SPI 807: The Future of Online Business and Digital Marketing with Eric Siu

SPI 807: The Future of Online Business and Digital Marketing with Eric Siu

Eric Siu: I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people just wanting to add their take, right? Just, there’s so many interview podcasts out there. I think it’s a red ocean. Whereas I think when you look at like a Andrew Huberman, for example, the doctor, I was at a longevity summit and he said that he spends about 12 to 100 hours doing research for one episode and it would take him anywhere from 3 hours to 11 hours to record just one episode. And it’s all research that he’s done. Occasionally he’ll have a guest on, but that to me is an evolution of where things are going.

Pat Flynn: I had somebody recently asked me, Pat, how do you stay up to date on everything that’s happening in the online business space since you’re doing all this other stuff, right? I’m running companies, I’m advising, I have this Pokemon YouTube channel, but how are you still up to date on things that are happening in the world of online business? So you can stay on the forefront so you can best relay that information, all those kinds of things.

And my answer is always to follow and find those or find and follow those who seem to be really, really integrated into all of that. Who seem to be hustling in the world of interviewing. Who seem to be showing up all the time.

Whose names keep coming up, kind of no matter where you go. And one of those people that I follow is Eric Siu. He has an agency called Single Grain and he has a couple of podcasts. He has a podcast that he co hosts with Neil Patel, who’s been on the show a few times, a very, very prolific marketer that is marketing school.

But Eric’s show, the one that I’ve been following and listening to, to get all this new up to date information. I mean, he’s had Alex Hormozi on, he has had Kevin Espiritu and a number of others who are sharing what’s working now. And so I follow the Leveling Up podcast for this information and I have Eric on the show today, the Leveling Up podcast, definitely check it out. But we’re going to level up today with Eric by talking about the agency model. And he has an argument for why the agency model is the best model that you can have for business for generating the most revenue courses and coaching is fine, but why the agency model works best, we talk about the future of business, where things are going.

Cause he’s got, again, a pulse on a lot of this stuff. Why community is going to be. Extremely important moving forward and a number of other things, including right away, you’re going to hear a tactic that I’ve noticed that he’s been using in the world of YouTube that is working really well too. So an all around incredibly prolific marketer, especially because of his connections with who he interviews and also Neil Patel, his business partner.

So let’s chat with Eric today. Here he is, Eric Siu.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he got inspired to grow potatoes in his backyard after watching the Martian, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Eric, welcome to SPI. Thanks for being here, man.

Eric Siu: Yeah, thanks for having me again, man. Always good chatting with you.

Pat Flynn: Even before we get into a little bit of your background, I want to ask you about something very specific because, and this is very selfish of me, you had mentioned somewhere that there was some new YouTube tactic that was working for you to get videos to explode a little bit.

Can you tell us what that is? Can you just share that? Is that too much to ask?

Eric Siu: Oh, yeah, totally. So do you remember Jubilee, the YouTube channel? Yeah. I personally haven’t watched much of it, but okay, good. So you’re more cultured than I am when it comes to YouTube. So I had the Jubilee, this guy was an early employee there.

Eventually he rose up to becoming the chief strategy officer there. His name’s Ryan Hashimi. And he said, look, a lot of YouTubers aren’t doing this right now, but this is the easiest way to get more views, especially if you have someone that has a large YouTube following. And so we did an interview and in the first couple of hours, like I was like, okay, this is like, you know, seven out of 10, eight out of 10.

This isn’t going anywhere. Right. When you look at YouTube studio, it’s not ranking very high. It’s not top three. Usually if you’re, It’s top three. You might be going somewhere for those of you that are maybe a little new to YouTube. And so I was like, okay, it’s not really doing anything. I’m going to try this Ryan Hashimi tactic.

This guy has grown his YouTube to, you know, he’s got 5 billion views for Jubilee. He’s, he’s done a lot of crazy things. Mr. Beast tried to poach his employees. So he’s like, he knows his stuff when it comes to YouTube. So I was like, I’m a little skeptical, but I asked the guests and keep in mind at the time the video had like, I don’t know, two or three hundred views or so.

Right after he posted it, the graph, and I sent you a picture of this, but the graph went parabolic. It went like flat and it just shot up and it’s continuing to shoot up right now. The video, relative to my channel, it’s pretty good for my channel. It’s got like a hundred and seven thousand views so far and it’s continuing to climb.

Pat Flynn: That’s great. You didn’t change the title, change the thumbnail, you literally just did this one thing.

Eric Siu: Exactly. And all he told me to do was just ask the creator to post it to their community tab. And when they post it to their community tab, YouTube, other people, they see it as a new video that was posted.

And that’s why the video ripped.

