601: Neil Patel’s Blueprint For Traffic, Growth & Making Money in a Saturated Market

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Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I’m joined by a very special guest, Neil Patel. As the founder of one of the top marketing agencies in the world, Neil sees what’s really working across thousands of e-commerce brands. And today, he’s sharing exactly what’s driving traffic and growth today. No fluff, just proven strategies that are working right now.

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But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses.

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No corporate execs, no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now,

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tickets are the cheapest they’re ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:37
Welcome to the My Wife Coder Job podcast. Today I am super excited to have Neil Patel on the show. Now, if you do not know Neil, he is one of the most recognized names in digital marketing. He’s the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, Uber Suggest, MP Digital, all tools and services that pretty much every online business owner has either used or heard of. Now recently he spoke in my annual e-commerce conference, The Seller Summit, and here is a funny story. We actually called Neil a private car from the airport

02:08
And the dispatcher was like, you’re not having me pick up Neil Patel, are you? And I was like, yeah, why? He’s like, all rides are on the house. And you mean for me or Neil? He’s like, no, no, no, all rides for Neil are on the house. And I’ve never, ever seen that happen before in my life. Let’s see, President Obama named him one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30. But what I personally like about Neil is that he’s not just some random marketing guru who teaches theory.

02:35
He’s actually built seven, eight, and nine figure businesses using the exact strategies that he shares. Now, today I think what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna dive deep into what’s actually working right now and what’s gonna work in the future when it comes to driving traffic, growing an e-commerce store, and standing out in a crowded marketplace. And with that, welcome Neil, how you doing? I’m doing good, thanks for having me. So I gotta ask, over the years,

03:03
you’ve run a bunch of different SaaS companies. And I’ve always been curious because it seems like MP digital is your main thing right now. Why did you go the agency route? Because I personally think SaaS is easier to run and scale than running an agency, which is all like people. is easier to scale. SaaS is more competitive. If you look at the venture dollars flowing to SaaS versus services.

03:29
In SaaS, people will spend so much money to get a customer, they’ll lose money just to prove out the business. And that’s what you’re competing with. It’s just a much more lucrative category from the valuation perspective. So investors, whether it’s venture capitalists, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, they prefer software as a service over service based business from what I’ve seen. Yep. And what we found is majority of the revenue is actually in services over SaaS.

03:59
services generates way more revenue when you look at the GDP than software does. But it doesn’t mean that software is bad. It means for us, it’s easier to scale revenue on the services side. But of course, have to deal with other challenges like people, which is never easy. And the route we took with NP digital is software combined with services. So at NP digital, we have the agency.

04:28
but we also have tools like Ubersuggest and answer the public, both of those which we acquired. We have Scout that we’ve built internally. We built quite a bit of AI capabilities internally as well. And we think that’s the future where it’s service as a software and figuring out how to automate as much services as possible to create a delightful experience. But the key isn’t to do this to purely jack up your margins.

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it’s to be more competitive and offer more for the customer. So imagine a service-based business running at 10 to 20%. You add on software, you can improve your margins. And that’s great, but instead of just improving your margins, how can you take some of those margins and give it back to the customer and offer them more services so that way they can get better results, which then increases their satisfaction, increases NPS.

05:23
hopefully reduces turnover time, increases the LTV, and then causes the company to be more stickier and be worth more overtime. So you sell the tools, but then the people at MP Digital, the consultants, actually use your tools, use the tools in-house to provide a more efficient service essentially. So it’s like a hybrid approach. Correct. a variation of the tools. Our internal tools are quite a bit different than the external. I see. So the internal tools I imagine are way more powerful, but just not ready for the public.

05:53
It’s not even ready. There’s too many edge cases when you’re dealing with companies of all sizes, and in all different verticals. So the internal tools don’t, they have more advanced features. And I can release those to the market. The problem is, is the internal tools have a really terrible user interface. Right, right. But it works really well for internal use. It’s not the best for self service. Yeah.

06:21
It’s like all the tools that I’ve written for my own company. I can never release them because there’s no documentation, nothing either. And it’s ugly too. Yeah. Okay. So back in 2009, I used to follow your blog, Quick Sprout. And I believe at the time, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, I think you ranked for your name, Neil. Like if you just typed in Neil, you were like in the top three. And then I remember you were also ranked in the top three for SEO.

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You’re probably right. I’m actually just checking right now on Neil if I actually even rank on. Oh, I don’t think I do. I don’t think you do anymore, but you did at one point. Okay. So anyway, with the advent of AI and more and more people starting their journey on chat, GPT or Claude or whatever, I want to know where you think Google search is going. And as an e-commerce store owner, what are some things that we should be doing to be more searchable in today’s market?

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Yeah, so when you look at search, whether it’s Google or chat GPT, or perplexity or any of the other solutions, or even people using search on meta, search is changing from traditional search that we’re used to to more AI powered. Now, is that interface going to look more like chat GPT slash AI mode, which are very similar? Or is it going to look more like Google search where you see the AI overviews and you see the listings?

