How To 10X Your Traffic & Revenues with Eric Siu, Single Grain

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Here's a little framework that you can use. Let's say I'm doing a podcast interview. So that's the pillar piece of content. So when you watch like a Joe Rogan, for example, that is the pillar content, right? You have people sitting there, camera crew working on it, and then what happens afterwards is the post production. So you have a pillar piece of content, whether it's a podcast or whether you are good writing blog posts, whatever it is. Exactly. You have one pillar piece of content. That's your seed and then you start to split it out. I'm going to have my team jump on it and then we're going to make it into shorts. Going to probably take those little one minute clips, I'm going to throw them into a LinkedIn box video and then I'm going to write a little long form piece and then try to maximize the reach. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

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We're going to talk about a couple of things that really I've tested across the board, whether it's for a clientele or ourselves internally. My name is Eric Hsu. As was mentioned earlier, I have a ad agency called Single Grain and I do a podcast called Marketing School with another marketer named Neil Patel and another one called Leveling Up. And now I nerd out on web 3 too. So we just created a new podcast. I'm really into podcasts called creators of Web3. And so I have a love hate relationship with podcasts. And what I mean by that is as a marketer, it's probably the most rewarding channel that I've ever dealt with, but it's also the hardest thing to grow. So I'm gonna give you a couple things that you can do but before I do, who here actually has a podcast? Quick show of hands, real quick. And who wants to start? Who wants to start a podcast? Okay, a handful of you. I bet the rest of you are lying. But so on the podcasting side, this is us. The numbers are a little off. May was actually about 1.7 million. I think this month we'll hit about 1.6 million in terms of a monthly downlo. And this is not all to brag. In the very Beginning, after the first year, I was only getting nine downloads a day and I was spending six hours a week on it. And second year, only 30 downloads a day. And my mom would probably tell me to give up, but keep going. But then it just starts compounding over time. And so a couple things too. Demographic wise, and it's hard to read this. I'll share the slides afterwards. But at the very high, the highest point, maybe in the top left, you can see for us, we have a lot of people, like a lot of rich people that listen to podcasts, right? So 250k income or more. Then there's 200k bracket, but you can see we're in a dark blue and we actually exceed what the benchmark numbers are. And that's just to say that podcasting is great from a demographic standpoint, but also from a retention standpoint. Think about this. If people are watching a YouTube video, they're not likely to finish it. Like I get ADD when I'm watching YouTube videos. Like I start looking at my phone, I start doing other stuff. But with podcasting, you're usually doing something you're working out or you are maybe you are doing your laundry or something like that. Your retention is. Your retention curve is actually a lot higher. So when we look at our Apple podcast analytics or we look at Spotify, it's actually like a flat curve. People actually our retention is about 90% or so. Keep in mind, these are about five minute daily episodes. And even for my longer episodes, 45 to 60 minutes or so, the retention is about 50 or 60% versus on YouTube, I'm lucky if I get like 30, 40%. I'm not like Mr. Beast where I can hold people at 60% across the board. It's hard to keep people interested. But with podcasts you can actually do that. And so here's how you can actually grow podcasts. This seems like a duh statement, but right now we're doing a deal with Jordan Harbinger, who has a podcast with about 5 or 6 million downloads a month. Great. One to listen to, we're trading him impressions right now. So we said, hey, we'll trade you 500k impressions and he'll do the same thing. And it's pretty easy to do that. You can use different tools like Chartable. Our host is Libsyn. But my point here is that if you're gonna try to promote your podcasts, it makes a lot of sense to get onto other podcasts or buy ads on other podcasts. And there's actually a lot of ad networks that are forming right now like podcasts. Ad networks are just podcast networks. The HubSpot Podcast Network is a good example of this. They're all cross promoting each other. If any of you listen to my first million great podcast and now we're starting to do the same thing, you can also buy ad slots too. I know Jordan spends like seven figures a year just promoting his podcast. So hardest channel to grow, but the most rewarding from a retention standpoint because you're building trust at scale. When you get that level of retention, I just think it's very difficult to match. So that's that. Another timeless test of principles. So this is actually number one is the law of pool clickthroughs. LinkedIn Right now I would say there's the law of shitty clickthroughs. What that really means is that over time, any social channel, the click through rate is gonna come down. That's what the law is. Really good essay by Andrew chen. This is LinkedIn, right? And so I would, I'm gonna give you a list of what I think the biggest opportunities are from an organic standpoint, which I think everyone can attack. But LinkedIn right now I'll throw something up and boom, we'll get like a thousand likes on it. 2000 or so. This one over here, I threw up a couple weeks ago and I think it's at, this one might be at like 7 or 8,000 likes now and I think it's at 5 or 600,000 impressions. And all that to say is LinkedIn organic is very strong right now. Actually Kyle, who's just on stage, I always see his stuff on LinkedIn. And so there's a couple things that you can do. One, same thing, can you create a pod? Can you create like a group of friends that when you are posting out there, when you're posting anything, you are going to get a bunch of people to like it, right? Or a bunch of people to comment. So if you work at a company, there's a, a lot of companies that actually do this, right? Now, where I see them, their employee will post and a bunch of their employees will jump in. It works. And that's how you get a post jump started, right? Images work really well. Videos work pretty well. I would say carousels work really well too. But LinkedIn organic. Here's the interesting stat. When you compare LinkedIn versus Instagram, 87% of Instagram users actually post to Instagram. Okay. Whereas LinkedIn, only 1% of users post LinkedIn. That's like, they need content. And so I think everyone here is in B2B. Most of us are in B2B. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be attacking LinkedIn free, right? Like, I don't need to really do much here. So that's LinkedIn. And for me, keep it very simple. Like the posts. I'll just ask a question the very beginning. I'll try to make it controversial. I'll try to make. I think having a spiky point of view makes a lot of sense too. You ideally want people disagreeing with you because then it causes more engagement. But don't say anything that you don't mean, obviously. So just be you. Cause there's a lot of people that are engagement farming on link. So don't do that. Just be you and get a couple of friends together and then you can start to push something. And LinkedIn works if you're B2B. LinkedIn to me, is number one. Number two, in my opinion, is shorts. Any type of short form, especially YouTube shorts, because obviously it stays on YouTube. So YouTube has really been taking off for us. And what I actually thought was a little counterintuitive was running ads to my YouTube videos, right? And so recently we just started spending like 25 to $40 on any of our YouTube videos. And what. What's happening right now is you can see, like, I was like, okay, this is stupid. Like, it's just gonna say my traffic source is coming from YouTube advertising. But that's not actually the case. When I look at analytics now, the reality is on YouTube, YouTube's actually recommending a lot of my videos or like suggesting a lot of my videos. And so that $25 to $40 that I'm spending per video is actually a good return on investment, right? Cause it's actually growing my YouTube channel across the board. And it's actually starting to push my channel more. So I think YouTube shorts, big opportunity. Obviously they wanna fight against TikTok, right? And obviously, if you're doing shorts, then it makes a lot of Sense to hit TikTok it makes a lot of sense to hit reels. Your argument might be I'm B2B, but there's actually a lot of B2B people that do this. And so I would say, okay, you got LinkedIn shorts would be number two. Believe it or not, Facebook pages, organic reach is actually making a comeback because so many people have got away from it for a while and now it's making a comeback. Right. If you actually have a B2B Facebook page, like maybe you should dust it off, take a look at it again because it's a big opportunity. Okay, all right, so I'm gonna skip that one, obviously, repurposing your content. So I think a lot of people don't really use a framework, right? So here's a little framework that you can use. Maybe this is the only like picture worthy slide, but this is our little content sprouting process. And so what this means is that for me, if I'm doing like an interview, let's say I'm doing a fireside chat, like I was just up here doing a fireside chat, right? So that might be a podcast interview. So that's the pillar piece of content. So when you watch like a Joe Rogan for example, or who else is there? Lex Friedman, any of these podcasters. That is the pillar content, right? You have people sitting there, camera crew working on it, and then what happens afterwards is the post production, right? So you have a pillar piece of content, whether it's a podcast or whether you are good writing blog posts, whatever it is. Exactly. You have one pillar piece of content. That's your seed and then you start to split it out, right? The argument here is that you can take one piece of content. The or what I'm doing right now, I'm going to take the recording right after this, right? And I'm gonna have my team jump on it and then we're gonna make it into shorts. We're gonna probably take those little one minute clips, I'm gonna throw them into a LinkedIn box video and then I'm gonna write a little long form piece and then try to maximize the reach. And here's the other thing too. Like it sounds like this stuff is expensive. Sure, it's gonna cost you money to do, but this is one of those things now where not many people want to talk about this, but this is where when you actually hire people offshore from upwork, and I hate like that I'm even saying this right now, but we've been hiring people off of Upwork that are really good at shorts. And our test is very. It's just like, hey, like, here's the video. Chop it up. Let's see what you got. Give us an example. And then if we like it, then we'll hire you. And we actually, like, really quickly, within a weekend. We hired four or five editors, and it's 10 or $15 an hour or something like that. And we just pay them per video, right? But not many people talk about this, but everything you see there, like, at first I was initially a little hesitant. I was like, looking at everyone's shorts, the reels, I'm like, man, this is so high quality. And then you realize, oh, a lot of people know how to do this stuff, and a lot of people would kill to do this stuff stuff for you. So that's that. So building for the long term. I talked about YouTube a little bit, but one of the key things I'll talk about. One of the key mistakes I made with my YouTube channel, where it's finally getting back on track now, is that a couple years ago I would talk about marketing, as an example, and some of my videos would get 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, or like 200, 300,000 views or so. What happened along