344: How To Build A One Man Media Company With Eric Siu

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I my friend Eric Su back on the show, and Eric spoke at the very first Seller Summit I ever held. He runs two podcasts with over 40 million downloads with Neil Patel, and he’s the founder and CEO of ClickFlow, a software that helps you grow your SEO traffic. Now, in this episode, we’re not gonna talk about his companies. Instead, we’re gonna talk about how to create a one-man media company.

00:29
But before I begin, want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Businesses are always the most successful when they own their own data, customer relationships, and their growth. And that’s why more than 50,000 e-commerce brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad trust Klaviyo to deliver their ideal customer experience. Now having used Klaviyo for many years now, I can wholeheartedly say that Klaviyo is the best email automation platform in the world for e-commerce, and you get everything you need to build strong relationships that keep your customers coming back. Now with advertising getting harder and more expensive,

00:59
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01:27
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02:23
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m excited to have Eric Su back on the show after a very long time. Eric was actually a guest back in episode 43. He actually spoke at the Seller Summit my very first year that I launched the event and I’m very appreciative to have him as a friend. And he’s got a very impressive resume. He’s well known for buying single grain for just two bucks and turning it into a multi-million dollar ad agency. He runs two podcasts with over 40 million downloads, The Marketing School with Neil Patel.

02:51
and Growth Everywhere, which I think you just rebranded to Level Up, which is a weekly interview series where I was a guest a while back. And then finally, he is the founder and CEO of ClickFlow, a software tool that helps you grow your SEO traffic by split testing titles, meta descriptions, and helping you optimize your content. But Eric is actually a master all around digital marketer. And what we’re going to cover today is we’re going to talk about how to create a one man media company, which is something that I’ve been trying to do for the past decade.

03:19
And with that, welcome to show, Eric. How are you doing today, Good, man. Thanks for having me. So it’s been a long time since we’ve heard from you. I want to say almost five years ago, what have you been up to during this time? Yeah. I mean, wow. I can’t believe time flies. Has it been, I think it’s been five years, right? So yeah, I was actually living closer to LAX Diamond downtown LA and then probably going to relocate soon. But yeah, I mean, the last five years have been quite a journey. you know, the ad agency has been growing. We now have a CEO that runs that.

03:49
And then four years ago, I started the marketing school podcast with another marketer named Neil Patel. And then click flow was actually started about two and a half years ago. And then we now have a GM that runs that company. And I mean, this all started from, you know, buying single grain for the $2 out of pocket and turning around. my entire thesis back then was if I could turn this company around, you know, obviously there’s no freelancer was a failing company. If I could turn it around.

04:16
And I could basically use the funding, the profits from the company and reinvest it into the business or invest it into other areas. And that would be my funding mechanism. I don’t necessarily need to raise money. And that’s how I would level up because I’ve always looked at agencies as, know, that’s a very good first step for people. It’s a great launchpad business. But you you have to look at more durable or exponential sources of revenue. And that’s why we’re doing Clickflow. That’s why we have all these other things.

04:45
that we’re doing with marketing school right now and that’s why I’m doing the book, right? There’s this entire concept of leveling up, which I’m happy to talk about later. So what’s funny about this is you started several companies, the agency, Clickflow, but when I see you publicly, all I do is I see you mainly producing content, right? You have two awesome podcasts. You actually write a blog and then you actually have a YouTube channel as well. How does all that stuff come into play? Yeah, that’s a great question. think it’s, you know, I think I would…

05:13
turn it back on you in a second. the, was just saying before we started recording a couple of weeks back, I was talking to a guy named Anthony Pompuliano who’s very known in the crypto space. And in 2017, he started going hardcore on content. just publishes whatever’s on his mind. His Twitter is now about three to 400,000 followers. He’s got a podcast with about 2.5 million listeners a month. And his email is about 80,000, which is great. And then his YouTube is pretty solid. I think he’s approaching 150,000, but.

05:42
In three years, he’s done this and he is very much a one-man media company, which I’m happy to talk about more. But, you know, we had a conversation and I was like, so what do do every day? He’s like, you know, honestly, the highest leverage thing I can do is create content because your content, you know, you might spend 45 minutes on it, but if, know, um, three, five, 3000 people, 5,000 people see it, you’re getting leverage. Right. Um, and so I’m like, wow, that is the highest leverage thing that I can do. So that’s why I, you know, that’s why we have, um, know, for these companies.

06:12
We have these operators that are running it and I’m just going to focus on having great conversations with people like you creating more YouTube content and even creating more content for the leveling up podcast. And then we have this book coming out and there’s a whole method to the madness around the book as well. Cause some people are just like, why are you doing a book? That’s so traditional. So yeah. So I guess one of the questions I get asked from readers and listeners is you can put out content and media and whatnot, but how does that lead to money? So what is kind of like your flow? So let’s talk about the one man media company.

06:41
How does that actually turn into revenue? Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think, you know, for our, for our Asian parents, you know, they don’t understand anything. No, I would just say this, right. Where’s the money? Where’s the money? It’s always, you don’t make money. Where’s the money, right? It want you to be safe too. So the leveling up podcast formerly growth everywhere. The first year that I did that podcast, I was spending six hours a week on it while I was trying to save single grain.