Pat Flynn: Wow. Okay. So, If you are on YouTube and you have a guest on your YouTube channel, or maybe you even just mentioned another person, see if you can get that person to post it on their community tab, which is not a big ask at all. It’s not a lot of friction to do. It doesn’t really cost anything.

There’s no worry around that. And that seemed to shoot it up. Have you tried this again?

Eric Siu: I haven’t tried it again. So you and I did an interview and I thought we had a great conversation and it was, it was two hours, but the video didn’t rip right. And I was like, That’s a waste of a conversation. And like, it’s not doing a service to you either.

Right. You know, it did well for audio, but I’m like for YouTube, you know, that’s where it’s at. I’m like, okay, maybe Pat number two Mark Moss, he agreed to do it. He talks a lot about Bitcoin macroeconomics. So, you know, if you’re down to do it, great. If not, it’s okay.

Pat Flynn: I’m down to try it. I mean, again, like I said, there’s, there’s very low costs to doing that.

So we’ll do that and see what happens. But this is what I love about you and your partner Neil. You guys always come with like these strategies that it’s not even like download this tool and do these hacks. It’s like literally just think about how to do this in a different way. What’s it been like to work with Neil?

Who’s been on the show several times. A lot of people know him as a founder and as sort of very prolific content creator, blogger, marketer. What’s it been like to work with, with him?

Eric Siu: It’s actually a really good partnership because we both took item. I forced him to take this personality test and this personality test was created by Ray Dalio and Adam Grant, more so Adam Grant than Ray Dalio.

And Ray Dalio is the hedge fund manager. Adam Grant’s a psychologist, bestselling author. And this is the best personality test I’ve ever taken. It’s called Principles You, it’s free. So it’s, it’s really interesting because Neil and I were polar opposites, right? Like when it comes to being creative, I’m super creative and he’s not.

When it comes to being super direct, he’s super tough on people. You know, I’m not, I’m kind of in the middle on that, but he’s also like maximum on detail oriented. I’m very low on it, but we’re both very practical people, right? So the partnership works out and we’re both very honest with each other.

What I would say is, working with him, you know, he brings a lot of numbers. He’s a very numbers driven guy. At the end of the day, he brings a lot of research. And oftentimes now when we have conversations on the marketing school podcast, I’m bringing a lot of new trends, a lot of new tactics, whereas he will level it with details, right.

And, and numbers, and that’s how it works out so well. And, you know, we’ve evolved the podcast over the years. So it’s, it’s been a great partnership because we’re so different and we compliment each other well.

Pat Flynn: How long has that podcast been going for?

Eric Siu: I think we’re coming up on eight years now. Time flies really quickly.

This, this podcast is older than his kids. It’s older than his marriage.

Pat Flynn: So what have you seen change in the podcasting landscape since you both started that, is a marketing school podcast, right? And what has changed and how are you promoting it? How are you still making it work now?

Eric Siu: We talked about this yesterday.

So I literally got back from Miami and then we drove straight to his place and we recorded. And we were just saying how I think Tim Ferriss said this recently, that it’s almost impossible to be the next Oprah because back in the day, Oprah had, there’s only a few channels and only a few hit shows and she had one of the hit shows and that’s why she became so famous and she held that attention for so long.

Now, with today’s algorithms, someone might become famous and there’ll be yesterday’s news very quickly. And so the half life of fame goes down quite a bit. And what we said is. We have to continually reinvent ourselves. And so our podcast, the way it used to be when we first started was really the first two to three years or so, Neil and I were just sharing everything that we knew, all the tactics that we knew, but eventually we realized that we’re just repeating ourselves over and over and we had to change up the content.

And so what used to be a five to 10 minute episode for all seven days has now changed into, it eventually morphed into a weekday episode for every, every five days and it was 15 minutes and now it’s morphed into just a 90 minute conversation that him and I have and we just riff off of stuff and we’re constantly testing things and it makes for much better shorts, reels and Tik Toks.

We share a lot more stories and that’s helping more with a brand new YouTube channel that we started there. So we’ll see how it goes. But I think the key takeaway here is that. We have to continually reinvent ourselves. Otherwise we’re going to be yesterday’s news. And same thing with you. You’ve continually reinvented yourself over the years and it’s because you have to.

Otherwise people aren’t going to pay attention anymore.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, we at SPI have converted over to community centric. You know, our courses aren’t even what we promote anymore. It’s literally the community, but also myself personally, I’ve reinvented myself in a way, or if added to it or supplemented it with all the Pokemon stuff, which we went pretty deep on in that conversation on your channel.

Eric Siu: And by the way, Pat, like I, I like, you know, just to back up a second, when I think about the other podcast that you were on Leveling Up, I’m like, okay, I’ve done so many interviews over time. I’m just like, I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people just wanting to add their take, right? Having more conversations.

