Leveling Up with Eric Siu

Founder

Growth Everywhere is a weekly interview series where I interview world-class entrepreneurs on business and personal growth. 

Past guests on the show include Marketo co-founder Jon Miller, Eloqua founder Mark Organ (sold to Oracle for >$1B), Jason Lemkin from SaaStr, Andy Johns from Wealthfront, and Ron Klein (inventor of the magnetic credit card stripe).

To learn more, go to http://www.growtheverywhere.com

Member

Marketing School Podcast

Marketing School is a daily marketing podcast where Neil Patel and I provide actionable bits of marketing advice for 10 minutes a day.

Listen at marketingschool.io

Co-host

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business

Guest Lecturer

Single Grain

I manage sales, operations, marketing, culture and the overall vision.

Chief Operating Officer

ClickFlow

Chairman

Entrepreneurs'​ Organization

Pepperdine University

Treehouse Island Inc.

Responsible for acquiring users and growing overall revenues.

- Conversion Optimization
- SEO
- Social
- PPC
- Media buys
- Affiliate program management
- E-mail marketing
- PR
- Video advertising
- Content marketing
+ more

User Growth Lead/Head of Marketing

Team Rubicon, Inc.

Online Marketing Strategist (P

Founder @ Growth Marketing Agency - Single Grain, Podcaster @ Marketing School + Leveling Up

Single Grain is a digital marketing agency focused on driving scalable and predictable revenue growth using Facebook advertising, Google Ads, YouTube advertising, SEO, video production and content marketing. 

We've worked with companies such as Amazon, Uber, Nordstrom and venture-backed startups to create and execute on custom-tailored growth strategies.






-> For those of you that are interesting in marketing and personal growth tips from top entrepreneurs, please visit http://www.levelingup.com for our free podcast. You'll hear from billionaires, authors, and other high performers.

-> For my daily marketing podcast, go listen to Marketing School at https://www.singlegrain.com/marketing-school-podcast



Skills:
SEO
Paid Search (Pay per click advertising)
Affiliate Marketing
Display Advertising
Mobile Advertising
Remarketing/Retargeting
Facebook Marketing
Video Advertising
Twitter Marketing
Google Analytics
Conversion Rate Optimization
Sales
Strategic Partnerships
Content Strategy/Development
Business Development
Social Media
Community Development
Operations
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate program management
Retargeting
Growth Hacking

This exercise will help you figure out your 'zone of genius' and 10x your outcomes.

It's simple -- every year or so, I'll send out an anonymous survey asking my direct reports a few questions. I'll let them know that I'm trying to figure out what my blind spots are and what they see me doing that's 'world-class'.

By asking these questions, I can triple down on what I'm world-class at while trying to figure out what things I can hand off. In some cases, the things that I suck at are eye-opening.

Here are the questions:

- What do I do that you experience as 'world-class'?
- What do I do where I appear to be experiencing fun, peace, or joy?
- What do I do that I am good at but I don’t appear to enjoy?
- What do I do that I am not better than others at?
- What do I do that I am actually worse than others at?

For example, here's a response to the 'world-class' question:

In terms of foresight and innovation, particularly in navigating the future of digital marketing, your expertise is truly world-class. It's your creativity, visionary outlook, and knack for innovation that, in my opinion, set you apart.

While that's nice to hear, I want to know if this is a singular response or if other people are saying the same thing. If more than 50% of people are saying the same thing, then it's probably true.

Here's a response to the 'what I'm worse than others at' question:

I know you're not fond of the details -- so while your strategic vision sets you apart, setting up the operational details and next steps is something others are better at. 

I highly recommend running this exercise every other year at a minimum so you can continue to focus on what you're good at while continuing to delegate the things that don't give you energy.

Eric Siu ✓

Being a CEO is one of the worst jobs.

Mad? You can't show it.

Scared? You can't show it.

No one available to do the job? It's yours.

Last one to eat? Yep, that's you.

Being a CEO is one of the toughest jobs and that's why not many people want to do it.

But it's one of the most rewarding personal growth experiences that you'll ever have.

Most people just can't take the pain. That's why they give up.

That's why a lot of people are tapping out right now. Economy sucks. Leads are drying up. Churn is increasing.