07:45
interesting fact for you, and it’s changed quite a bit. Did you know that a overviews used to almost be always at the top of a Google search? Now 12 plus percent of the time, they’re not the number one position. So they’ve been dropping where they place it. I did not notice that at all. Actually, is that recent? Okay. And what we’re seeing is for certain types of queries, chat GPT type of interface and AI mode is perfect. When you’re doing really deep

08:14
thorough research on a service, a product, whatever it may be, an industry, a problem that you’re looking to solve, it actually works really well. But if I’m looking for the weather in Los Angeles, or if I’m going to travel to New York, I can open up my weather app, you know, because I just got back from New York, add New York in there, and then go look at the weather for New York over the next seven days. But it’s actually just more efficient to just type in on, you know,

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the search bar, New York weather, right? And it just pulls up New York city weather. And that traditional search interface is still very relevant. Showing that in an AI version isn’t that useful. It’s a bad use case. The point I’m getting at is, and I know there are two different extreme cases that I just gave for examples, but there’s some instances where traditional search is amazing.

09:09
there’s some instances where AI search like using a chat GPT or AI mode is way better than traditional search. So which one is going to exist in the future? I think it’s going to be split and they’re going to start showing different interfaces depending on the query type that you provide. Because as a user, why should you have to go to AI mode versus Google? Right? Why can’t you just type in a search and they can figure out what

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type of response and what type of interface should you see? The homepage of Google is really clean. It’s just a search bar or a box, whatever you want to call it. They are smart enough to detect what your intent is and then show you the interface that maps up with that. And I think that’s what we’re going to see in search. And what we’re seeing is also a shift on how e-commerce companies need to create content. So it used to be

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where they would create content on every single thing, create blog posts on there and try to get rankings. We’re seeing content evolving. Content, if you go back 20ish years ago, content used to be where you write content for robots. You put in keywords in the title, within your text, you stuff the keywords, you rank higher. 10ish years ago, you write content for humans and

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when you’re it for humans, you want the best user experience. Yeah, you’re putting in keywords because you’re naturally talking about those topics, but you want amazing piece of content that no one else has talked about. And it’s just such high quality that people are like, wow, this is great. And that started ranking really well. You fast forward to today, contents changed in which you create content for humans, but you package it up for AI. So yes, you’re writing content for humans, but it has to be packaged at the same time.

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where it’s really digestible for AI. So a great example of this is people use a lot of these AI solutions for research. So if I’m selling dog food, all right, and I’m chewy, I may write articles on the 10 best organic dog food, the 10 best dog foods for a newborn or for a puppy, the 10 best dog foods for

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an aging dog or I don’t know, you know, I don’t have a dog, but you know, whatever age range is towards the end, right? Hopefully dogs live a long time, but you guys get the point. And then when someone’s doing research on chat, GBT or Google say, I’m buying a newborn dog. It’s this size and this breed. What dog food should I give it? And then it’ll start pulling from your articles like the best dog foods for puppies.

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and where you’re giving going into detail saying depending on the size, this is how much you feed. This is the type of food. Here’s how you transition them. I’m making some of this stuff up, not because I’m trying to bullshit, but it’s, I actually don’t know much about dogs, but you get the point. You’re just trying to be very thorough. Some of my things could be off. I’m making assumptions here on how dogs eat. And I don’t know what is reality or what is not reality when it comes to feeding a dog, but then they’ll start pulling in that content.

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and then they’ll start recommending your brand. And that’s the key. How do you create content that feeds into people’s research? So based on what you just said, it seems like you could use AI to find out all the different questions that people are asking about your product and then create posts that way. Yes. Okay. So is that, are we no longer writing paragraphs? Are we just writing like Q and A like fact style?

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Like what’s the style now? You’re still writing paragraphs, but you’re getting to the point and your paragraphs don’t have fluff and you’re answering the questions as quick as possible. So think of like Q &A combined with paragraphs. Cause a lot of people write paragraphs like it’s like a novel and Q &A is yes to the point, but it’s not the most friendly when someone’s reading it, but combine both of those. Interesting. Okay. So blogging is not dead. Blogging is not dead. It’s just changed.

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And it’s changed in which you need to think about what are people researching and how can your blog content feed into that research? Okay, so in an e commerce store, let’s say, would I do this on a blog post? Or would I do this on each individual product page? Both? Okay. So even if it’s going to different, a blog post, let’s go back with the chewy. Let’s use chewy as an example. Everyone knows them, right?