07:09
So was doing the interviews. was, I was writing out the posts. was publishing. was just a lot of work. And after the first year, I was only getting nine downloads a day. And what I didn’t know that same thing. Yeah, it was bad. I mean, after the second year, I was only getting 30 downloads a day and I had amazing guests, right. And then they would share it and all that, but averaged out, was 30 downloads a day. So, you know, our Asian parents would tell us like, what are you doing? You’re not making any money at all. And so I would just say, if you’re looking to produce content, it’s.

07:37
probably an 18 to 24 month journey to start to see results because it takes time to compound. And I optimized more for the learning, right? I got to meet amazing people like you. have, you know, one of my best friends right now is he was actually the first listener to the marking school or sorry, the leveling up podcast. Then he invited me to speak at a conference and we became really good friends. And so if you optimize for the learning, you know, the stuff will come afterwards. Like if you’re actually enjoying it, that’s how.

08:05
A lot of these YouTube creators got really big, like MrBeast in the first six years. He’s got 46 million subscribers now, but he just, you know, he ate doo-doo for the first couple of years. Um, you know, it didn’t work out well for me with business for the first, I would call it the first two to three years or so. And so same thing with content, right? It takes time business. Neil and I often talk about on the marketing school podcast with whatever business we’ve started. It typically takes around three years to start to get going.

08:31
All right. So what do you recommend? So let’s say you want to start a one man media operation. Which medium do you choose? Blogging, podcasting, YouTube? What would you advise someone to do? Yeah, I think it depends on a how competitive each channel is and what you’re really good at. Right. So, you know, back in the day, I would say maybe in 2010 or so, um, I just really enjoyed writing in high school and also in college. So I started a blog first and, you know, right now, like, you know, got pretty good at blogging, got pretty good at SEO.

09:01
Um, the trouble with blogging and SEO is there’s millions of blog posts being published every day and you’re competing with people that are spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on content and links. you know, two things that matter with SEO content and links. So that’s a red ocean, right? So, but if you think about, if you’re actually good at video, you’re probably good at audio too. So a blue ocean might be podcasting. So, you know, maybe a year or two ago it was about 700,000 podcasts. I don’t know how many it is now.

09:30
But 700,000 podcasts versus over a billion blogs, like you’re in a much better position to succeed. So A, think about what are you good at, which channel you’re good at, and then also how competitive is each channel. And then I would attack one first and then get it going before you start to do too many at once. Cause splitting your attention is going to lead to, I’ll just say you’re going to extend your timeline to success. So I would agree with you that there aren’t nearly as many podcasts out there as blogs, for example.

10:00
I feel like it’s much harder to grow a podcast, right? Because the discovery engines just aren’t quite there yet. Would you agree with that? I would say, yeah, for the most part, you know, when we look at marketing school, the reason why that worked out well was because we were using our other audiences to push to it. And so you kind of need a boost in the beginning. I would agree with you. That’s the short answer. But how you would circumvent that is if you do have some money, if you’re fortunate enough, you know, can you

10:30
buy some sponsorships on some newsletters, you know, get, cause we really grew through email blasts initially, and then we stopped doing it. And you know, that’s in marketing school just kind of grew organically after that. So how can you jumpstart it? Do you have your audiences first? Can you boost it initially? And then could you get on other podcasts and do this podcast tour? Right. Cause with this book right now, the reason why I’m also doing this podcast is because if you want to grow a book, you do the podcast tour. Cause that’s, that pushes books and that also builds the audience.

10:56
So if you were to start your podcast from scratch without an audience, what would you do? Yeah. I mean, it’s the same thing I did with leveling up. think it’s, let’s say I am brand new. I’m cutting coming out of college right now. Um, I have a lot to learn anyway, right? It’s so I have a lot of questions. I’m going to be really curious. And if, if I’m lucky enough, and by the way, here’s a really good example. Um, Anthony Pompuliano, the guy just talked about, he, he did a really smart collaboration with a YouTube influencer that doesn’t know.

11:24
anything about finance or business and he wants to learn. And they made this new podcast called capital university. So a yes, I get it. They’re both influencers already. But if you somehow can get a collaboration going with someone that is bigger than you, more knowledgeable than you, you can kind of arbitrage that. And I would argue that marketing school is kind of like that. So that’s one thing you can do. The other thing I would say is, look, if you, if you don’t have those relationships, if you don’t want to reach out to anybody, do exactly what I did. My KPI.

11:53
was optimizing for the learnings. And the other KPI I had was I was looking for the unsolicited response rate. So what I mean by that is, you know, I might be doing this podcast over and over. So I might, what would happen every month or so as I’d see a comment from someone like Steve and Steve might say something like, Oh, um, you know, Eric, don’t know why this is not getting more reviews. It’s not getting more downloads or more views. Um, but this, this has been really impactful or this has changed my life. I’m like, okay, I’m onto something. Not only am I learning.

12:22
But other people are finding value to it, right? Because I’m not going to get this influx of, um, you know, a bunch of downloads initially. And then you just keep going, you know, go for that 18 to 24 months, as long as you feel like you’re learning, you keep going. And there’s no way in hell that you, a, you don’t get better and you’re a bunch more wiser in that time period. And then from there, you just, you just start to take off and grow. That’s exactly what happened with leveling up. Well, so what was the tipping point? So the tipping point was when we.

