind of stuff that Google's looking at right now, right? Totally. Yeah. Because that's kind of a common trend from the SEO folks we've had on recently is just you got to fill it out on whatever that specific keyword or thing is. Give everything you possibly can in that piece of content.

There's, you know, this concept of like being a T shaped marketer has stuck with me since the beginning. So I think, you know, I've gone deep with SEO, but I've, you know, I have a pretty good understanding across the board. I think most people need to look at it that way because if you just specialize Today I just don't think it's enough. And you know, by the way, like the people you hire to be able to speak their language, you know, it's always helpful.

Yeah, okay, this is, is, this is good stuff. How about, how about on the paid side? Maybe we go there because there was a lot, unless there's anything on organic, you think that would be like super relevant to where we're at now. Do you do anything on YouTube or these other channels where organic plays a big part there?

Yeah, I'll talk about YouTube and by the way, I'll share kind of what I've learned because I've been talking to people that have actually worked with the biggest YouTube creators, influencers in the world that have like, you know, tens of millions of followers. You know, I have a small channel, it's 50,000. Right. But I'm actually focusing more on YouTube now because keep in mind it's still the number two search engine in the world and their algorithm is strong. People say, oh, YouTube's too saturated. If you look at the growth rates amongst, we're talking, you know, five million plus subscribers, one million plus, a hundred thousand, ten thousand, even a thousand or so, the growth rates are over 10% in the last last quarter, right. So it's continuing to compound. And so what these big creators have said is look, as long as you focus on your three metrics, right? So your avd, which is your average view duration, your retention percentage, right. Hopefully you can get that above 60% or so. And your click through rate, right? So this is one I didn't pay much attention to. To click the rate, it's got to be above 5%. So good thumbnail, good, good headline is going to do a lot of the damage. And some of these creators that have grown very quickly, they're, I would say the thumbnail and the headline are actually in some cases more important than the video. Right?

Yeah. So, oh, and you're, I mean to be, got to give you Credit, man, your YouTube channel looks hot too. And those freaking thumbnails, I don't know what you use or how you designed the movie about that, but I'm like, damn, they just like pop from the page. And if I saw them mixed in with all these boring thumbnails, I'm like, all right, I'll give Eric a try.

I need to tell my team that though, they appreciate that. So I'll tell you what we do. It's all manual. It's, I think they use, I think they just use Adobe for it and they Just crank it out quickly.

Yeah, well, it seems like there's a theme, you know, and I think maybe that's the, that's kind of the, I guess the principles behind it. There's like a theme, it's kind of expected. There's colors, brand, consistency. Yeah, yeah. Cause we just chatted with Rob from Tubebuddy actually and yeah, I'm sure you use TubeBuddy or at least your team does. And yeah. Oh my God, like the A B testing in that thing, I'm like four thumbnails. I had no clue. I'm like, oh, that's perfect for click through rate. Specifically. Yeah.

With, with your YouTube channel. Is it, is it all sort of fresh new content or are you repurposing stuff from the podcast and putting on YouTube channel? Like what kind of content are you flowing out there?

Yeah, great question. So maybe in the last, let's call it two weeks or so. So I finally got my camera back. I was going to move to Puerto Rico and then I didn't, I got sick and so I got all my camera gear back and then I. Every day I'll try to crank out, you know, three or five videos and I'll. Basically what I'll do is I'll go to. And this is cop, these YouTube creators, they'll log on, they'll go to Mashable or whatever and they'll look at the trends. Right. For me, I'll read Wall Street Journal, cmo, I'll read all these different newsletters and then I'll come up with five to ten different topic ideas and I'll probably pick the top two and I just crank out videos from there. So it is new content. And if it makes sense, I'll push it over to podcast as well. So I'm kind of repurposing there. That's what I do.

So a lot of it starts on YouTube and then makes it to the podcast, not the other way around.

Correct.

Gotcha.

That's like reverse of us.

That's clever, man. With the short time we have. How about on the paid side? Is there anything specific that you just go to often or is like a core thing that just runs all of your businesses and clients?