But if you're willing to fight through, you'll become a lot more resilient and be a lot stronger for it. Not for the faint of heart but again, one of the best personal growth engines out there.

Be warned though -- even if you try your hardest, you still have a good chance of failing. 😬

#leadership

Agencies of the future are going to be wildly different.

For one, there will be agencies doing hundreds of millions in revenue with far fewer employees.

Right now, a 'good' agency has a revenue per employee of $100-200k. I think this number becomes more like $1-2M+ per employee.

Why? AI Agents. 

Recently, I remember asking one of our developers how much more productive he has become with AI. Without skipping a beat, he said '4x'. 

That's kinda nuts considering we're in the early innings of AI. Imagine how that multiplier will look in 5 years. Maybe 20x? Maybe more.

So what are AI agents? 

Let's use the example of an agent in the context of a marketing agency.

Let's say you are a full-service marketing agency. You help people:

- Build funnels
- Build ad campaigns
- Build backlinks
- Create blog content
- Create social content
- Write e-mails/SMS for retention
- Optimize conversion rates
- Create and optimize creatives

Now let's say you are helping a SaaS company doing $100M ARR. They care about booking more qualified meetings. They'll pay around $1,000 per qualified meeting that you send them.

Your AI agent can look at every single lead that enters your funnel, observe their behavior, and then send them relevant content based on their patterns. 

For every 4-8 value-added e-mails that your AI agent sends, 1 will be asking them to take an action.

An 'action' could be considered:

- booking a demo
- getting on a webinar
- opting in for another resource
- buying a low-ticket product

Your AI agent can look at ALL the sales conversations that you've had, identify the objections, and use those objections in your sales and marketing messaging.

In short, AI agents are human agents on steroids. 

Marketing agencies like this one can build customer acquisition platforms for their clients and charge on a usage-based or performance-based model. 

If you drive 1,000 qualified meetings per month, that's $1M per month in revenue. (1k * $1k per qualified meeting).

This model shifts the dynamic from a client-vendor relationship to a client-partner relationship. 

The agency is naturally incentivized to put all of its effort into creating the best possible marketing funnel for its clients.

Results will be all that matter. 

In this new world, agencies will experience:

- less client churn because the client needs you for ongoing maintenance
- better client relationships
- more profitability
- more time spent innovating 

Winning will require constant experimentation and willingness to continually fail. It'll also require people to build up their relationship capital with the companies that can afford to pay fees for leads or customers.

This is just one example. Imagine what's going to happen to all the different types of service businesses in the next decade.

McKinsey is already begging people to take 9-months severance and go away. Yes, they're trying to protect their profitability. 

But they also see where things are going.

Do you?

A big Google update recently destroyed many AI-driven content sites.

So is this the end of all AI content?

If you look at sites that got completely deindexed from Google, a lot of them were the black hat SEO influencers who were celebrating their wins on their YouTube channels.

Their YT channels grew fairly quickly and a lot of their videos were getting anywhere from 25-80k views on average. 

That's a pretty significant number for a niche topic like SEO.

The lesson? Don't brag about your black hat wins in public.

But they weren't the only ones to be hit. 

There were a handful of people on X who claimed that their sites lost virtually all their SEO traffic even though everything was handwritten.

These are people who spent years creating incomes from their blogs so you hate to see it, but one peculiar thing happened...

Some sites actually GAINED traffic from this past 'Google AI update'.

Why?

Because their content was genuinely helpful. The authors were REAL people sharing REAL experiences. The content also isn't optimized for SEO. 

In fact, you could see little to no signs of optimization for search engines. 

But how do you know if your content is 'genuinely helpful'? Ask yourself if you'd share it with your friends. 

If not, it probably isn't that good.

So is this the end of AI content? No, but it's moving towards the end of unhelpful AI content.

I'm not saying that you need to handwrite everything nor am I saying to stop using AI. The answer is a mix of both.

We're finding that our 'AI-assisted' content works best -- that is, content that includes a mix of AI with a human in the loop to fact-check, add context, add media, add links, etc.

For example, we do this with the Marketing School podcast -- we simply take the AI-generated transcript and ask OpenAI's API to create a blog post from the transcript. Then we run it through a duplicate content checker and after it passes the test, a human editor is added to the loop.