the way was that I started talking about other stuff. I'm more than a marketer. Talk about investing. Talk about NFTs. There's NFTs up here, right? The problem with that is the YouTube algorithm will punish you for trying to act like you're too. It punishes you for not focusing. Whereas my podcast co host, Neil, like, he's got a million subs now on YouTube and all he talks about is marketing, right? Like, we talk about a lot of other stuff on the side. We talk about investing, we talk about real estate, we talk about all this stuff. It's just like, it doesn't matter. The YouTube algorithm just wants you to stay focused. And now that I've. What I've done with my channel, I think if any of you are having, like a dormant channel or struggling to grow on YouTube, I would just delete or unlist all the videos that are unrelated to what the core topic is, and then just focus on that. Put some YouTube ads towards it, and then your channel should start growing again. Because that's working for us. I think pretty quickly we'll break 100,000. I think we can grow to a couple hundred thousand very quickly. So that's YouTube. And I think there's a reason why everyone, like every kid, wants to become a YouTuber. It's because YouTube is around for the long term, second largest search engine in the world. And then what can you do Afterwards? If you're B2B, you can retarget people. And here's the thing. I don't see a lot of B2B companies that do YouTube pretty well for, for whatever reason. But when you look at, when you study the best YouTubers out there, when you study a Mr. Beast, when you look at what's going on, I really recommend looking at Colin and Samir. They study the top creators, look at what they do. And even if you emulate 20 to 30% of what these top creators are doing, you're gonna be better than all the B2B companies out there because people are just not doing this stuff. It's like the problem now is the world that we live in. You know what? Pre Covid, Maybe even during COVID 45, 50% of VC dollars were going to Facebook and Google Ads. But the game's gotten much harder now. Marketing is harder now. And I love it. Right. Because it forces you to be creative. And so all of you are here to learn. I think if you want that leg up like it does require, I think the two things are going to separate the marketers are data and creative. Right. You have to be pretty creative with them. You have to understand your data really well and you have to be very creative. Right. Which is just one of the things I think I'll talk about in a second. Talked about that. But obviously you're here for an in person event as well. But what I do with my in person events is so I do a little founders mastermind called Leveling Up Live. And I really, what I really enjoy doing. You don't need to throw a big event like this one. This is a great event, right? Huh? Attraction. Right. The way I started out with my events was I started out with a little dinner and this is when I was broke and when I was like 25 or 26, like we eat like a bag of chips at my home. So you slowly level up and you don't have to pay for everything. You get people to come over, maybe get people to bring their own food and you just have a little mastermind. And there's one of my friends has a nice PDF on how to throw a mastermind. It's called Mastermind talks. Just Google this. Mastermind talks. Just Google Mastermind Talks, Jason. And then you'll find like the PDF. But basically I started out with dinners and then slowly leveled up to other dinners, like paying for larger dinners in Private rooms. And then it started to become larger events. Right? So this is an example of a dinner I did recently. And the way I do it is I don't. You got to think about your approach and how you deliver. And so for me, when I throw these dinners, I'm not trying to like collect leads, I'm not trying to get clients, I'm not trying to say, hey, how are you doing with this? Because people can smell it from a mile away the moment you start to try to sell them. And like genuinely, it's not my goal. Like I get, my drug is I get a lot of value from connecting with people. So anybody happy to talk to you all afterwards? But relationships are the roi, right? Like long term, no matter what you do these things. Like I just like hosting like this dinner over here that I did in New York. This is during NFT nyc. And yeah, sure dinner costs a couple thousand dollars, but at the end of the day, like the magic that happens from these dinners, all these collaborations that happen, it's worth it. That's my opinion on it. So the other thing too is maybe you don't have to pay for it. Maybe you can get people to sponsor the dinners. Right, Because I'm too dumb to do that. But a lot of people get people to, to sponsor the dinners and the costs are covered. Like it's a win across the board. So look again, you can host the happy hour, you can host a dinner, you can host the event like this. But shifting your mindset instead of trying to become the most interesting person in the room, just being interested, that's the quote that's always stuck with me. So that's that. And one final. Well, I think this is my second to final point. So there's really only one thing that matters the most when you're running ads. And I'm assuming everyone in here is still running ads. Yes. Yes. Cool. I can still see you. So real quick, you can just blur it out if you want. What do you think is the most important thing when it comes to your ads? Is it click through rate? Is it conversion rate, cost per click? Like what is it exactly? Anyone feel free to blurt it out. Cpa. Okay, conversion one more. Cost per acquisition. Okay, so this is the most important thing. Okay, so it's hard to see this, but this is one of our clients. Echelon front and in the very top left corner, this is their Facebook ad library. And you can see that they're running 220 ads at any given time. This is another one of Our clients called Belay Solutions, they're running 120 ads at any given time. I would challenge you to take a look at how many ad creatives you're running at any given time. Whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on Google, whether it's on Facebook, whatever channel, meta Alphabet, whatever you want to call them. Look, at the end of the day, it's all about the creative, right? And I think people have gotten lazy about creative over time. How can you hire someone like just when you're hiring them, hey, show me some good creative that you've done, right? Show me what you can do for us. Like we'll pay you for this assignment. I think we forget that process during the, when we're interviewing people. But yet, like that's one of the most important things. Like we hire a lot of doers, like a lot of tacticians, but you need the strategic thinking, you need the creativity, otherwise you're gonna get the same results as everyone else. And that means poor click through rate, which affects all your down funnel conversions, affects your cpa, affects your cpc, affects all those numbers, right? If you can't get that part right, then it's just not going to work. And using the ADA model, right, this is old school copywriting, old school sales. The first thing is, what does the A stand for? It stands for attention, right? So how can we get people's attention? How do we hook people? I didn't want to use this example, but those of you that have heard of this Andrew Tate guy, he's like growing. Love him or hate him, right? But this guy's a walking highlight reel because everything he says will grab your attention. And some people really hate him, some people really love him, right? And that's why he's more popular than I think anybody else in the world right now if you search on Google Trends. But what works for him, by the way, I think love him or hate him, that's one thing. But I think what he's doing from a marketing perspective is genius. And I think I might just end on this point and I'll talk about the acquisitions point. So if you follow this guy, he makes very crude comments. And what happens is he puts people through his, his training like he's going to teach you how to become like a marketer. And then what happens is he takes some of those people and he has an affiliate program. And so his students become people that will market his courses, right? And then what his students do is the students take, they take all his highlight reels. And make them into shorts. And because this stuff is blowing up on reels on TikTok. On. Was it shorts? TikTok reels? Yeah, those three. Right. They're all just trying to. They're all blowing him up right now. And they're all just trying to collect a commission. It's this cycle, right? And so for me, when I look at guys like this, it's not so much do I love him or hate him, it's what can I learn from him and apply it to my business. And there's something to learn from everyone, right? Whether you love him or hate him. So I removed that portion. Check out what this guy is doing. I think it's interesting and I think he might become mildly entertained. So that's the final thing. I'll leave it with this. I talk to a lot of people. My background's in SEO. And people are like, oh, is SEO dying? Is SEO a thing anymore? Like, all these other channels, like, organic reach is strong. And while I agree with that, you can still play the game of SEO because there's so many underutilized websites out there that are primed for the taking. And I invested in a company called Microacquire. You can go there and check out some sites over there. But like, they list their marketplace. There's. There's Fee International, there is. There's Empire Flippers. There's a lot of these websites that are out there that lists these sites available for sale. And my point of seeing all this is that you can buy a website that's getting a good amount of traffic. They might even have an email list. They might have other assets as well, and they're generating cash flow. And you can just plug it into whatever it is that you're doing B2B side to, like, for sure, you can definitely find something. I would recommend using a tool like Ahrefs or ubersuggest to find out people that are competing in your niche. And then I'll just try to figure out how you can buy these websites. And by the way, you don't even need to have a lot of money. Maybe if you raise money, you could just buy it directly. But this I'm going to skip over. Like, this is. Maybe we can talk about this later, but you can basically finance these websites for almost no money down, right? And I'll just give you an example here. So if we start, let's say you're a pet SaaS business and you're doing 3 million in ARR and you come across a website that gets about 500,000 visits a month. So it's pretty significant. And they're doing about a million a year in revenue and 200k in profit. So that's at the bottom, right? So the way you can structure this deal is if they're doing 200k in profit, then you can buy them for 3x profit, right? And then what you can do is you can say, hey, you know What, I'll put 10% down to buy this deal. Okay? So you put 60 grand down and the rest of it, you can sell it, you can sell or finance it, you can use a loan or whatever and you can actually defer the down payment, say, hey, I'm not going to pay you to 60 grand down payment. I'm going to wait maybe 30 to 45 days or so and you actually end up paying $0 out of pocket. Maybe you can get someone else like your mom or something to finance it. Right? I'm just joking. So my point of saying all this is that, look, you don't have to be fancy. You don't, oh my God, I'm doing M and A. Like, you can do this yourself. It's practical. And as marketers, I think we need to think, we need to start to think a little more creatively and this is part of it. Like creative is the one thing, right? Like we can be creative with how we acquire more traffic. Like we can own this traffic and we don't need to be always using these other ad platforms out there. Like it's, that's, that's how everyone else is doing it. You have to be creative. You have to go into a blue ocean and not go where everyone else is competing. That being said, that's it for me. Hope you enjoyed this.

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