I'll tell you one thing that we've been doing a couple of things that have been working for us. So from the land of startup and tech, I mean, they talk about the daily standups and so we decided to start doing that because of all the, you know, if we're spending, let's say we're spending a Couple thousand bucks a day or even more than that. Forget waiting a week, let's just talk about it every day to see what the blockers are so then we can get things faster. Because you realize if it's top of mind, you're going to be thinking about it right then and there and there's going to be a lot of. There's going to be incentive to get to it. Right. And so that's one thing I think, from like a logistical standpoint, but interesting thing for us, you know, running a contest for the book right now, we're actually collecting emails for as low as 15 cents. And it's actually a good audience. What I will say is that, you know, gamers, if you incentivize them with the right thing, obviously we're not, you know, if you give them like a. Sure. If you give them a MacBook Air or something like that, a lot of people are going to come in. Right. So what we did was, hey, let's collect these emails. Let's see if these people are qualified. But we'll send them a survey immediately to see kind of where they're at and then we'll segment them accordingly. So to me, this is not anything new. It's just, you know, it's all about sometimes finding the right offer and then finding the right audience. And you know, if you hit the right audience, you're good to go.

So yeah, that's. Ooh, I like the idea of a. Yeah, the contest. But then you have a survey right afterwards and then you could probably. Obviously segmentation is like king with content or any kind of audience. But yeah, and then you mentioned the prize that you're giving away. You don't want to attract just everybody. Everyone wants a new computer.

So I'm sure that's just going to help you even zero in better on the qualified, ultra qualified leads after a contest.

And that's something that you drive paid traffic into once the contest is up and running.

Yeah, that's correct. And we use Kingsumo for this.

Kingsumo. Okay, sweet. Any specific source of paid traffic that you kind of lean towards?

Yeah, so the ones we, I mean, Facebook is probably the easiest. Facebook or Instagram just. Just because it's easier to run than like Google. But you know, the next one we're going to look at is actually YouTube. And the final thing I'll say, or not, I guess the other thing I'll say, not the final thing I'll say around paid media is that, you know, people mostly think of, oh, it's just Facebook, it's just Google, it's Instagram, it's the big ones. But look, Reddit's got what, over 52 million. I think it's monthly active users or daily actives. I don't know what it is exactly, but you have all these other channels. Like to me, running ads is not just the big ones. Right. And so, you know, where else can you go? And arbitrage. Cause these platforms are gonna get more and more expensive. Can you go buy into, you know, newsletters, which is not exactly paid media, but be more creative. Right. I think a lot of people, it's just like, oh yeah, you know, we run paid ads. It's just Facebook and Google and that's for sure.

Yeah, it's like, that's not omnichannel, man. It's like, yeah, get the outbrain or all these other things. Yeah.

In fact, one of the places we've actually gotten some really, really good results from is actually experimenting with Twitter ads too. When nobody talks about Twitter ads.

There you go.

I was just gonna say that. So Twitter ads does really well for us too. What do you guys do there? I'm curious.

We've used Twitter ads to help grow our podcast. We've used Twitter ads to drive leads to opt in pages. I mean, we've experimented with all sorts of stuff, but as far as just getting really, really cheap clicks over to your content, that's been our big win there. Like we can get 5 cent clicks over to a piece of content, build a giant remarketing list, and now people are then going to see us on Facebook retargeting ads, GDN retargeting ads, things like that. So it's almost like a feeder to build the pixel with cheap clicks.

That is so awesome. Yeah. So on my end, from a B2B perspective, we have, we'll just say a really well known company that's based on everyone in finance knows who they are.

Okay.

And so they saw one of our ads, the ad was just driving them the content and then all of a sudden they. There's this email chain that starts like, we need to get in on this fire. Right. I didn't even know they talk like that. And then we got a lot of other B2B SaaS, companies that are interested as well. Cause that's what we specialize in. And yeah, it's been great because people are like, oh, I know who that is. And he speaks at SAS conferences. I'm gonna read the stuff. It's good. Okay, let's Work together. Right. So that's a really simple way of using Twitter ads as well.

Yeah, yeah. You got the authority built, and you've done, you know, you've done the stage time and all that stuff, and you're just. Just bringing the awareness there and then feeding the pixel and doing all the. Whatever you do afterwards.

Cheap clicks, man.

Cheap clicks. You can do it all. All right, man, let's wrap this sucker up, man. So levelingup.com I know that's where you get the book. Any. Anywhere else or any last final words here about that or anything you got going on here?

Yeah, no, really appreciate it, guys. So look, levelingup.com you give you a free chapter of the book, or you can go to your favorite online retailer if you want, and then if you want, you can hit me up at Eric O S I U on Twitter or Instagram.

Sweet, sweet.

And then you've got your clickflow software and then Single Grain as the agency, so you can look all those up as well.

And. Very cool.

Thanks so much for hanging out with us, Eric.