This type of content seems to be getting a boost from this past update.

As long as you're being helpful to your users, you shouldn't need to worry.

#seo 

MrBeast tried poaching Jubilee’s team by DMing their Instagram account.  

Of course, poaching talent isn’t new to the industry, but you’re doing something right if it's coming from the king of YouTube. 

I had Ryan Hashemi, the brains behind Jubilee’s explosive growth to 5 billion views, on the pod last month and we talked about how he found/hired a team worth poaching and all of the other ups and downs that have come with building the YouTube giant, Jubilee. 

YouTube is a battle for attention, and Ryan’s team has nailed it with a lot of learnings to get them to where they are now. 

Jump in to learn: 
- How Ryan built Jubilee for six years straight 
- How Jubilee changed YouTube with 1 video
- Why 90% of Jubilee’s videos failed
- Why they hired the best creatives who didn’t even watch YouTube at all

Watch the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/dSQaTkKG 

Timestamps:

00:00 - Building Something Like Disney for Digital
03:04 - Thinking About Formats, Not Just YouTubers
07:48 - The Importance of Crystal Clear Ideas
09:16 - Balancing Ideation and Production
13:02 - The Challenge of Talent Acquisition
23:36 - Expanding into the Love Space
26:58 - Dealing with Copycats and Reactions
30:22 - Standout Collaborations
38:09 - The Importance of Passion and Grit
39:09 - The Power of Packaging: Compelling Thumbnails and Titles
49:11 - The Rise of Creator-Operators
58:27 - Strategic Content Creation for Business Growth

Kevin Espiritu won an $8 million company
— with a hat. 

@KevinEspiritu, founder of Epic Gardening with over 6.2 million followers, won over the founders and secured the deal without having the highest bid.

His secret? It all came down to a hat.

During the process, he knew he wasn’t the highest bidder. But he also knew the founders cared deeply about their team and brand. So, he decided to wear their company hat in EVERY single piece of content he created until the deal closed.

It might sound crazy, but it sent a clear message. He wasn’t just after the bottom line. He was a fan of their brand, passionate about their mission, and most importantly, committed to their team.

And it worked. The founders saw it as a genuine symbol of respect and commitment to their company's legacy.

The lesson? Sometimes, the most powerful bids go beyond just numbers. It's about understanding what truly matters to the seller and going the extra mile to show it.

Watch the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/geaEFRwk 

Timestamps:

00:00 - Wearing the hat: winning the biggest deal
01:01 - Building epic gardening
03:47 - The botanical interests deal
05:14 - How wearing the hat made a difference
06:06 - The angle of the botanical interests deal
09:28 - Getting into gardening
10:54 - Finding a hobby outside of business
12:44 - Going all-in on epic gardening
20:33 - Acquiring blogs for growth
25:48 - The future of SEO
27:09 - The importance of email marketing
28:49 - Testing offers and opt-in rates
30:12 - The role of a president in scaling
31:35 - Finding the right operations guru
32:04 - Recruiting and hiring 10X talent
33:00 - The role of private equity in business growth
33:26 - The benefits of executive recruiting and acquisitions
34:15 - The value of learning from others in business
34:41 - The parallels between poker and business
35:37 - Why entrepreneurs should consider playing poker
36:07 - Lessons learned from playing poker
37:27 - Exploring mold toxicity and health
37:56 - Getting into gardening and wood carving
40:12 - The journey of epic homesteading
41:30 - The beginner's approach to gardening
42:27 - The benefits of growing citrus trees
43:30 - The connection between gardening and business
43:59 - The analogy of asparagus and long-term thinking
48:10 - The importance of mental models in entrepreneurship
49:47 - The need for action and real-world testing
52:23 - The shift from reading to doing
53:46 - The revolt against short-form content
54:45 - The purpose of the personal YouTube channel
57:00 - The importance of health and wellness for entrepreneurs
58:21 - The value of long-form content and building relationships

Let's say you get 100s of millions of views per month from YouTube Shorts, IG Reels, or TikToks.

What's the ROI of short-form video?