12:50
we were promoting it more actually. We’re promoting it on websites like Producton and then we were actually, some of the guests that we were getting, they were actually happy to throw it to their email list and they were happy to hit their socials as well. And that’s what started. So maybe I might be more aggressive and ask for that sooner. Interesting. So you just flat out, actually I never asked that question. I never asked people to send it out. I just send them a link to it. So you flat out ask people to share it? That was in the early days. I think it’s still very tough today. Okay. Okay. All right. So that’s

13:19
That’s the podcast. you reached a tipping point and okay. So back to the original question, how does that lead to money as an Asian parent would ask? Yep. So once you have an audience, let’s use, let’s use leveling up as an example. I didn’t monetize for the first three years for that podcast. we, then all of a sudden we started getting people reaching out to work with single range. So what ends up happening is whoever listens to this podcast, for example, you know, they like you, Steve. Um, and they’re going to look into you more.

13:49
And what ends up happening is we actually ended up getting a couple of clients for on the ad agency side. And what I will tell you is that for these clients, um, yes, we were making multiple six figures from them annually. Um, the sales cycle was a lot shorter. The lifetime value of the customer was a lot higher and they’re just a lot more pleasant to work with once they know you, cause they, treat you as a friend. So there’s a lot of benefits there. got agency clients. So that’s, that’s revenue there. I didn’t try to monetize through ads or anything until maybe about a year and a half ago. And we.

14:18
Basically what happened was once we started getting volume. So I went from, you know, nine downloads a day to 30 downloads a day to, think we, we at our high point, maybe we average about 150,000 downloads a month. Now we’re about a hundred thousand or so, but that’s good enough to start working with advertisers if you want, and then they’ll pay you on a CPM basis, or you can push them to like a membership offer that you might have. So there’s a lot of different ways to monetize. I’m happy to go through the list.

14:45
Um, if you want, and I’m happy to also talk about how we do it for marketing school and share some numbers around that. Yeah. Let’s talk about markings. That’s, that’s the bigger podcast of the two, right? Yeah. Okay. Uh, real quick, before we jump into that, do you recommend everyone just start content before starting a business? Like for example, if you want to start an e-commerce store or like Clickflow, like what you started, do you recommend going the content route first way before you even think about doing that?

15:11
I think to me, the way I look at content is it’s the same thing as choosing when to invest, right? Obviously, know, Warren Buffett, Snowball, the earlier you can start compounding, the better. The earlier you can start making deposits, the better. So I think a lot of these TikTok influencers, Instagram influencers starting young, they get the value of content and now they want to understand, you know, how to do, you know, investing in the stock market and all that. So I would say as soon as you can start investing in content, cause you want to get all the suckage out of your body.

15:40
and you want to let the time start to compound. Okay. Interesting. So this is while you are starting a business, like when you were running single grain, you were working on the podcast. Did you have other content projects going on at the same time? Yeah. So the only, as I was trying to save single grain, the only content projects I had at the moment was our, yeah, it was the leveling up podcast and it was our blog. So the single grain blog, when I first joined, um,

16:06
It was 4,000 visits a month. Now we average about 350,000 visits a month, which is it’s decent, but it took a long time to build there. So I, I tried to do those two while juggling saving the company. All right. Is that from search primarily? Yeah. For blog. Okay. So blog and podcast. What would you start with? I would start with podcasts today. I think blogging is just too competitive. Really interesting. Interesting. Because I know for me, the blog is actually where I get people.

16:34
And then I funnel those people to the podcast because it’s really hard to grow a podcast organically. Yeah. I think it just, I think it depends. I would just say if I was starting from scratch, it just takes forever. Like if I had a brand new website, it takes forever to build that domain authority. I actually think a podcast, my opinion is the podcast can grow faster than a brand. Like if they’re both starting from scratch. Interesting. How does YouTube factor into this? Yeah. So I, at the time it was funny. I think when I had you on my podcast, um, no.

17:04
No, I moved away, but when I first started doing the podcast, it was actually on YouTube as well. So YouTube was, was a factor, but it was like, I’m just like, I might as well repurpose. So I had a, like, I did it in a dark room. I’d spiky hair at the time. And then I had this, I had this background where it wasn’t even fully like covered. Um, and it was just really ghetto. And so I would do that. I’d be wearing a single grain shirt and, um, yeah, I would do that and then push it to the podcast and YouTube.

17:31
I remember I only got to YouTube to about 2,500 subscribers. It just wasn’t growing, right? And so I didn’t start focusing on YouTube until maybe three, four years ago. And still it’s kind of been like a, as focused as I like to be. So I’m starting to ramp that focus up like as of four weeks ago. So here’s my opinion. You can tell me whether you agree or disagree. think YouTube and blogging are really good at getting new people in because Google is really awesome at search and getting people to just view your content.

18:01
Whereas podcasts, don’t think Apple has done a really good job. Spotify is out there too, but you know, the discovery engines for podcasts aren’t as good. for just discovery purposes, think blogging and YouTube are better. And then podcast is really good for building much deeper relationships. Like if you want a client, a multi six figure client for single grain, example, podcasts is probably better for that. Yeah, I’m with you. think so what I would say is out of the three. So I agree YouTube and blog are good for a top of the funnel kind of discovery.