So here I feel like we’re, we’re, we can have a conversation back and forth. just, there’s so many interview podcasts out there. I think it’s a red ocean. Whereas I think when you look at like a Andrew Huberman, for example, the doctor, I was at a longevity summit and he said that he spends about 12 to 100 hours doing research for one episode and it would take him anywhere from three hours to 11 hours to record just one episode.

And it’s all research that he’s done. Occasionally he’ll have a guest on, but that to me is an evolution of where things are going. So sorry to interrupt, but yeah.

Pat Flynn: No, that’s a great point. So. What are you inferring about the idea of just starting a podcast and having it just be an interview show? Is that even worth the time now?

Because we can’t become the next Oprah, or can we become the next Oprah in our own little niche? Because that’s how you can still make a name for yourself if you narrow down who it is that you’re speaking to. I’d love your thoughts on that because I mean, we don’t have hundreds of hours to put. I mean, for many of us, it’s not our sole profession to do what it is that we’re doing on our podcast.

So do we not do the interview shows anymore? Is it too Red Ocean?

Eric Siu: I think it’s a mix of you could have some interviews, but for example, you’ve been in business for a while. I’ve been in business for a while. We have our hot takes, we have our spin on things. We have a lot of stories to share. For example, from conversion Excel, now it’s called CXL.

He just did announce me yesterday. He’s like, I’m changing my podcast format. It’s it’s, I have a lot of hot takes and I’m going to focus it more on mostly me talking. Right. So he’s doing away with the interviews completely. I don’t want to go that far. Cause I enjoy having conversations with people like you.

And so I think it’s a matter of, Hey, these are my experiences. Like I’m operating, I’m running my business right now. There’s a lot of things I’m going through, looking at buying other businesses, looking at investing in other things. So I want to be able to share those experiences so people get to understand me more.

Cause one of the biggest things I realized in the last couple of, this was like maybe a month ago or so someone had reached out to me and said, Oh, you’re actually more legit. You’re way more legit than I thought you were. And I was like, what do you mean by that? He’s like, Oh yeah, cause your YouTube channel is, is just interviews and I don’t really know who you are.

Right, and then he, he like, when I mentioned a couple other things like YPO and all these other, he’s like, Oh yeah, you’re actually an entrepreneur. That’s not a good thing, right. And so I’m like, how do I change that?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And then plus the idea of the interview itself being time with the person you’re interviewing and that relationship could be built.

I mean, you and I got to know each other over the two hours that we sat together in your studio, and then here we are furthering that relationship here and whether people end up listening or not, that still benefits both of us in terms of our relationship together, which is great. What other creators or who else are you watching or listening to right now that’s, that’s making an impact on you and why?

Eric Siu: Yeah, I would say I’ll be very honest with you. I, I love Alex Hormozi as a friend. I love Layla as well. And you know, what’s interesting, not that I don’t love them anymore. They, they actually, so I kind of stopped watching the content, right? Cause it, it changed in the last.

I actually watched a video that he did on YouTube yesterday and he’s like, I’m changing everything. I’m not going for wide audience content anymore. I’m going to narrow it down. I’m just going to focus on business people because you know, if I make relationship videos, it’s going to be relationship people that are looking for it.

If I make, you know, shorts, it’s going to be mostly people that are looking for shorts, but ultimately we need more applications so we can buy more businesses. I think again, it’s like a lot of people are pivoting into like what works again, right? It’s not trying to go wide anymore. It’s trying to go narrow.

And so that one really resonated with me because that’s exactly what’s been on my mind right now. So I would say him, I would say there’s, I like what Sam Ovens is doing with school. So I was fortunate enough to invest in the growing like a weed right now. And so what I would say is I’m watching some of the top Skool groups.

If you go to Skool, you can see some of the top groups there. And some of these groups are making like three to 500 K. I have to imagine most of that’s profit per month, right? And the way they run their groups, I would just recommend I’m not looking at anyone in particular. I’m just looking at the top groups.

I’m seeing how they do things. And I’m sending that over to our community manager. And he’s helping implement a lot of those things. Nice. There hasn’t been someone that explains funnels really well. Like Russell Brunson is known as the funnel guy, right? From ClickFunnels. But this guy, Matt Larsen, he doesn’t have the biggest following on YouTube right now, but he’s got so many well done videos that are 20, 30 minutes, maybe an hour or so.

Anybody that’s looking to build a funnel the right way. Just watch this stuff. It’s completely free. It’s a criminal that it’s free. I should say. So it’s Matt Larsen. Find that and you guys will be able to grow faster.