Yeah, brother.

Been.

Thank you.

Been too long, and maybe we'll have to do it again sometime soon.

We meet up sometime when the restrictions are down for sure. All right, man.

Have a good day. Good talking to you.

Hi there.

We are back.

We're back. We're back with an outro with our fact check.

No, that's Dax Shepard.

Sorry, I'm like, we're probably going to make more lies up in this outro than facts.

Yeah, Everything we say is made up, to be honest.

I mean, we've gotten this far. Why change now? Yeah. No, dude, Eric sue is.

Just a cool dude. Ever since we met him last year at Rich Sheffern's event in Florida. That was the whole steel winners kickoff thing, even though it wasn't called that. It was Coalition to Save Internet Businesses. I think that's what it was.

Yeah, well, that was the name of the live stream. And then the thing they were selling on the live stream was Steal our Winners.

Yeah, you should check that out sometime. From our boy, Rich Efrin. We're in there a couple times. One time we're in there once, but.

We'Re working on more.

But it's cool. And Eric's in there as well. It's definitely not Eric's product, but it's cool promo, no affiliate commission.

Yeah. So Eric is interested. So we met him for the first time at Rich's event, which happened to be in February, and I don't think we were actually Talking about it on the recording. Maybe we did, I don't remember. But we met him in February at Rich's event and like three weeks after that event, the world shut down.

Yeah.

So it was like, it was the second to last event we went to, but we also went to two events really close together. But Eric was one of the people that, when we went to Rich's event, we didn't know him, to be honest. We really, we didn't know his name that well. I think we knew him as like, we knew him. Neil Patel's co. Host.

Co host, Yeah. I mean, we were in Rich's kitchen actually at his house. I remember that. And we were. And we were one of the, the early people that got there to this mastermind. And Eric was kind of standing around, so we're just like, yo, who are you? And then it just happened to be. He actually had a lot of San Diego ties.

He was one of the first few people we actually, we met at that event. And then for the rest of the weekend at that event, he was one of the people we kept on kind of spending some time with and chatting with and learning from and stuff. So cool, dude.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is a long time coming because it's been since then, he's like, dude, I'll totally go to the podcast. And then just like, like life happened. I don't know. But whatever, we're here. And I love the fact that now, I mean, he didn't have his book around then leveling up, but it's. I mean, I'm even more jacked up to dive into that book once it's released. Might be released now by the time this actually goes live, but if not, it's going live February 24th.

Yeah, I mean, most likely this episode is coming out a few days before February 24th, so that you can go like put it on your Amazon wish list or pre order it or whatever.

There you go. Yeah, I mean, just. I just love the fact that he's gamifying life. And I mean, as a gamer himself, I mean like hardcore gamer, I was kind of a gamer. I mean, you were more of a gamer?

I was more of a gamer, probably. I was a closet gamer. So like, I. Yeah, what's that? Somebody who, when I was at home was playing video games constantly, but when I went to school, I didn't admit to people that I was a gamer. Interesting, because I was, I was like growing up, I was a basketball player.

You.

I. Well, probably not. I mean, in retrospect, it's stupid, but totally. You know, when I was a kid I was. My identity was sort of like I played basketball and I skateboarded and I was kind of more of like an active person. Like that's sort of what my friends knew me as. But when I was at home, I was playing Zelda, Ocarina of Time. I was playing Starcraft, Command and Conquer Civilization.

Still to this day I play video games. But now I do it.

Like you still play a lot of those same games?

Yeah, I mean there was like a. There's probably a 10 year gap where I didn't game at all. But now that I have kids again and they're into gaming, we all play video games together.

I can't wait until my girl is old enough to bring the games back and I could just play along.

I mean my backstory, I'm not going to get into it, don't worry. But I learned how to code in QBasic when I was 12 years old or something like that. But all of my friends at school saw me as the kid who played basketball and skateboarded in his free time.

It's cool. Actually, there's some of that stuff I did not know about you. That's rad. I mean. And yeah, I mean there's if it. So I just love how Eric took that and then applies it here. And I think he's targeting a lot of gamers actually is what it sounds like what he was saying. But obviously it applies well that overlap.

If you have a Venn diagram of gamers and entrepreneurs, that Venn diagram of where those two overlap, it's almost like that's it.

That's the sweet spot.