18:28
Um, I actually think if I were, if I were to pick the three starting from scratch, I’d probably pick YouTube because the algorithm is really good at discovery. Yeah. Um, and you know, what you learn from these big YouTube creators is that, know, the number one thing that matters is how good your idea is. And that factors directly or correlates directly with how good your title is. Um, how good your thumbnail is one, one of these creators was like, he’s got about 800,000 subscribers. He’s like, look, honestly, I think the title on the thumbnail are more important than the video itself. So that just shows you like, that’s what everyone says. Yep.

18:58
But I think to a certain extent, your video has to be good too, in order to build the mind share, right? You can get people to click, but the mind shares is what I’m going for at least, right? Yeah, I think it’s gotta be like, I think if you’re like, you know, the Ogilvy, like I was thinking about this the other day, I was like, you know, Ogilvy has said like, you know, you know, the, $1 80 cents goes towards the headline base. I’m paraphrasing, but I’m like, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense for YouTube too. It’s like, if your headline is a 10 out of 10, but your video is like maybe a 7.5 or eight, I still think it’s passable.

19:28
Right. Yeah, I would agree with that. So, so let’s go back to marketing school now. How did you grow that? What was the master plan with that? Cause I remember it’s, it’s a short podcast, right? Yeah, it’s very short. you know, leveling up is very similar to this, where we go maybe 30, 45 minutes. Yep. The marketing school podcast is five to 10 minutes and it’s every single day. And you know, that was just, it kind of happened out of serendipity. So Neil and I, we’re walking around in Hollywood and then.

19:57
I was like, yeah, you know, the podcast has been great. I was referring to leveling up here. Podcast has been great. It’s done this, this, and this. And then he interpreted it as we should do a podcast together. Right. So he’s like, yeah, let’s do a podcast. And then I was like, wait, what? And then he’s like, let’s call it B school. was like, no, someone else has B school already. Let’s call it marketing school. So that’s how the conversation started. And then, um, we know we started recording and get away and then we’ve been growing since then. But what was the plan?

20:24
just to have content for the sake of having content or was there an ulterior motive for that? So it was, I think it’s more so that, you know, we realized that, cause podcasting was still ramping up at the time, right? We’re like, okay, I think it makes sense to have a big audience around marketing. And Neil’s naturally got a lot of big audiences. So it’s like, yeah, you why don’t we build it around podcasting? Cause you know, the benefits are, you know, insane.

20:52
So, um, that was, that, that was the reason it’s like, let’s just occupy this channel as well. How did you launch that podcast? So we started out, um, we’re like, okay, let’s do it daily. And then we started recording at his place in Vegas. Um, and the way we grew, so we, we, would batch a bunch of episodes at once. So like usually in a recording session, we probably do 10 or 15, um, under five to 10 minutes each. And then what would happen is we’d upload it and.

21:20
we would both hit our, our channel. So, um, our email lists, we’d use our notification platforms like subscribers.com. And, um, that’s what helped us very quickly in the first month, we jumped up to about a hundred thousand downloads for that month. And then next month we jumped up to 300,000. And then, um, over the next year, I think our high point was 500,000. And then it just kept compounding over there. So we haven’t over the, after that initial bump where we would push it through our email lists and our channels, maybe for the first, let’s call it three months.

21:49
We didn’t do anything afterwards. Sorry. What is subscribers.com? Is that push notifications? What is that? Yeah. Yeah. That’s one of Neil’s products. It’s subscribers.com. It’s it. Yeah. Oh, interesting. So if we could wouldn’t mind segueing. do you have email? Are you guys using SMS in addition to push? Not at the time we do have SMS. Now we use community.com. And what about messenger? You guys using the messenger at all? We’re not. Not okay. What would you say is like the most effective way to keep in touch with your audience right now?

22:18
I would say for us, it’s through community.com because, um, what is community.com? Yeah. So it’s, it’s an SMS, uh, platform a lot of, yeah. So it’s, it’s cheap. It’s like not, well, actually it’s not that cheap. It’s 99 bucks starts at 99 bucks and it goes up. Um, but I think there’s a lot of, I’m sure you talked about, you know, other SMS platforms that are probably better in my opinion. Um, but. You know, every now and then we’ll ask like, Hey, like, what’s your biggest challenge right now? Or what, you know, what topics are you interested in? Or how can we help? Um, and then people respond.

22:47
And then Neil and I will hop into community and we’ll actually respond to these people. Um, that’s been pretty, um, personal. then in addition to that, we have a virtual event actually just came from that right now. Um, we’re each month and this is for free. People can apply to be as, as, as part of that, but, we’ll have an amazing speakers come in. They’ll share talk tactics and then there’ll be a Q and a with Neil and myself. Um, and then, you know, um, from there, the other thing we have is we have a membership community where you can join a.

23:17
You can join a discord group that we have, then we can just keep in touch there.

23:22
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

23:50
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

24:20
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. So that’s interesting. So I’ve always thought about this myself. I’m actually not doing SMS for the blog right now because it is my impression that people don’t want content sent to them via text message. But from what I understand, you’re not doing that. You are just doing Q &A via text. Is that accurate?