13:55
I would end up writing blog posts on like the examples I gave you like the 10 best dog foods for puppies and you can do it by size for like miniature toy cup or tea cups. I don’t know what they’re called like really tiny dogs medium size, you know, you guys get the binoculars. But on the flip side, it lets you have a food, a dog food that I’m organic chicken, I don’t know dogsy, but let’s just go with organic chicken. All right. I would end up talking about on that page. This food is best for

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and then list out the dog breeds, the dog sizes and weight, how much I would feed based on the dog sizes. So I’m being very specific so when people are asking, it’s able to pull from my products and just recommend. The best way to think about AI and sorry to cut you off is there was a case where Google had appeared in front of a judge and Google said, we don’t understand documents, we fake it.

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And they’re using a lot of data like social signals, links, keywords to kind of understand the document. What AI has changed is they now understand the document. So they don’t have to fake it anymore. So even though you’re not mentioning a keyword, like if I don’t mention dog on a page, but I talk about puppies, AI knows I’m talking about newborn dogs without me saying newborn dogs. You know what’s something interesting is I started doing that with my store. And one thing that I put was, so we’re we sell wedding handkerchiefs.

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So I put that we’ve sold or we’ve served over 120,000 weddings. And then all of sudden, like literally the next day, I asked who is the leader in selling wedding handkerchiefs? And then our company popped up and said, this company has served over 120,000 weddings, blah, blah, blah. So it’s instantaneous. And it happens right away. But one thing that I was thinking though is if you want to rank in traditional Google search, this necessarily might not be the good thing. So are we just shooting for

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getting ranked in AI now, because that’s the future. Like, what do you see those blue links going? Are they going away or? I don’t see them going away for all queries. I do seem going away for some queries. You know, when I searched Neil, because we had that discussion on this podcast, at least the result I’m showing on my iPad only had four blue links. All right. So the rest was filled with other stuff, images and knowledge graphs and all that kind of stuff, right? Knowledge panels or whatever. So when you’re looking at

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search, I think it’s going to be adjusted based on what the query people are typing in and what’s most relevant for them. And yeah, I look at it as it’s something where everything is moving towards AI, but it doesn’t mean traditional searches dead. It’s more so there’s different use cases for different things like I don’t need a chat GPT style interface. If I’m asking what two plus two is, it’s four. Google will just tell you it’s four.

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And before when they told you it was four, there was blue links underneath. But did anyone really click on the blue links for what’s the weather in New York City or what’s two plus two? Not really. They were just there for the sake of it. So I don’t know about you or like your friends, but I know for me, I don’t even use Google anymore. I just start everything with the chat. GPT app on my phone and my mom has actually followed suit. And I usually use my mom as like a bellwether.

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of like the common person because she doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t follow any of this stuff. So we’ve been talking about Google so far. Are you still kind of bullish that Google is going to be the place to go where people start their journey? Sure. So I’m going to give you a few points here, right? You’re based in the Bay Area, if I’m not mistaken. Yes. Yeah. You went to Stanford, if I’m not mistaken. That’s correct. Right. So highly educated, lives in the Bay Area.

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tends to be an early adopter technology or people in the Bay tend to be your mom, think is very interesting use case. I think search is going to change to be more like social media. Instagram never killed Facebook. Snapchat did not kill Instagram. YouTube still exists and does well. Tick Tock did not kill Instagram or Facebook. They all coexist. According to Sprout social, I believe the average person uses like 6.6 or 6.7 or 6.8 social networks per month.

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where they’re actually logging into those social networks. It’s one of those three numbers. I know it’s between 6.6 and 6.8. I just don’t know if it’s 0.6 or 0.7 or 0.8. Search is changing to be the same way. Chat GPT is growing. I don’t see Google crushing them. Just honestly, I don’t see it. But at the same time, everyone’s like Chat GPT is crushing Google. Did you know Google used to get 8.5 billion searches a day? Now they get over 13.7 billion a day. They’re at five trillion plus searches a year.

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Did you know Sundar talked about with AI overviews and the response of AI overviews have been so successful at their Google IO event that those responses or those queries are causing 10 % more increase in Google usage for the AI related searches that have AI. Google’s 10 % growth is probably similar to the usage of all of ChatGPT to give you, to put it in Right now, yes. Yeah. Is ChatGPT growing? Definitely. Is Google growing?

19:13
They still are. Do I think one is better than the other? It doesn’t matter. What matters as commerce owners or entrepreneurs or business owners is you get your business place on all the platforms that have volume. Who cares if TikTok is more popular than Instagram or Instagram is more popular than Facebook or vice versa? Doesn’t matter. Use the content because it’s a similar format on all the platforms and just get as much as you can. Same with

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SEO for AI. Some people call it search everywhere optimization, which is what we call it a lot. Some people call it GEO, gender, vengeance, optimization. We look at it as it’s the same concepts to try to get ranked on Google’s version of AI mode as it is with chat GPT searching, you’ll end up with an article on this. There’s a direct correlation on ranking on page one of Google and being mentioned by chat GPT. So why not just get placed everywhere? And whether it’s Google, who’s a winner or chat GPT, that’s a winner perplexity.