Pat Flynn: What about Matt’s intriguing to you?

Eric Siu: I just think he’s very transparent with his numbers.

The way that he explains everything, it’s well thought out. He has slides for everything. I think when he’s doing a one hour video, he’s probably got like, I don’t know, 60 to a hundred slides or so, and everything’s well designed and it’s very simple and it makes everyone feel like it makes the viewer feel like they can accomplish anything.

Pat Flynn: That’s really great. That’s, that’s tremendous feedback. Actually, Matt Larsen, I’ll have to check him out. You had mentioned Alex refocusing his efforts to do what ultimately his goal is, which is to acquire more companies. He’s got acquisition as his company and that’s literally what he does. What is it that your goal is?

I mean, you are a very prolific creator. You are a podcaster, you’re on YouTube, you’re doing so many things. What is the end game? Or at least right now, what is the funnel in your world leaning to?

Eric Siu: I feel like if we were to give the, the, a macro answer to this, it would be the same answer. So I would, I just imagine for myself that I remember playing this game.

You want to buy companies? No, no, no. Just you overall, right? The, the, the watch, watch, I’ll give an answer and you say, if you’re aligned with me, that’s how we’ll test this. I remember when I used to play this game ever quest and sometimes, you know, you would see if you can kill a monster. Right. And sometimes if it’s red, it’s like, what would you like your tombstone to say?

So I think about that question a lot. What would I like my tombstone to say? I just want my tombstone to say, this guy was a great learner and a great teacher. And that’s all it is at the end of the day. And I think business is the ultimate game that you can play. And Neil and I we’ve talked about this.

And so he’s gotten offers to sell the company for hundreds of millions of dollars, but I was like, Why would you sell? Because it’s like, what would you do afterwards? And it’s like, well, I’d probably be doing the same thing. So then like, why would you sell? Because you’re already far along. And so to me, I’ve rewired my thinking into, you know, it’s, it’s, it doesn’t take a year to build something great.

You know that, right? Not even five years, not even 10 years. I think it takes 20 to 30 years to build something really generational. And you know, I’m just going to keep playing this game. I’m going to keep compounding because a lot of the people that you’ve seen out there that have built generate, it’s like, well, why build generational wealth?

Well, because it’s fun, right? That’s the only reason, right? If it’s not fun, then I’m just not going to do it. And so I think it’s fun to continue to work on the same problem set. For me, I’ve really learned in the last couple of years to really focus in, even though, you know, previously I was just doing too many things.

Right. And so You just look at all the people out there. You look at the Elon’s of the world. You look at the Jeff Bezos of the world, they’re focused on one company. They might’ve had different product lines, but they’re locked in. Yeah. I’m really enjoying what I’m doing right now.

Is it a pain in the butt? Yes. But I’ve been asked this question during a dinner meeting. It was like, so what is your goal? Like, I feel like I’m kind of doing it right now. Like I’m, I’m learning and teaching and that’s all I want to do. And I think business is the best vehicle for that. So is that aligned with how you’re thinking for yourself long term?

Pat Flynn: It is. However. I have specific more, I’m not saying you don’t have this, but I do have some philanthropic goals and some sort of lifestyle goals that help drive those decisions that I’m making right now and what it is that I’m doing. I’m curious in terms of the now, the things that you’re doing now, the podcast and the content creation, tell me the business model around that. Where are people finding you in general and what’s the journey you’re taking them on? And is it just ad revenue? Where’s the revenue coming from on in your business as a learner and teacher?

Eric Siu: So the revenue primarily comes from the ad agency, Single Grain. So both Neil and I, we make our monies from our separate agencies and the content builds authority, obviously, and it funnels customers to our respective agencies and you know, we have a high lifetime value offering and you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s the best, you know, whether it’s SaaS, when you think about e commerce, you think about education, it’s just been the best business model for myself. And then Neil said the same thing, it’s been the best business model for him. The agency model? The agency model, right? Because it’s like, if we’re teaching this stuff, we’re going to make the most money from selling services at the day.

It’s not selling courses or selling coaching or consulting, that type of stuff.

Pat Flynn: So what does an agency look like? How many employees do you have at Single Grain? And how involved are you in that? Or is it kind of just running on its own?

Eric Siu: I don’t believe a company can run on its own, like completely, we can talk about that and I’m happy to talk about the mistakes I made in the last two years or so.

So we’re at about 40 people. We did some acquisitions recently in the, maybe two years ago that didn’t work out. So we had to cut down to the amount that we’re at right now, but you know, happy to go into that. And I think that’s what you asked, right? How many people we have?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, when you started that agency, was it just you kind of providing those services and what were kind of your first steps there to, to start to scale that?