24:48
So it’s, I, I, I agree with you. There’s this one, um, there’s this one YouTube channel I follow, um, value attainment, Patrick bet David. Um, and he actually sends content and I’m like, this is, I actually don’t open it, but when you ask a question, it actually gets people to engage, right? Cause then it’s like, Oh, he’s actually asking me something like, yeah, I’m going to engage. So, um, short answer to your question is yes, because I think just blasting content is not helpful in today’s day and age. Interesting. Okay. So the way you do everything is.

25:17
different depending on the medium. So email, it’s fine to blast, obviously, and you guys probably still can, do you guys continue to send out emails about your episodes? We don’t, not anymore. Okay. So from after that initial push, the growth has just been organic, right? Correct. And how do you foster that organic growth? Is it literally just the quality of the content or? I think it’s, it’s cause it’s the consistency. I think it’s because you’re doing one every single day, it’s going to compound and people are going to listen to your old episodes.

25:44
Kind of like SEO where people read your old blog posts and it compounds. and you know, every now and then we’ll have like a, like a hit episode that really takes off that performs, you know, two to 300 % better just looking at the analytics. But you know, whether I’m sick, whether Neil pumps out a baby or Neil’s sick, you know, we powered, like I had, I had, actually had COVID a couple of weeks ago. just told no, okay. It was like, I and I had this weird like, um, you know, paralysis on my face called Bell’s palsy. So I was talking all weird too, but, you know, we power through it. And I think that’s the biggest thing.

26:14
Yeah. Can we talk about frequency? You guys decided to do it every day. that, mean, one, that’s a huge commitment, but two, do you think it ends up being like seven X the value of just doing once a week? Um, yeah, I mean, it’s so, you know, one of our mutual friends, uh, John Lee Dumas, does every day as well. And that, you know, he’s over seven figures in terms of monthly downloads. I would say, yes, it does help a lot because if we didn’t do that.

26:42
And it was only five minutes. think a people be underwhelmed, but people love binging on the podcast as well. So in terms of user experience, like the feedback we get is incredible. Interesting. How’d you guys decide on just five minutes? First, it was 10 minutes and then, you know, fight. then we, chopped it down to five because we realized we can get enough out in, in five minutes. It’s just, cause what we’re trying to do is we’ll talk about something, whether it’s like a trend that we’ll share or like new tools. And we just want people to get back to their day. like, listen to this real quick, get this bite and then move on.

27:11
right? Because I, for one in my personality test, I do not like it when people are long winded. So I just like it when people get to the point. Neil’s the same way. Actually, I’m the same way too. Yeah. Which is what makes me wonder why I’m doing this long. It’s not really a long form podcast. But yeah, okay. So one thing that I was a little surprised at in your response was like, it seems like you’re ranking blogging is last right now, right? Yep. And yet you run this company click flow.

27:39
that is designed to boost your SEO. And I was looking at it and it was actually the first time I looked at, I remember you telling me about it a while back, but I wasn’t kind of in the mindset to even look at the tool. But I took a look at it right before this podcast. And it seems like you are split testing titles and meta descriptions. That’s the primary value add. that accurate? No, that’s actually that was the primary value add, but we’ve pivoted and it’s more focused on the content editor, which I’m happy to talk about any of those.

28:10
Can we just talk about the split testing of titles? Like, I mean, that seems just like a bad idea to me, cause it takes so long for things to just kind of change in Google land, right? Yeah. It’s, so a, guess the, the whole premise of this, why there’s a lot of couple where there’s a couple of companies that are doing this right now, um, is a couple of years back, Pinterest released something about how they AB test, um, titles and meta descriptions. So you have a lot of these, um, you know, big companies that.

28:38
have the dev resources that have a lot of traffic, they have a great SEO team, and they build out something like that. And they talked about the results, how they would run a test and then they might get a 30 to 40 % higher click-through rate. Boom, that’s additional free traffic. To your point about how things change in Google, and sometimes, yes, you might try to change a title and it won’t change, because Google gets to decide. So in that scenario, we will actually show you, it hasn’t changed yet. The test hasn’t officially started.

29:07
So we cannot control that, but there’s, are elements we can control where like, we’ll actually show you how you’re performing over time and we can at least make it a little more scientific. So when you are trying to make these changes, you can prove to your boss whether what you’re doing is working or not. we have this tagline, you know, click flow helps you grow your traffic while looking like a genius. Cause a lot of the stuff that an SEO does kind of operates in a black box. And then people end up getting, you know, looking bad or getting fired. Are click through rates for individual posts in search console?

29:36
Yep. So what you want to do, and you can do this for free by the way. Okay. Go to Google search console and then go to your pages. What you want to do is you want to sort pages by high impression. So Google’s joined the pages, but a low click through rate. Those are the pages you want to on. You want to optimize. What is a low click through rate? So that depends for your website. So for ours, a low click through rate might be anything that’s below 0.5%. But again, like your, your mileage may vary.

30:04
Interesting. is, what is like the tie? It doesn’t the position matter too. So I guess you evaluate it based on position, right? Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, what you want to do is, I mean, you probably want to evaluate based on traffic. Um, but yes, your position does correlate with the, click through rate. So, and SEOs love to look at, um, rank. So how long does it take to split test the title then? So, I mean, for us, we recommend, uh, 30 days, but people are impatient. you know, that this people like to go 15 days or so.