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Doesn’t matter. You’re just gobbling up as much traffic as you can from wherever it’s coming.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

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So let’s go back to the content portion. Let’s talk about blogs, because one thing that’s happened to my standalone blog, not my store’s blog or anything, my store’s blog actually surprisingly has been fine, but mywifequitterjob.com got decimated by the last Google update. Now, it seems like due to all the content spam that Google has only started ranking content sites that actually have legit businesses or services associated with them.

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going forward with just regular blogging, what is your take on that? And is it worth going through and restructuring everything according to the conversation that we just had? Yeah, so I’m in agreement with you in which if you’re just talking about regular blogging, you need to figure out how to add a product or a service to your blog, right? And the reason being is there’s a lot of revenue to be had there. If you don’t, you’re just going to miss out on a lot of potential revenue.

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So I’m going to pull up on my screen. Okay. Not really on my screen, but I’m going to showcase it on the camera. AI search versus traditional search, traffic and sales. Check this out. Okay. This is for both B2B and B2C. Hard to read. All right. It’s pulling- Why don’t you just describe the graph? I’m having problems reading it. Okay. So when you look at traditional search, we’re going to do B2C first, because most of your listeners are B2C. Yep. Traditional search brings in roughly, and this data is from-

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50 B2B businesses and 43 B2C businesses, all generating over 10 million in annual sales. So let’s go with the B2C first. B2C traditional search for the people in the study, it made up 27.5 % of their traffic. All right. It made up 21.5 % of their sales. I’m talking about traditional organic search to be more specific. For AI search for B2C,

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it made up on average 0.49 % of traffic. That’s very little, but 11.4 % of total sales. See, that’s nuts. That’s nuts because people are doing the research on these platforms. And then when they go to your website, they’re not really researching. They’re ready to make a decision and buy. Traditionally with traditional search, you click on those blue links and you do your research on the website. And then you go back and forth and you figure out which site you want to buy from. Now they’re doing the research and everything on platform.

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and then they’re going over to your website to make the purchase. In B2B, the numbers were actually even crazier, in which traditional search made up 19 % of traffic, organic traffic, 11.6 % of sales. For AI powered search, it was 0.38 % of traffic, but 9.7 % of sales, which was much more closer aligned. The point that I’m getting at is if you are a blog and just a blog, going back to your question,

23:51
and you have no conversion points, you’re going to get crushed. Your conversion points can’t be an ad, like AdSense. You need to figure out a product or service that you’re selling. Then your traffic may fluctuate, whether it’s up or down, but your conversions, what we’re seeing is overall conversions being pretty steady, even with all the AI changes. So my dilemma here is that it seems like people aren’t clicking on websites anymore, right? So let’s say you do create a blog and people are using

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are getting the content from that blog in their AI searches and whatnot, but you’re not getting the click. So how can you even measure that your content efforts are actually working? Brand mentions and citations. So there’s tools like Profound and Scrunch, which are really expensive. We’re releasing a free version on Ubersuggest in the next 30, 45 days at the latest, where you can put in your URL or brand and a keyword, and we’ll figure out your industry and we’ll figure out

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all the prompts that you’re mentioned on the ones that you’re not mentioned on how your competitors are mentioned versus you the sentiment analysis how you rank versus them. So then that way you can figure out all right, I’m not getting the clicks. Here are the prompts. And then we’ll give you suggestions on how you can get included into the other prompts. I would love to know the secret sauce and how you’re doing that because it’s not really deterministic every time you put a prompt and you get a different answer. Right? So how does a tool measure that not necessarily

25:19
There’s a lot of similarities on what’s included. So when you put in a prompt, we’ll run the prompt like 10, 15, 20 times. And then we start looking at patterns because if you run the prompt enough times, you’ll start noticing what they constantly always recommend and what they don’t. Okay. Interesting. Okay. And so you are looking for increase. So on the search side, you can look for more brand mentions. Like if you see your, your, brands going up, then that means you’re doing a good thing.

25:48
And then you can use a tool like what you’re adding this on to Ubersuggest, you said? Uh-huh, we’ll answer to Ubersuggest and answer the public and we’ll make most of it for free. It’s not that expensive. We don’t understand why some of the competitors charge $499 a month. The API costs for ChatGPD have gone down drastically over the last 12 months. Yeah, it’s super cheap, especially if you use 3.5, it’s like free, basically. But here’s what people don’t realize. If this is the cost now based on history,

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history showing us that they’re trying to get more efficient, it’s more competitive, so they’re trying to get cheaper. You agree with this statement? Sure, of course. Right? They’re even going as far as being like, we’re going to buy our own power plants to try to even make energy more readily available, reduce our costs, and you get the price. Right, right, right, right. So maybe it doesn’t go down 10x over the next 12 months, but it’s already cheap, it goes down three times. That’s such a big savings. So we don’t understand why people want to charge so much. Interesting. Okay, so you’re doing queries for

26:45
for what keywords or whatnot. And then you’re measuring all that and you’re offering that in a database. I love it. Yeah. And in this case, prompts, right? Keywords, prompts, whatever you want to end up calling it. And I look at it as all similar because some people are like, oh, I’m typing in prompts. Technically, you’re just typing in a keyword, your keywords are just longer tail and more specific because they’re in a sentence or something. Yes. Because now the platforms can answer those questions and give you relevant results. Well, three years ago, that wasn’t possible. If you did any Google, the results would have been crap. Right.