Eric Siu: The story with this, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but Neil’s cousin started the company. And so I worked in tech before and I came into the company and the goal was to help turn the company around. And basically, long story short, basically six to eight months into it, I basically was able to buy the company for $2 out of pocket.

So 1 for Neil’s shares and another dollar for his partner’s shares. Oh, really? Yeah. And then the rest was seller finance, meaning that the sellers carried the note. Right. And I put in a contingency saying that if the company failed, I would owe nothing. And my thinking behind this was that if I could make this work, then my, my upside’s unlimited, but if I fail, it’s a great MBA.

You know, I actually made it go from bad to worse in the first year. We actually dropped all the way down to one employee. We had like 10, 10 people or so. We dropped all the way down to one employee. I was like 26, 27. I didn’t know what to do. Right. I didn’t know how to run a company. And then thankfully we were able to the SEO kicked in for Single Grain. I was doing a lot of SEO work at the time. We started ranking number one for the keyword digital marketing agency. And so we started getting a lot of leads for that. And I started referring those leads out to an agency in San Diego. And that allowed us to cashflow for that year when I like basically tanked the company and through that cashflow, we’re able to hire the right people.

And then slowly we turn things around there. So, you know, it was a lot of a lot of luck involved, but thankfully it worked out.

Pat Flynn: That’s crazy. Is SEO still an important component of your business now, or is it youTube and the other platforms that you’re on that are providing more leads for you.

Eric Siu: SEO is still very big.

I would say paid covers the majority though, maybe paid 60 percent of the revenue at SEO.

Pat Flynn: Okay, so not as organic as it was back then.

Eric Siu: Yeah. And then I would say, to your point, Pat, we’re getting a lot more enterprise companies reaching out asking for help with YouTube. Guess what they’re asking for help. They’re also asking for help with Reddit as well, because Reddit’s ranking really well on Google now. So. People are looking for community management. They’re looking for Reddit. They’re looking for YouTube. So it’s becoming way more obvious to people that you can’t just trust SEO and you can’t just trust ads.

Pat Flynn: You had mentioned that you had made a couple mistakes along the way with the agency. What were a couple of the bigger ones?

Eric Siu: Yeah, I’ll give you these acquisition stories. These are a doozy. So we did. These are recent too, right? These are recent 2021. So we did two acquisitions in 2021. I’ll tell you the lessons afterwards.

So we did these two acquisitions and one was a paid media agency. They were focused on e commerce. The other one was a let’s call them an SMB SEO shop, right? We basically did these two acquisitions one after another, and we integrated both companies, two different cultures, two completely different cultures into our culture.

So you have three, I like to call companies that they’re very you know, it’s chaos, right? So three chaotic organizations come together and with one of the companies, there’s an executive that came with it. And, you know, I was kind of lukewarm about this person, but I was like, okay, let’s give it a shot because Pat at the time in 2020, 2021, the cool thing is to hire someone, hire a GM, hire a CEO and get out of their way and let them do their thing.

Right, so I drank all that up. I was like, sounds good to me. So. I was like, okay, this person has a lot of agency experience. I can go do other things. Now I can go focus on the SaaS. I can focus on other stuff. We hired this person and basically two, three months into it, their family member got really sick.

We’re talking stage four cancer here. So I said, Hey, look, you know what? We love you. We got you go take care of your family. We’re going to put you on paid leave. Okay. And so she goes on paid leave and basically like clockwork each week someone’s resigning from Single Grain and we’re like, what’s going on over here?

Like, do we suck? And this keeps going on. This is from like December of 2021, all the way into like January of 2022. Okay. Then in January of 22, we get a call from a law firm or a lawyer. I should say, we get a call from a lawyer from another agency. And we’re like, what did we get in trouble? Did we do something wrong here?

This lawyer says, Hey, we hired this person and they showed a bunch of screenshots and this person had actually poached a bunch of Single Grain employees to this new company and this person actually stole a 2 million a year client from Single Grain and this person then tried to go do the same thing to the other agency.

And then I found out later, cause the agency prior that this person was working at was a YPO member. So I was like, Hey, like what happened? And this person was like, Oh, this person did the same thing to us. Basically, that’s one of the things that happened. And you can imagine that something like that tanks the culture, right?

I would say more than anything, I take responsibility for everything because I just wasn’t involved. And I almost I didn’t delegate, Pat. I think a lot of people think delegating is just getting out of the way. But that’s actually abdication, right? So that’s the high level. I’ll pause for a second because I’ve been saying a lot.

Does that make sense to you?

Pat Flynn: I mean, yes. I’m just trying to process all of that because that’s a lot to have happened in a very short period of time. What does that do to you as a, as a CEO and, and like, how do you rebound from that?