30:32
I mean, it depends on the traffic too, right? mean, if you’re not getting any or that many clicks, then yeah. And by the way, like one of the reasons why we pivoted too. we still have this feature, but it’s tough because there’s a lot of factors that come in. There’s seasonality. There’s, there’s all these things that we’re just like, it’s hard to make it a hundred percent scientific unless you build out like a platform like Pinterest did, but what we have at least enables you, gives you the ability to easily kind of have reporting set up.

31:00
So you can see over time, right? So it’s not just like you’re putting everything into like an Excel sheet. Okay. And what was the, uh, what was the pivot then? Yeah. So we have this other feature. And by the way, we have a free feature right now called content decay. So that feature will show you when you are, when you have decaying traffic on your blog posts, right? So Steve, let’s say you have a blog post that drives 10,000 visits a month. Next month it drops to 7,000. So we’ll send you an email, um, or we’ll notify you saying, Hey, um, Steve.

31:29
one of your top posts just lost 30 % of its traffic. Do you want to do something about it? Right. Okay. So it’s just keeping on top of that. That’s called content decay. And you can just Google click flow content decay for that. And it’s free. Um, and then we have content editor, which will tell you, um, you know, a lot of your writers don’t know how to do keyword research, nor do they care to learn how to do SEO. So

31:51
what you do is you can have your writers write inside of Clickflow and let’s say you’re optimizing for a keyword, it’ll tell you the right keywords you need to be adding on the right side. So they’re in effect, they’re doing long tail SEO keyword research. And so when they are done with the piece of content, they’ve added a couple of keywords here and there, and that helps you drive more long tail search traffic. nice. I see. So basically you type in a seed keyword that you want to go for, and then all the related keywords are in this right-hand column and you just kind of work them into your post. That’s correct. Oh, that’s quite useful actually.

32:20
Is the keyword stuff from like Uber suggest or? Yeah. Good question. So we pull, we pull from this, this data, this API company that specifically works with all the big SEO software companies. Okay. Majestic or, or Moz or. Yeah. Well, actually those tools pull from this company. Oh, do they really? Okay. I did not know that. Okay. All right. Let’s talk about your book, man. What’s this book about? Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I used to play a lot of.

32:48
games growing up, the book’s called leveling up and I did esports before it became a thing. So I was very competitive when I played and you know, Asian parents, tell you, my parents used to take my mouse away. They used to take my keyboard away and they used to tell me it’s a complete waste of time. Same here. Yeah. So to an extent, I agree, right? There’s, there’s a time and place for not overdoing it. But you know, when I, when I commit to something, I want to go all in. And I guess I had that since a, since an earlier age, but I think it’s just.

33:16
understanding now that gaming is a lot more accepted, e-sports is getting bigger and bigger, and there’s over 3 billion gamers in the world. I think, you know, the notion that gaming is completely useless, I think it’s wrong because a lot of the skills I picked up from gaming, such as teamwork or resilience, communication, all these things came from gaming. And that’s, you know, that’s how I played at a higher level, you know, having to practice, you know, all these things, right? So I think that applies to the ultimate business.

33:45
the ultimate game, which I think is business. And yeah, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about mastering the game of life. Let me ask you this question about just writing a book. Why, why put out a book? Yeah, it’s a great question. And, um, you know, I think right now, when I look at, you know, you talk about, you’re, spending more time on YouTube, well, it’s to build your audience bigger, right? It’s a high leverage thing. So we talked about that earlier. My take on it is I’m well known for marketing or not, maybe not well known, but I’m known for marketing.

34:15
Um, and so, you know, that’s, that’s nice, but if I have this other message and I think I can build another audience around gaming, um, I think, you know, a, the messages, the message is going to be strong and B, um, if I can serve more people and figure out what they need, boom, that’s another, that’s another, you know, fun thing I can do. Right. To me, business is just, I’m going to level up and move on to the next thing. I’m going to level up, hire an operator and then just keep moving on. Right. So I think.

34:41
If I have a really big audience around marketing and I have it around this whole leveling up concept, then I’m just building a bigger audience and I’m just going to create more content. I’m going to have fun while doing it. And then, you know, meanwhile, we’re going to just continue to buy or build other businesses. And then I’m just going to keep playing the game. I feel like this book is just an extension of your marketing, right? I mean, the book isn’t for gamers, right? It’s for business. It’s a business book. Right. It’s a business book, but it’s so it is categorized as a business book.

35:08
But I think it’s really going to resonate with the people that actually played games. Really? Interesting. Okay. Here’s how the book is structured, right? So it’s, you know, at the beginning of each chapter, and by the way, the forward of the book is from the guy that bought Activision and Acclaim games out of bankruptcy. So there’s a whole story around that. But it’s, and the endorsements on the back of the book are all gamers that became entrepreneurs. Like you got the Twitch founders and all that. So anyway, each chapter is, I might talk about an anecdote from gaming, right?

35:38
how like, you know, I, um, how I ended up joining, one of the best teams, right. And then I’ll talk about in the business world, like, you know, um, we’ll talk about maybe an anecdote from Bill Gates as an example. And then at the very end of it, there’s a quest, right? There’s something you need to do. Um, and so every chapter is laid out like that. That’s why it’s going to resonate more with gamers than anybody else. Cause they’re not going to really align with, you know, some of those anecdotes. Can we just talk about gaming real quick? So I used to be a gamer, probably not as hardcore as you, cause we had this conversation prior to this starting.