27:16
Okay, cool. I like that idea. Okay, so that’s where it’s going. Let me ask you this question now. Let’s say you have a new e commerce store, where would you be focusing your efforts? Because you let’s say you have a small team and you got to focus and you’re brand new. Would you focus on ranking an AI search? Or would you focus on social media video? What would you do? Social shopping? I think it’s like a $7 trillion market by 2030. You see there are six or $7 trillion market by 2030. It is massive and it’s untapped and it’s not that competitive.

27:46
A lot of people get social shopping wrong, they can’t figure out how to make it profitable. But a lot of people put too much effort into it. And they make too highly produced videos, instead of just like paying an influencer who’s well known in the space to record a video on how they use a product and think it’s amazing and then just run ads. So would you do things the traditional way? Oh, so let’s talk about platform first. Tick tock Instagram, does it matter where you would start? Or I would start on all of them that allow social shopping. Okay.

28:14
because they tend to take the same content type and format. So when you’re creating your ad, it works on pretty much most of the platforms. It’s like YouTube and social shopping is not popular, it will become popular, they have no choice but to adapt. So you optimize for all channels. It’s like when I create social content, people like, why do you waste your time posting on tik tok? There’s not that many customers for either. Yes, but already created the content, it takes one second to post it on tik tok. Maybe not one second, but you get the point, maybe two more minutes, right?

28:44
Yeah, might as well. You know, you’re actually doing pretty well on there. I mean, you pop up in my feed. And, you know, I don’t know, by your standards, by my standards, you’re doing pretty well. I don’t log into TikTok. So I have no clue. Okay. So let’s walk through that strategy, then. So got a brand new e commerce store, and you’re selling something, you would create content yourself? Or would you start looking for influencers? Would you start with TikTok shop? Like, where would you go? Yes, let’s talk about dog food. Yeah, the first thing I would do is

29:14
you know, yes, you can start with TikTok shop, it’s been super effective from what we see for our customers. But what I would really do if I was getting started, I would find an influencer, a micro influencer who’s known within my vertical, like someone who’s known for just dog food, or dogs and training dogs. Like there’s this TV show that there is this dude who teaches your dog to be obedient and behave. It was popular back in the day, I don’t know what it’s called. And I would

29:43
then go and get an influencer like that to just create content around my product and I’ll run ads to it. And in most cases, you can make it highly profitable. are some guidelines? How would you approach this influencer? If it’s a big one, like you just said, free product’s not gonna do it, right? So you’re gonna have to him money. So the first thing I would do is I would actually run the ad without the influencer.

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and I would run variations. You can even have AI help you create tons of different ads. And I would see what kind of script resonates the most with the audience. And it could be a few different ones. You take the pieces that you think are the best from each of them, combine them, run another test, assuming it converts well, but maybe it may not be profitable. You then go take an influencer and you say, want you to record this because now you’re paying them money, but you’re paying them money on something that you already tested, you know,

30:39
that does well, but their brand probably has way more trust than yours. No offense to anyone listening. That’s the reality. That’s why we pay influencers. And then boom, your conversion rate should go through the roof. And then it makes your ads much more profitable. That’s an interesting take because the copy that works well for you might not resonate with the style of the influencer, right? It isn’t, but typically with the copy, when you’re selling products like e-com specifically, most of it’s pretty generic.

31:08
They can add their own flair and people obsess too much about the copy instead of the messaging. Like, okay, I have a comparison. This comparison is important because people, when they consider our dog food, they consider these three other brands. Pricing is an issue. So we talk about pricing. Quality may be an issue. Should we talk about how we make it? The way the influencer describes the comparison or the quality may be a little bit different than you or I would, but

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that’s okay, you’re still getting the same message across. The wording may be a little bit different, but that’s okay. It doesn’t make that much of a difference. And in terms of, so I’ve done a little bit of influencer marketing and I probably didn’t do it well because it’s always been hit or miss for me, right? It seems like it’s a numbers game. At least in my experience, how do you structure the deals so that you have even a chance of getting a decent ROI or is it more of a long-term play with mind share and branding?

32:05
I usually structure the deals where it’s performance base or they just take an upfront fee that I’m willing to test. Some people won’t do it on either of those routes. It’s a numbers game. There’s enough influencers for pretty much most verticals. You may not get the biggest person. That’s okay. Hence I talked about micro influencers. They tend to be more cheaper, more reasonable, more flexible. And yeah, I would go down that path and keep in mind at the same time, you want it to be profitable. It should be profitable.