Sweet spot right now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean everybody, almost everyone can relate to like Super Mario Brothers or some basic game where you have to uplevel beat the boss and go and it's a little bit more difficult. You have to learn new tactics, you to have to power up, level up in certain ways and then that's essentially what he's condensed. I think he said 11 or 12 power ups that he lists in the book and we dug into I think some of them and the habits and all that stuff.

But the concept is intriguing as hell. I'm really looking forward to getting that book and going, all right, what are these power ups? Because just the little niblets he gave us on this show.

Grabbed my attention for sure.

They did, yeah, man. So besides that, I mean I think it's just super cool to hear. I mean even the poker playing while he was at UCSD in college, university, you know, a little bit here in San Diego. That's why we asked him about the casinos. I'm like, oh, brona, okay, it's down the street here. And just the fact that he did not lose for what, 60 days straight, that's crazy. That's insane for one, because book players are crazy, crazy intimidating a lot of times. But how you can take that and apply it to business. And I really like the whole habit forming thing and taking that persistence and I don't know, there's a lot of stuff that's just out of your control in business and life in general. And a lot of people do give up or they don't get the win right from the beginning. So they're just like. But it's like, no, through gaming and through all this, you just train your mind to rise up. There's something new I can try, or there's a new game I can dive into and maybe light my brain up. That then, I don't know, excites me. For this other project I'm working on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is a tough episode to really like, sort of synopsize like what we talked about because there was so much. Right. We talked about mindset, we talked about SEO, we talked about YouTube, we talked about paid ads, we talked about content, we talked about software.

Like fricking, hey, man, beginner's mindset.

Beginner's mindset. Like, we covered so many topics. There's a couple that definitely like, really stand out in my mind.

What'd you get?

Go for it. So, you know, right before we hit record on this outro, we were talking, talking about this whole concept of basically acquiring businesses to grow your own business. Right.

So such a common theme coming up lately too.

Yeah, he mentioned two websites. I managed to capture one of them in my notes. The other one, I'm gonna have to go back and get our action guide to get the URL for. But he mentioned microacquire.com and he mentioned another site, but he kind of said it fast, so I'm gonna have to listen back. But basically he was saying you can go to these websites and if like we asked him an SEO question, like, how do you grow through SEO, essentially? And he said, go buy other sites that are already positioned and point them over to your sites, essentially. And just.

I haven't thought about that for SEO.

Not for SEO.

We've thought about it for other things. Like, oh, if you have an audience already, it has an email list. Like Shaq, who was on earlier, you know, a couple episodes or whatever. Ago. Yeah. He buys them to essentially control or acquire an email list.

Yeah.

And then here's Eric over here acquiring it for traffic, I'm sure. Email list and all that stuff, too.

And then you talk to Roland, and Roland actually. They'll actually go and acquire businesses to get the team that's running the business.

Team, revenue, traffic. I mean, all of the above. Yeah. And I love the fact that Eric was like, yeah. And the beautiful thing, because this is where a lot of people don't think there's like, oh, I gotta buy that. How am I gonna afford a $500,000 website or a blog that. It's like, no, get an SBA loan, get 90% of it funded, and you can pay for the other 10%. Or you could do, like, what Roland would do and probably defer that 10% payment out by, like, a couple months and then figure out a way to come up with 10% of that money and get other people to pay for it. Like sell a product. Yeah, or have someone else invest into it. I mean, like, you don't have to go out of pocket.

We have an episode with Roland called, like, how to scale through acquiring other businesses, something along those lines. Definitely go check out that episode. Because he breaks down, like, all these different ways that you can do it, all the different reasons you might want to acquire business. You know, you can always do, like, owner financing stuff where you go buy a company and say, look, I'm going to pay you two grand a month for the next two years. And that's how I'm financing the company. And a lot of people, they don't want to run the business anymore, but they want the cash flow. So you can say, hey, look, I'm going to give you cash flow, but I own your business now. You know, you can do stuff like that. It's not as hard as I think most people make it out to be. And also, another thing is not all these sites are $500,000.

No, no, that was a random example.

Yeah, that was just like a random example.

That's super expensive. Like, you can probably buy. You can clean it up on some cheap ones, probably.

And something that actually. And this just popped in my head because I've been thinking about the way that Roland thinks a lot lately, just for, like, deal making is price and terms. It's like, you can. You basically pick one, but, like, it's either price or terms. And this is like, I think a Rolandism or principle that he came up with that's just true is like, okay, cool. If they have a price tag of say 500,000. Well, cool. Your terms are what? Pretty much, you know, you get an SBA loan to cover some of that. But maybe your terms are like you said, spread out the rest of the payments for over a year or two and then not make it so a burden you don't have to pay up front. Maybe that increases the price slightly, but at least it takes the weight off of you to get in now. And you now have a new traffic source or email list overnight.