36:07
But I actually feel that all that time I spent gaming, like there’s this one semester in college where I feel like I almost flunked out that semester because I was stuck on this game civilization. And so I feel like it as a waste of time. Why do you feel differently? Yeah. mean, you know, for me, it was, it was my confidence builder, right? Cause I was never good at sports growing up. And then, um, when I was 10 or 12 years old, 12 years old, I started to realize, Oh, I’m actually getting pretty good at this stuff. So.

36:36
You know, obviously if you don’t have your confidence growing up, you don’t have anything. And then you realize, Oh, this is what it takes to play at a high level. Um, and to be a part of something, to be, you know, part of a community and have this commodity where, you know, because I wasn’t good at sports, I didn’t have that. Right. And so, you know, for me, I, it, to me, it was the same thing as, it’s those same interactions I had from gaming. I’m just recalling it right now are very much the same interactions I getting from business right now. Like I don’t regret any of the time I spent doing it.

37:04
Um, I do think though, at a certain point you do, you do need to level up from gaming, right? So you do need to level up the gaming too. You need to build the right habits, but I think you need to go on to playing the ultimate game, which is, you know, optimizing your career. And then I think if you want to play the game, um, take that to business, right? So I think the skills translate. so, you know, growing up your parent and you look at your kids and you’re like, okay, you know, it’s cool if they’re going out there and they’re playing, I don’t know, maybe they’re playing golf or they’re playing, you know, sports or whatever.

37:34
You can make the argument that yes, they’re getting physical activity from it, but I think other elements you can actually get from gaming, right? And I think that might be the canvas for some people like myself. So I don’t think it needs to be gaming versus sports. I think they have kind of their uses and then you can translate that to the real world. I understand where you’re going at. The gaming essentially replaced sports for you. Like all the elements of sports you got from gaming.

38:00
And it applies to business. mean, a lot of people are not athletic, right? And maybe they don’t want to play sports, but they’re good at games. So if you’re good at that, you know, there, there, there are a couple of parents that I know that they actively encourage their 13 or 14 year old. Um, and they bought them the best gear, they bought them the best computer, the best gaming chair. And that 14, 15 year old now, cause their parents invested in them or part of the reason they’re making, you know, healthy, you know, seven figures a year, if not more than that, right? So can’t be Asian. they Asian? They’re not Asian. white.

38:29
Yeah. All right. Well, let’s wrap this up here. Okay. It’s because we talked about a number of different things. So your advice, from what I can understand is just start putting out content no matter where you are in life. Right. And from what I could gather, blogging, YouTube and podcasting.

38:47
You probably favor podcasting YouTube over blogging, even though you run SEO. Here’s one thing I’ll say, right? There’s a survival blog that I’m a part owner in and we took that from zero to a couple million visitors a month. then that does this year, at least it’s going to do a couple million bucks. we did that in a span of one and a half, two years. So it drives millions of visitors a month. Here’s what I’ll say though.

39:12
Yeah. Why are you throwing this out just now at the end of the interview? I just realized, I’m just looking at my notes. I’m just like, Oh, let’s probably talk about this. Um, so here’s the thing. It, terms of competitiveness, that, that niche, those keywords are not nearly as competitive as like, you know, where I am in the marketing world, right? It’s way, it’s a red ocean there versus a blue ocean. So it depends on the niche that you’re in. Cause here’s the thing that Google has said before.

39:37
They really are looking for more content in countries like Brazil and Germany and Portugal, because they want more stuff to index, right? More stuff to index. They make more money from, from ads, right? They please their shareholders. So there are a lot of niches. Like if you happen to be interested in, I don’t know, basket weaving or something like that, you might be able to build a really good business that way. But for me, at least personally around business and marketing, it’s a red ocean. Okay. I can agree with you on that. So, okay. Basically what you’re saying is you got to do the keyword research and depending out.

40:06
competitive certain things are pick your medium that way, right? Right. Yep. I mean, the marketing space is been a red ocean for as long as I can remember, right? Because maybe because there’s a lot of marketing dollars. But yeah, you’re right. Basket weaving survival. I don’t think there’s large multi billion dollar corporations going after these keywords. Yep. Interesting. Can we just talk about that blog? How’d you guys grow so quickly? Was it all SEO or

40:32
Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you, like it’s for us, it was pure content. I mentioned earlier in this conversation that, you know, the two main things that matter, it’s content and links. When it’s not a super competitive niche, you do not need to worry so much about links. You just blitz with content. And what we did was we would go to websites like a problogger.net and we’d also look at some of our competitors and just poach their writers because there’s an arbitrage because they’re not paying their people that much in this industry.

40:59
And so, you know, that’s what we did. We just poached the best people. then initially we started with ProBlogger and we just kept ramping up our content, you know, built it on a WordPress site. It didn’t have to look that beautiful. And, know, was really the, the, the founder’s passion for the business. Cause he was writing everything initially. Um, you know, he took all the pictures and all that he jumped started everything. And then now he’s got a whole team around him. we talk about this? How many pieces of content are you guys putting out a week? Yeah. So I believe it’s about.