32:34
and you’re also building your brand and you’re getting market share from it as well. So let’s just set some guidelines here like realistically and I know you’ve done this a lot like how many people should you be approaching to have like a good test and just what are some numbers in place with with some of your own experiences doing this with brands? So you probably pay a few grand assume you’re targeting micro influencers and you’re probably going to have to reach out to 20 to get one and when I say reach out to 20 manually reach out to them, you know,

33:03
Talk to them about, love what you’re doing, why, why it resonates, what product you have, what you want to talk to them about, see if they’re interested. You got to follow up two to three times. And out of the 20, you’ll get some people who are interested. The reason I say it takes one, it takes 20 to get one is the pricing won’t work out for all the ones who respond to you. So you’re going to have to reach out to enough to get one. And usually if you reach out to 20, you can get one. You know, what’s funny is that 20 to one that

33:32
pretty much matches the numbers for tick tock shop. You message 100 you get five responses and then of those five you give away product. Is that 5 % like from your data or 5 % is roughly from our data. It’s not exactly 5 % is for change, but it’s close to five. Yeah, interesting. Okay. But with tick tock shops, we’re seeing a lot of people just give away stuff for free to just boost, you know. Yeah, to get that initial traction. I actually just had someone on tick tock shop on and we

34:01
went through really in depth on the process. It seems like tick-tock shop is so seamless because everyone on there is already ready to go and you can message 7,000 a day or whatever. And it’s just a numbers game at that point. Yep. Your method seems a lot more manual use. It seems like you need someone to do this, right? Yeah. Do all the messaging and the coalition and it’s harder work. Well, that’s the key because then you can scale, right? Advertising just really makes things scale.

34:31
when you’re running ads, what are your what are some realistic returns on ad spends? So we don’t like looking we do look at it. I personally some of my team likes looking at I hate looking at ROAS. Okay, some people will be like, Oh, look, we got a seven to one ROAS or 12 to one. And then I’m like, you’re telling me got a seven to one ROAS, but it’s not profitable. So who cares? Right? Like ROAS is good. But I want profitability.

35:00
And with e commerce, if you’re generating at least 20 % profit from a sale, you’re good to go skill up as much as you can. Even if it’s like 15%, it’s not too bad. Interesting. So you don’t look at I mean, if you have a seven extra turn ad spend, chances are it’s profitable, right? I mean, depends on the industry, maybe for commerce. But like if I run an ad, and I have a seven to one on a service based business, but then I paid to get that customer.

35:30
It’s eating in my margin. A lot of service-based businesses, like we work with some service-based businesses that do five, 10 billion in revenue, but they’re only operating at 10 % margins. You can’t have a seven to one ROAS with a 10 % margin. And a 10 % margin may suck, but if you’re at 10 billion in revenue and one in profit with no investors, that’s a great business. I would take that all day long, even if it’s not growing. Give me the billion a year. Sure. But when you say profit, okay, I guess for e-comm, like typical,

35:59
Gross margins are like 50, 66 % or 75%, right? Which means you can probably get by with like a 2X ROAS just to break even. It depends on the e-commerce product. Like we work with a lot of companies that sell electronics. They would not, ROAS of two to one would not work out from them. They would lose way too much. Yeah. So, okay. So you would start with that. And it seems that to me, at least with my research, just by doing the social and getting mentioned,

36:29
that will already improve your AI search, right? So does it? Cause it all just kind of works. Okay. They have data deals with a lot of these people and they’re just pulling and scraping. So if you go that route, uh, when do you start thinking about content? Like where does that rank in the priority of things? Uh, content.

36:50
content on your own blog or social platforms or it doesn’t matter just content, just optimization of content on your own blogs, social platforms. Like right now we talked about influencers them having creating content, you paying them you want to start that out first. What’s next content is like a 10. It’s very important. You need the content, whether it’s organic content or paid content or other people writing content about your brand or you’re writing the content about your own brand. It’s super important because without the content, these a platforms don’t have stuff to push out.

37:19
when people are asking for prompts. So you need content and your products and services need to be mentioned in those pieces of content to do well. All right, so we have the influencer thing going. Other people are creating content for you. Now terms of your own content efforts, today, would you start with social or would you go with the written content and some of the things we just talked about earlier? I’ll go with written content because it’s easier. And AI platforms are pulling from lot of these sources that have written content.

37:50
And then I would figure out how to get into video next, not images, specifically video, because you can end up taking the video content, taking the written content, turning it into videos, whether you’re using AI tool, like K gen, or whether you’re doing it manually, you know, it’s up to you. And then you can slice and dice the videos into shorter form clips and reels and shorts and all that kind of good stuff and some even to ads. And then you go from there.

38:19
So how does a short form compared to long form? Long form has better retention from people remembering what they consume the next day, the next 24 hours from what we tested versus short form by a huge leap. Long form doesn’t get tons of views. We look at short form as a great way to get people into the door. Long form is a great way to get people to evangelize a brand, promote the brand, you know, which is evangelism, but also buy in a great way.