Yeah. And I mean, if you know how to monetize it in a way that the current owner doesn't know how to monetize it, oftentimes you can go and acquire a company, better monetize it it and recoup your investment within the first, you know, 90 days of owning the company. I mean, that's pretty damn common. One of the things we were talking about right now with, with Eric was there was a website that he was working with that was making millions a year. They decided to go and add affiliate links throughout their website and they boosted their money by $200,000 per month, $2.4 million a year free cash, by just adding affiliate links. So imagine if you were able to find a website site that gets good traffic, has good SEO, but doesn't have any affiliate links. It's not very well monetized. You go acquire the site, sprinkle affiliate links throughout it, you could potentially recoup your investment within 60, 90 days of acquiring that company and maybe never even come out of pocket at all.

Yeah. Another example was Shakir. You know, in that other episode I keep referencing, you know, we're referencing these related episodes, check them both out. You know, Roland's episode and Shakir's, he acquires them and he knows he's really good at high ticket webinars. So if they're not not profitable or whatever on the front end, he knows to recoup his investment or whatever, he's going to throw a high ticket webinar in there to their traffic or their email list and bam, you know, have it basically cleared and profitable almost immediately.

Absolutely. It's interesting because I think the things that we talked about weren't necessarily what we went into the conversation thinking we were going to talk about, but they're almost like more valuable, I think, mentally from the things we were planning on.

Talking about, I think. So how can. And I know we mentioned Roland's thing often, but like the epic thing, is there like a link or Something I know.

Like, we'll probably put in the show, I believe.

Okay. Yeah. Check it out. Because I know Eric mentioned it, that he went through his whole, like, his big, whole course. We have as well. Go check it out. Because if you're interested in this at all, there is, like, a little challenge thing you can walk through that's pretty cheap to get in there and it will blow your mind. That's on flowchart.com epic.

Yeah. He was also given some good, good advice on YouTube. We actually. The last episode before this. Well, actually, no. The last episode we recorded before this. Not that's being released before this was Rob Basablis.

I don't know how to pronounce his name. The tubebuddy guy studied it enough. It's Balasabas. Balasabas.

Balasabas.

Okay. I don't know if that's exactly how you pronounce it, but covered the name.

Yeah. So we had him on the show and really deep dove on, like, YouTube strategies. We weren't really thinking we were gonna get into YouTube with Eric, but Eric had some great advice around YouTube that's very in line with what we talked to Rob about, about really optimizing the headline and thumbnails being the most important piece of growing a YouTube channel. So.

Yeah. And sounds like he uses tubebuddy. Well, so there's a reason it works. Yeah, man. And shoot. There was some.

Beginner'S mindset, I think is a big thing. Obviously, that's a principle. Like you said, it's more of a Zen thing, Asian culture thing. Like Eric was saying. It's brought up in many things. I mean, Naval Ravikant, I kind of turned over because you have the almanac behind me. It's interesting to apply that and take that to everything in life and not go in with this big ego or big like, oh, I know what I'm doing here. But, you know, come with your experience, but still also know, like, it's probably good to be the dumb guy in the room, dumb gal in the room, and just be. Be a sponge and see what sticks. Not everything's gonna obviously be bright or relevant.

Yeah, I. I almost have. We talked about the philosophy of this kind of stuff a little bit about, you know, constantly looking for things that oppose your point of view so you're not creating your own echo chamber.

Right.

But when it comes to, like, being an expert on things, like, I const. Whenever I'm talking to somebody, even if it's like. Let's just use Eric for an example when we're talking to him about something like SEO. I'm always going to act like I'm a complete beginner. Teach me what you know. Even if it's review for me, I'm going to constantly act like I'm learning this for the first time. Because if I sort of put myself in that mindset of this is my first time learning this, this, then A, it's going to be more valuable to the listeners. Right. Because some of the listeners, this is their first time hearing some of this stuff. But also B, for me, I'm probably going to find little nuances that maybe I've missed last time somebody explained these concepts to me or the time before somebody explained. So, like, constantly acting like I am a complete newbie, a complete beginner at whatever topic we're talking about helps me find new little teeny nuances that we would have missed before, you know? So I think it's a great approach to everything is approach everything as a beginner. Even if you are an expert, even if, like, people consider you the foremost expert on a certain topic, have conversations in from the perspective of I'm learning this from the first time, and you'll probably help open your eyes to some of the little nuances that maybe you've even missed as an expert.