Eric Siu: I think the best CEOs, when they stare into the abyss, I don’t know about you, but it’s, it’s for me, I, I thrive in chaos.

It’s some, it’s some weird thing. So I actually enjoy it when it’s chaotic. And so I’m like, Oh, this is like challenge accepted. Right? I mean, if I could turn around a company the first time, if I could help turn around a company, it’s, it’s great. By the way, it’s the people that helped lift it up. Right. I’m like, I think I can do it again to answer one of your other questions.

I’m more involved than I ever have been. And Neil says that too. Right. We had a little conversation yesterday. I was like, Neil, how long have you had MP digital for it? That’s his agency. He’s like, I had it for about seven years. I was like, so out of those seven years, how many years did you focus? He’s like all seven.

I was like, okay, well, I’ve had single grain for about nine, 10 years. You know, we’re very close. He’s watched the journey. Right. He’s like, you probably focused like two or three years and you’re more focused than you’ve ever been. I’m like, yeah. Pat, you and I, we probably read a lot of different books out there.

It’s like, you know, focus, focus, focus. I never took it that seriously until I got slapped in the face a couple of times from these acquisitions.

Pat Flynn: So what does focus mean to you now? Are you not doing other things or have put a stop to other things in order to put more time into this? Or what does that mean exactly?

Eric Siu: Yeah, I’m very locked in on Single Grain from Fixing the current problems to looking into the future with AI agents and everything like that. I’m happy to talk about that. And then I’m just focused on content creation. And then the little side hustle that Neil and I have, that we’re building in public right now, is we’re building like a YPO or EO for agency owners, right?

We’re calling that the Agency Owners Association. And so that’s our community for agency owners. Our goal with that one is to have that community, but also eventually think about, hey, Who might be looking to partner up? Who can we potentially partner up with or or acquire down the road?

Pat Flynn: I like that. Tell me about the A. I. thing that you’re just mentioning.

Eric Siu: Yeah. So have you read up about the concept of A. I. agents?

Pat Flynn: Is this similar to having bots created that can kind of voice your company and be support? Or am I thinking about something different?

Eric Siu: No, you’re correct. So an AI agent, that’s a really good example is Klarna published a case study recently, and they serve a bunch of e commerce companies, I think, or they’re e commerce company.

Basically they created these AI chatbot agents, right? And these agents solved about 11 million tickets or so. And they took the average customer support ticket from 11 minutes down to two minutes. And they basically did the work of 700 customer support agents and Klarna is estimating that’s going to add about 40 million to their bottom line.

And that’s pretty significant, right? So that’s the, at its core, that’s an AI agent. But when you think about agents at another level for developers, so you can have, you know, developer agents reviewing your code or helping you re rewrite your code or refactor your code, right? Or when you think about marketers, well, what if you have a marketing agent helping you with programmatic SEO or programmatic conversion rate optimization, right?

Or helping you basically handle a, a sales call and then basically take it from inception to the very end of it. And so there’s a lot of people in tech right now. You have the founder of box. You have a Brian Halligan, who’s the former CEO of HubSpot. Everyone’s talking about how this is going to make a major difference in the next five, 10 years or so.

And so that’s something I’m really excited about. And we’re building a lot of things internally, even though I’m focused on Single Grain there’s, there’s a lot of things that we’re building for ourselves and we’re super excited about it. And so that’s what AI agents are. And then there’s another piece to it, but I’ll pause for a second.

Pat Flynn: You’re building your own agents for your own customer service.

Eric Siu: So right now, what we’re doing, Pat, is I guess I probably have to explain programmatic SEO and programmatic CRO first, and then I’ll, I’ll tie it together. Does that work for you?

Pat Flynn: Let’s get nerdy, man. Let’s do it.

Eric Siu: Okay. So, you know, TripAdvisor, right?

They drive basically 113 million visitors per month from Google alone. So that’s a lot of SEO traffic. And if they’re paying Google for that traffic, they’d be paying 66 million a month, which is a lot of money. And they rank for about 124 million keywords. Now, is it that their content’s amazing? No, not necessarily.

It’s because they’re creating a lot of these pages, millions of pages programmatically. So fun things to do in Rome, fun things to do in Japan, things to eat in Kyoto, right? You get millions of these permutations that are all creating these pages that are created programmatically. And these pages will, you know, show links to, you know, cool things to do in those areas.

And they’ll cross link to other things. And so you have a bunch of these pages and TripAdvisor, the website, it’s been around for so long that the website’s authority is so high, right? So it has a lot of links pointing to that site. So when you have a high authority website and you’re pumping out a lot of these pages programmatically, those pages are typically able to rank.