38:48
to get them over the line. So short form gets them into the funnel, long form gets them to convert. So where’s the balance here? Again, you’re a small brand, you got to pick a direction to go. You suggested starting out with written content first, because that’s easy. And then would you go on to shorts after that or? No, the long. So you create like one long form piece of content each week. And then you go and then got lost, dice it up and you’ll have like five to seven short form pieces from that long form because you’re just cutting clips.

39:18
Okay, so you start with a long form, then you cut clips. Okay. Give me some examples of long form content. For let’s say dog food that you might put out. Sure. So a video or text actually doesn’t matter. can give you both. mean, it’s the same based on the method we talked about. the method I’ll talk about, I would end up doing something like we tested, we tested

39:45
the 25 best dog food brands for puppies. And here’s what we learned. And then I would go into what we tested, animal sizes, the type of food, how it what it actually took to get it ready and give it to the animal was a quick like you just open it up and you give it to them or do you need a microwave it? I don’t know if you microwave dog food, but you get the point or add some water and mix it up and crunch it and or mush it and then put it in a bowl.

40:12
how they react better, how was their stool movement after did any of them get sick? Like I would just break down all the kind of stuff that you’re thinking some of it is probably not appropriate like getting sick, we don’t want to talk about it. It’s a little too graphic. But you get the point. And then you can turn that into a video. And you can do the same thing. And like, here’s what we learned. You know, Rover ate this food. This is what happened to Rover penny ate this food. And this is what happened to Penny. Look at their

40:40
their skin or their fur or hair or whatever you want to call it. Look how silky it’s gotten and smooth because of the food. Look at their teeth and you know how much more energy they have and they’re not getting as sick and they’re growing faster and gaining more weight. And we did this for 30 days and look at this study. Like that’s the cool stuff that people want to see. You can create a really cool long form video from that as well. And you can create a lot of shorts from that. If I cover 20 brands or 25 brands, I forgot how many I said.

41:09
That’s one short right there, each of the brands, right? So it’s like all of that just produced a ton of content for you. So what’s funny is that that’s always been your style, like information that teaches or informs. I’ve seen on the opposite side of the end of the spectrum where people are just using their product and just being a goofball on video and that seems to work too. Very Can you just comment on the different styles?

41:36
that we find the goofball one to work really well, but it’s hit or miss. It doesn’t always work for all products. It really is a big hit or miss. The education tends to be consistent and it performs. So we tend to go with the method that is more proven to work. The goofball one and a great example of this is Dollar Shave Club, right? Just messing around or squatty potty.

42:00
right? And like, you know, pooping unicorn excuse my language, or not unicorns, pooping ice cream or something like that. yeah, forgot what squatty potty. Yeah. And that’s just goofy. And it works. And loomie was also another example of one that was funny, the deodorant. But for every loomie and squatty potty, we see a ton of misses. And when you do the education is more scalable, it’s more predictable.

42:25
and these platforms pull from this because they’ll ask questions related to some dog or dog size and what food is best. Yeah, and starts pulling from these research pieces or educational pieces. And boom, you’re getting sales. So it seems like since we can make the assumption that Google is pulling every transcript from YouTube, right into their AI. So given that, it seems like the informational content is the way to go. Yes. Right.

42:52
And we assume that it’s not just YouTube, I assume that Chad GPT and others are doing the same thing because they can scrape through one of the most popular bots on the internet right now. And they understand what video are actually saying and what they mean. Okay. So given all that, the content you create that can influence a purchasing decision, it should always be some sort of informational content. It seems that way, right? Does everything getting pulled in? It doesn’t always have to be but we’ve seen it work consistently and almost all the time.

43:23
And the reason we go with that route is when you’re a business and you’re spending money, you want predictability. What can you spend money on that’s repeatable and that you can scale up versus what is hit or miss? If you’re a large organization, you can define that however you want, but organization with enough money to spend where if something goes wrong, you don’t care and you’re willing to run experiments. You can try the goofy route and the educational and informational route because you have the cash, but most businesses in e-commerce

43:51
I’m assuming most people listening can’t afford to just go spend 50 or 100 grand on something and have it not work out. So you want to go with the consistent proven route first. And then when you scale by all means, try the goofy route or any other thing that you can try that may not be as costly. I want to switch gears a little bit and just talk about some of the things that you provide. So I know you acquired Ubersuggest and Answer the Public. What is your vision for the future of both of those tools? Now it seems like we already talked about that a little bit with Ubersuggest.