Yeah, something just popped in my mind is I remember an old traffic and conversion summit, maybe even the first one or the second one in Austin, like a long time ago. And I think it was Russell Brunson and or Bill Glaser in the room taking notes like from some presentation that was on there. He was in the back row and I think we just happened to be right around there and we looked over and like, Bill Glaser, how fricking cool is that? That Bill's over here taking notes. Him personally, not an assistant. He's not the cool guy in the bar that's hanging out, you know, smashing, smashing drinks. And I don't think he would do.

That, but it doesn't sound like the.

Bill I know joking, but I just remember the impact. I was like, you know, how cool is that? That here's a guy that at the time was running with Dan Kennedy, no bs. That whole Glazer, Kennedy, and here he is taking notes. I don't know what the topic was.

No, I remember that it was super cool. If I remember correctly, it was like Harry Belger, somebody speaking, and Bill Glaser in the back of the room sitting here taking notes.

Yeah. So, I mean, beginner's mind, man. You don't have all the stuff and you never will. And that's all right. But just be open to it.

Yeah.

Cool.

Good stuff, man. Good stuff, man.

This is a good day. All right. So you mentioned the action guides. Oh, a couple other URLs that might not land in the action guide, but for like, buying and selling websites.

So going back to one of your points, I wanted to say this earlier actually, when you mentioned there's a couple URL and you caught one of them of where to buy and sell websites that Eric mentioned. Obviously you need the notes to get the other URL, because I didn't write it down either. But in addition, I don't know if they'll make the notes, but empireflippers.com is another good website.

Flippa.com.

Flippa is another one. Yeah. Those two are also marketplaces. You can go find and find some of these websites we were talking about here.

Yeah, but I need to go check out Microacquire because that sounds totally.

Yeah, legit. Those two we've never heard of. But yeah, so get the action guides to this episode. You know, they're free for the time of a couple weeks of this episode going live. If you just go to Hustle. Don't go there. Go to flowchartgroup.com and that's going to ask you for your email and some other things. It's actually our Facebook group, but you give us your email address totally free. We will send you the notes to this episode.

The action guide to this episode.

Cancel, cancel, cancel. Thank you, James. Yes. Action guide. We are taking all of those very. Not taking notes. How do we stay there? We're taking.

We have action guides available for you.

There you go.

Is that not good enough?

Yeah.

Are you not entertained?

I am very entertained. So go get them@flowchartgroup.com I think you will dig them. And also we have the webinar.

The webinar. Easy. I think it's webinar.

Webinar, easy.com. no, don't go there. It's easywebinar.com our buddies over there. And they are amazing sponsors, but also just an amazing software company around webinars all in one tool. Everything you need there in webinars. They do it.

Yeah, Hybrid, live, automated, all that kind of stuff. And they're constantly upgrading. I mean, Casey's sending us like little loom videos all the time of like, check out this new feature we're rolling out. Check out this feature that we just added. Like, they're constantly evolving and improving the platform. And it's just getting better and better every day. And they're hooking you up, they're giving you a discount for being a Hustle and Flowchart listener. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle.

They'Re hooking you up there, they're hooking you up with some discounts on your plans. So if you're doing webinars thinking about it, go get easy webinar@easywebinar.com hustle and.

One last call to action.

Yes.

Share this with somebody who would find it valuable. Share this with your group who would that one. Well, here's the thing. If you don't share it with people, it means that you don't love us. It means you don't love us, but it also means you're probably a. A Nazi sympathizer.

Whoa. Right. I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, well, but possibly. I mean, you never know.

Yeah. So if you don't share it, we know who. No, I'm just kidding.

Wow.

Am I going too far with this one?

I wasn't expecting that, but I'm fine with it. I mean, I would agree. Yes. So show a little love, you know, and help someone out that, you know, I think that's the biggest thing is spread the love. It's not a self serving thing, even though it's gonna of just help us talk with more people. But yeah, if you think someone's needing to hear this kind of stuff, I mean, or any other episode you might have heard if it's your first time here, thank you for sticking around. But like, yeah, just spread the love. Spread the love. We'll appreciate that.

We do really appreciate it.

And, and let us know too because we might hook you up something cool too. Tag us, email us, whatever it is.

Absolutely.

All right, we done here? Have a good one.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it Wiki Wiki, we love you.