It’s nothing necessarily new, Pat, but it’s something with the advent of open AI’s API, it makes it a lot more accessible to people like you and me.

Pat Flynn: So when you say programmatically created. This is not a human being sitting down to write these things. These things are being auto generated.

Eric Siu: These are being auto generated, but that’s the key thing, too.

You want to make sure that you’re quality controlling these, because if you’re putting out hundreds of thousands of pages of crap, then you’re, you’re not going to do well, right? And so what we’ve done, like an example of one thing we’ve built internally is, Even though we’re creating these pages programmatically, we build a quality score tool.

So if some of these programmatically generated pages aren’t getting traffic in the first 30 days, like zero traffic, we’re just automatically going to delete them. And then usually when we first start doing it, we have a human in the loop to just make sure to spot check things. All that to say, Pat, is if we’re generating these pages at scale, right, that also gives us the opportunity to optimize the conversion rate of these pages at scale.

So let me give you an example. We have a page for conversion rate optimization services for Single Grain. And our typical call to action for our agency is work with us. Okay. Now what we do is we just use the AI to scan the context of the page and it’ll come up with a new call to action. So the new call to action is Optimize your conversions.

Okay. That leads to about a 60 percent increase in conversion rates on those pages. So that’s programmatic conversion rate optimization. So do those two make sense? PCRO and PSEO.

Pat Flynn: They do. Is that in real time or is that while the programmatic content is being created that the AI comes in and determines what the best call to action.

Eric Siu: Yeah, so you can do it right after the page is, is, is completed and then you can run it again, right? And so what we’re doing is we’re basically figuring out, we’re starting with PCRO, right? So if you want to do programmatic CRO, we’re building an entire interface. That’s able to help people do that at scale, right?

So we’re looking at target travel websites, e commerce websites, because they have a lot of pages at the end of the day, that’s where we’re starting. And the way we see this Pat is we might start with programmatic CRO first in terms of building a platform for people and then serving people in the back and using our service team.

And I’ll, I’ll talk about that in a second, but high level, if the world is going towards AI agents, how do we just build an entire customer acquisition platform? That leverages AI agents that has a human in the loop that has humans in the loop to help their right because you know, the old days of needing thousands of people for agencies, that’s probably going to go away because you’re just not going to need that many head count to get these things done like eventually computers are going to be smarter than us.

Pat Flynn: It’s crazy to think about where things are going and I have a question that may be on the audience’s mind right now, which is. And I know this is a guttural reaction from most people when it comes to programmatic content like this. It’s just like, we’re all just adding more noise out there and we’re all just kind of creating this content and that, that just like seems to create more of a mess and more overwhelmed for people.

How do you justify it? It’s hard because it’s like, well, this is the game that we’re all in now. So we kind of have to play it right. Especially at your level and the kinds of things you’re doing. So I don’t, I don’t blame you at all, but how do you wrap your head around the idea of just like, Quote unquote quality content versus this programmatic stuff that is just seemingly just with the push of a button with a certain set of parameters and rules can get put out there and is getting in front of people. How do you play that game and feel good about that?

Eric Siu: Great question. So the way we look at it is you have to balance it out with quality content.

And so, We have with the Marketing School podcast, that’s 90 minutes of recording every single week. And then there’s podcasts like I do with you and me. And if I could get this recording later, but there’s so much content that you and I are producing. And so we think about it from an AI assisted content standpoint.

And what I mean by that is, let’s say we take this podcast that we’re doing. I don’t know how long we’re going to go for, but we’ll take the transcript from this. And then we will have open AI basically, we’ll say, Hey, take this transcript and convert it into a blog post. And so basically it’ll give you like, you know, a blog post that’s maybe 60, 70 percent done. Then we’ll have a human in a loop come in, they’ll fact check, they’ll add context, they’ll add links, they’ll add media to it, and that makes it into a blog post, but that decreased the cost of the blog post by about 80 to 90%. And we’re way more efficient with pumping them out.

And so it’s a huge balance of AI assistant content and programmatic, right? And just to go a little deeper in Marketing School, Neil and I were talking about so many trends. There’s a lot of threads to pull on where they can become entire blog posts. That allows us to stay ahead of the curve while balancing out the programmatic piece.

I think if you’re just going to create a brand new website and spam with a bunch of programmatic content, you’re not going to get much results.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And I love the idea of repurposing and taking something bigger, chopping it up. And you’re right with podcasts like this. I mean, even in this episode, we’re talking about five to 10 different topics.

And, you know, there’s a couple more that I want to go into and where I want to go next is just the future of content creation. What does that feel like to you? And I know that you have some insight because you always talk about this with Neil as well, two or three years from now, what is a content creator doing to support their business to make a living?