44:21
But what do you what is your vision going forward with with all the tools that you’ve acquired sure and one quick thing I met on the last one I was making Yeah, do the stuff that’s not that expensive and then you can do the stuff that’s costly because you have the cash to burn But right so my version we talked about uber says a little bit my version for answer The public is really simple and I see a design hopefully tomorrow from it. I did not like the design that I saw Call it earlier this week our home page is changing

44:49
Right now and answer the public you put in a keyword and you pick the platform you want to search on whether it’s YouTube, Google, Amazon, TikTok, it doesn’t matter. And then it gives you data for that platform. We believe in this concept of search everywhere optimization, searches everywhere on all platforms, Google controls roughly 27 % of the market share when it comes to daily searches, the other platforms control the rest, which is the majority. Google is the biggest platform for search, but the other platforms make up more than Google in total.

45:19
So the way we see answer the public is instead of having to select the platform, and this will take a little bit to implement. I’m just seeing the designs right now, the homepage I was fine with, you just type in a query. And when you type in a query, you may also have to type in your domain name and we’ll suggest the industry based on pulling from AI. And then from there, we, instead of showing you all the traditional search results from Google or TikTok, we want to give you a homepage overview.

45:47
And this overview is broken up into four boxes. The first box is AI search. The second box is traditional search. The third box is social media search. And the fourth box is Shopee, like Amazon, Walmart, et cetera. And what we would do is you can then dive into each category and find keyword opportunities and learn more about what people are typing in and how to rank and get your products and services mentioned based on what platform you want to dive into or what category you

46:17
Right. So basically, instead of explicitly telling people which platform you’re just going to serve all the platforms with one query, right, and tell them how to get mentioned everywhere based on what they want to go after and give them ideas. So like, let’s say if there’s a specific prompt, what is the best dog food for puppies? And we see the articles that chat GPT and Google and others are referencing, we will start saying

46:42
you want to write content around these topics because it’s most likely to get you included. You know, you’ve always offered these tools for free or at extremely low cost. Is your master plan is to get people in through those tools and then sell them services or like what’s the master monetization? Oh, is that okay? You nailed it. Okay. And then also keep in mind, we’re late to the game. So when you’re late to the game and you’re not offering anything that’s

47:10
drastically different because we’re in a saturated market, your real differentiation is free or cheaper. Okay. Because I’ve recommended out Uber suggests to many people, mainly because you have this really sweet lifetime plan, which I don’t know how the numbers work out, but I guess they don’t work out. Okay.

47:33
But you have their information and I imagine you can sell services for MP digital to them, right? That’s how we make it work out. But yes, the cost of the product and everything in the usage does not work out. Because what happens is people use a monthly plan, and the ones who like it, and know they’re going to keep paying for it, they just switch over to lifetime. So you don’t get getting the recurring revenue, which really hurts the business. So it seems like all of your tools kind of work together and all the services you provide, right? Yes.

48:03
Okay, and then NP digital, who do you guys serve? Like what type of businesses? What size and what types of businesses? SMBs all the way up to enterprise corporations like Chanel and Louis Vuitton that are selling products. So you know, we but we work with SMBs like DTC brands that are only doing three, four or 5 million bucks a year. That can’t be profitable either. But okay, it’s not profitable. The enterprise side is much better margins than the SMB side.

48:31
But I guess a percentage of those eventually become bigger and it probably all works out. you got it right. Okay. Okay. Well, Neil, hey, thanks for coming on show, man, and providing all those tips to the listeners, which was very valuable. And then we also got a chance to hear about all the services. Any other acquisitions in mind? How are you going to improve the tool set that will help people be everywhere? We bought a company called Yodel in April, I believe it was, that does App Store optimization, like for…

49:01
you know, the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. For commerce, you know, like a great example of this is there’s a really cool fashion brand called Fashion Nova that’s here in Los Angeles. They do really well from their app. Not enough commerce companies build apps. And Fashion Nova has a really amazing experience. I recommend everyone check out their app, even if you’re not looking to buy, just to see what they’re doing. Like it’s a…

49:30
a really well executed company. So we acquire that company to help people with their App Store rankings, because there’s just so much search volume there. The Apple App Store itself gets around 500 million searches per day, per day. That is nuts. Yeah. And then we’re about to acquire an Amazon shop that should hopefully close in the next few months. It’s just like an Amazon brand, you mean? No.

49:59
Amazon agency that purely focuses on Oh, okay. Got it. Got it. it. most of Amazon, if you look at the Amazon agency, they focus on SMBs. Right? This one focuses mainly on enterprise. Interesting. Okay, sounds like you got your hands in a lot of different things. But that allows you to get all the data and keep up with the industry, right? So I see the appeal. And then the team merges them in and deals with the integration and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t have to do that much. Just being honest. Actually, what is your role?

50:29
Create content, speak, deal with sales calls, deal with client calls. Yeah, I had to deal with more stressful stuff, but not as labor intensive stuff. Got it. Fun stuff, man, Neil. Once again, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time. Cool. Thanks for having me. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If Neil’s insights got you thinking differently about marketing, don’t forget to put them into action before the next trend hits.

50:59
For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 601. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event, go to sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course.

51:29
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