41:28
four to eight pieces a week. We tried to ramp it up to 20, but then we decided that’s our sweet spot. Interesting. It’s is quantity. I guess when you’re just, you’re just trying to blanket all the keywords, right? Is that, is that the goal? That’s correct. Okay. So is more better in this case then? Yeah. I think if it’s, if it’s a, if it’s a wide open blue, like blue Asian type of a niche, you go all in and you just ramp up as many, uh, occupy all the keywords as quickly as you can. And then I would say afterwards, you can, um, you want to upgrade your content, right? So

41:57
Um, you know, maybe for your best pieces of content every month or so, maybe you’re adding a paragraph, you’re editing it. Um, but that goes a long way. A lot of people don’t think about how, you know, their best pieces of content, if you just add more to it, it’s going to get a lot more traffic versus trying to continue to pump out new stuff. So pump out new stuff. Initially, if it’s a blue ocean, then focus on optimizing what you currently have. Interesting. So I would imagine that doesn’t apply to everything, right? But I guess for topics that aren’t truly evergreen, would you, okay. So what I’m trying to ask you is.

42:28
You have this piece of content that’s, that’s ranking and let’s say you have to decide whether to focus more on new content versus upgrading the existing content. How do you weigh the decision? Yeah, I would say so. Okay. I mean, there’s a couple of things. If, if there’s like a big, uh, a big trend that comes out. So for example, yesterday, YouTube just came out with, um, they’re coming out with audio ads. So if I’m a marketing news website, I probably want to prioritize that. want to be news jacking, right?

42:54
Um, if I’m like more evergreen website, maybe like, uh, let’s, let’s use the single ring blog as an example. Um, I probably want to focus more. I would say here’s the percentage maybe for us, it arguably, it should be 40 to 50 % of the time we’re focusing on upgrading the other 50%, 60 % is focused on creating new content. think too many people are, are focused maybe like 99%, uh, new content. And so even if I look at Neil right now, he’s got three full-time people that are dedicated to upgrading content.

43:23
Interesting. And you feel like upgrading content is important for maintaining your rankings and even in the marketing space. Yeah, I mean, that’s why we made the content decay tool because content, you know, over time, if you’re not maintaining your garden, it tends to get, you know, out of whack. Interesting. So this blog, so let’s reset again. All right. So if you are in a blue ocean niche, YouTube podcast blog, what would you go with? Blue ocean.

43:51
Cause like survival, right? mean, there’s probably right for YouTube opportunities too there, right? Yep. So, we do have a YouTube channel for that. So I, if let’s just use survival as an example, I would pick, I would pick blog first and then I’ll pick YouTube and then I pick podcasts. Okay. For what reasons? So because, because Google is going to be indexing this content like crazy, you’re going to see exponential growth there. And then, you know, with YouTube, because I know the survival niche is there are nuts about this type of stuff and they tend to share really well.

44:21
I would put it on there. And I would even say this, right? I would put podcasts at the bottom, even below like Facebook or Instagram as an example, because our Facebook and Instagram, what tends to happen is this niche, sometimes they’ll talk, it gets very political. And so the engagement just blows up, right? People are commenting, whether they’re disagreeing, they’re hating each other, whatever, it just goes nuts. So that’s how I’d look at it. I noticed you didn’t even talk about social. Do you spend a lot of efforts on social or is it mostly just content?

44:51
That’s a great question. do have, um, you know, Gary V has a brand team. I think there’s about 30 people. So we kind of have our own little mini brand team here where it’s three or four people. And, um, what they’re doing is they’re chopping up content like this. let’s say we did a video podcast, chop it up for my Instagram, um, Instagram TV, and they would handle all the posting. So they handle that, but there hasn’t been a big focus on it. I think the, the big focus right now is, um, continuing to the podcast and continuing to grow the YouTube.

45:21
Right, right. You know, I, maybe I’m wrong and I’ve had many social media experts come on and tell me I’m wrong. But I feel like when I’m, I have limited amount of time to put out content. So I’d rather put out content that, that stands the test of time. Right? So if I rank on Google, that’s like free traffic. If I rank on YouTube, that’s like free traffic for an extended period. Whereas social I feel like is, it’s so fleeting, right? You might hit some traffic for a couple of days and then you gotta do it again.

45:51
You got to do it again. say this. mean, I think to me the, hot, because I’m in B2B, the highest value interactions I get number one is actually Twitter, believe it or not. Um, number two, it would be LinkedIn. And then, you know, occasionally I’ll get some messages on Facebook or whatever, but I’m with you. think it’s overall very fleeting and I don’t place as much value on it, but I do place extremely high value on Twitter. Wow. Okay. Interesting. I don’t spend any time on Twitter.

46:19
Yeah, I’ll tell you what, like once you start, once you start to optimize it and you start getting going on it, I guarantee you, you’re going to find it to be number one. Really? Okay. Maybe that’s like another episode in itself then. Yeah, that’s fine. We can do another time. But Eric, when’s your book coming out? Book is coming out February 24th, 2021. Okay, awesome. And then where can people find you?

46:41
Yeah, you can just go to leveling up.com. You can get a free chapter of the book. I think there’s some, some other goodies there and then you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram at Eric O S I U. Awesome. Well, Eric, thanks for coming on, man. It’s been a while.

46:55
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Eric knows what he’s doing when it comes to building an audience and I recommend that you check out his brand new book called Leveling Up. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 344. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

47:23
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash DEEV. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

47:53
head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.