Because It’s not what it once was, and it’s not going to be what it is now. Where do you think things are going?

Eric Siu: Let me respond to your question with a Google quote here. So even Google themselves, they don’t know where SEO is going in the next five to 10 years. So, and I’m just using SEO as a channel.

I had a meeting with one guy who has an SEO company. He’s not even sure what to do next. He, in fact, after we met, he’s like, Hey, do you know a couple of people I could talk to, because from a product standpoint, I don’t know what to do. Right. Should we, you know, open it up and just, you know, create content for people.

I’m like, but then you’re doing SEO. The same thing as everyone else. And so what I would say is for the next three years, don’t know, right? I think SEO is going to change very, very drastically. I think the 10 blue links that’s going to, I mean, we’ve had the 10 blue links for like 30 plus years or so, right?

When you search for stuff, I think people that are actively experimenting with things such as yourself and sharing their learning and their teaching, those people are going to continue to be able to build an audience and they want to diversify as much as they can to where their audience is hanging out and where the organic reaches, because you and I both know that organic reach is very fickle.

But I think, my bet is if I had to put all my eggs in one basket for the next decade, if I had to pick one channel, it’d probably be YouTube because second largest search engine and the fact that you and I are putting so much effort into it, it’s like you longer than I have. So I don’t see that going away.

Pat Flynn: How important do you think having a personal brand is moving forward with how much contents out there, how mushy all of that is. I think the human to human connection is always going to be important, if not more important, especially after AI starts to sort of level the playing field for a lot of information and brands.

How important do you think personal branding is? And what does personal branding mean to you? To you, as we think about the future of this space.

Eric Siu: Yeah. I think the personal brands that I’m used to following are people that stand for something. And so for me, I stand for learning, teaching. I stand for marketing.

I stand for personal growth. I stand like it’s a, it’s a mix of just trying to get better, right. At the end of the day. So. That’s what I would say, man. I had, I had something else I wanted to, to add to that. What was your question again? It might, it might come back.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. This idea of personal branding and how important that is in this world of AI.

Eric Siu: That’s kind of, I got it. Thank you for that. It came back. Okay. So to me, okay. I talk often about like, you know, how groups like, Entrepreneurs organization. So EO and then YPL, like young president’s organization have changed my life. I think as we go into a world where there’s so many deep fakes, you don’t know, you don’t know who’s who you don’t know who to, what to believe anymore.

And you know, you and I can speak each other in Chinese or whatever it’s, I think that communities are going to be the retention mechanism that that’s, because people want human connection at the end of the day, right? In a world where it might be illegal to drive now because humans are so, you know, we make so many mistakes when it comes to driving.

It’s only robots driving. It’s only robots doing the work. I have no idea how that’s going to look in 10 years, but I know for sure, I don’t care if you’re introverted or extroverted, you long for community. You long to hang out with like minded people. And I think if you can be a consistent personal brand and eventually you build a community like you have, I think that’s going to go a long way because ultimately people stay for community.

Pat Flynn: Amen to that. And it’s a perfect way to end this because I think there are so many communities out there that everybody has the ability to access, whether it’s yours, whether it’s ours and whatever space you’re in Pokemon, for example. We’re seeing that as well.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: So man, this has been amazing. And I know that we could talk for hours and we have before, and we definitely want to recommend people check out the interview that you hosted for me on your podcast, where can they go see that? And where else can they go to find your work and your stuff?

Eric Siu: Yeah. So they can go to Leveling Up on, they can just search for leveling up in my name on YouTube. And then, you know, if you want to listen to marketing school, just type in Marketing School on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

And then you can just follow me on Instagram or Twitter. It’s at Eric Siu. And that’s it.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, man. Great conversation today. Super fun. And I look forward to connecting again with you soon.

Eric Siu: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Eric.

Talked a lot about the future. I love what he said there at the end. It just shows that we at SPI are doing the right things by devoting and investing a lot into community to help you find your right people. And I know Eric’s doing the same thing and he’s got his agency models working with Neil still.

All those incredible things. But I definitely think that, like he said, community is retention. That is going to be more and more. Important and prevalent. And it’s why I’m grateful. I had already written the book super fans in 2019 before, you know, I knew this was coming, I knew this was coming and I’m just grateful for Eric and his friendship and all that he’s doing on the level up podcast.

You can check him out at marketing school, his agency, single grain, and just all the things. So. Thank you so much for listening and I appreciate you, Eric. Thank you for being on the show. I know you listened to the show as well and I’m looking forward to our next conversation and maybe another round of Din Tai Fung if we get together again.

Anyway, appreciate y’all and I’ll look forward to serving you the next episode. Cheers.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!