We know that YouTube long-form videos help many creators earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year (if not more). They have one of the best revenue-sharing programs out there.

But for short-form video, the revenue-sharing is either nonexistent or negligible. 

So short-form is already a non-starter from an ad revenue standpoint for both creators and business operators.

I know of some people spending $45k/mo to produce thousands of short-form videos monthly. In fact, I just spoke to one today and asked them about the ROI.

They said it's too early to tell because they've only been doing it for 4 months. 

They are getting 60M+ short-form views per month.

I also had a conversation with Gary Vee last week asking what the ROI of 100s of millions of social media views is.

His answer?

"I want all 8 billion people in the world to know me."

When I asked him for a specific example of how large audience TAM, short content has led to an ROI for him, he didn't blink.

He said that he made a video on FB ages ago and it got around 500 views. A FB developer saw it and invited him to speak at their headquarters. Zuck asked if he had time for dinner afterward (he didn't) but of course he said he was free because obv it's Zuck.

That eventually culminated in him investing in Facebook before they went public. He still hasn't sold a share.

Is that duplicable for everyone? No, but see my second point below.

So what's the actual ROI of short-form videos? 

A few thoughts:

- Measuring is important. But trying to measure every single metric has diminishing returns and increased anxiety. You can't possibly measure everything.

For example, I've bought multiple products just from watching YT Shorts.

- People on Twitter like to talk about increasing their 'surface area of luck'. This is exactly what it does. 

If they watch your content on another platform, these are simply ad impressions to stay top of mind.

Think about the 'rule of 7' when it comes to marketing. It takes someone 7 experiences before they take an action with you. Short-form is just one of those experiences.

- Sometimes, it takes a while to see a return. Investing $45k/mo for 12 months is $540k can be painful. But not experimenting with channels that are working might be even more painful long term.

Remember, organic reach doesn't stay forever. You have to strike where it's hot when it's hot.

I'm not saying to go spend $540k -- but at least test before dismissing.

At Single Grain | Start Growing, we grew to 11.4M views from 5.7M views (+99.52%). I think this still has room to grow.

But it's still too early for us to determine a direct ROI.

We've started doing this for clients and we're also getting more inquiries for this type of work so at least one thing is for sure: people will always migrate to wherever the attention is.

Will keep you all posted.

Do agencies actually have a moat?

Warren Buffett likes to talk about investing in companies with moats.

But what are moats? Here are some examples for starters:

Toyota has a strategic moat around its process
Coca-Cola has a strategic moat around its brand
Meta has a strategic moat around their network effects
and the list goes on

When most people think about agencies, there isn't much to stand on.

You might be starting to build your brand, but that will take at least 3 years to manifest.

What you can start to think about more immediately is the moat of 'switching costs'.

Switching costs are the costs that a customer incurs when they decide to switch from one offering to another. This includes monetary, effort-based, time-based, or psychological.

Let's say you just offer paid media. You've been with one client for over a year and you've done a pretty good job.

However, you don't offer anything else. As the customer grows, they're going to need support around creative and more general marketing strategy. They might even need influencer marketing. Or SEO. Or something else.

But because you don't offer anything else, you won't be able to support this growth.

Sure, you can have referral partners and you can get a nice kickback from any closed referrals, but that doesn't solve the bottleneck with YOUR offering.

Ultimately, your customer churn will be untenable because clients won't stay very long.

So what's the way to counteract this?

By offering more services.

Imagine if you're helping with world-class creative, paid media, conversion rate optimization, and influencer marketing -- you would create more lock-in with the client.

Even if you're doing just a 'decent' job across the board, it makes it harder to switch out because they spent so much time and effort building the relationship with you.

If you're doing a 'world-class' job across the board? It makes it WAY harder to switch out because why would they ever consider terminating a team of A-players?

So yes, agencies do have at least one strategic moat they can build around. Two if you can build a great brand.

P.S. Neil Patel and I started a community for agency owners to help them grow their agencies faster. It's called the 'Agency Owner's Association' - you can apply here to learn more: https://lnkd.in/eY-A_K4f 

hashtag

#agency 

One of the biggest fallacies in the last few years was for people to hire operators as if they could just run and grow your business for you while you sit on a beach.

You saw tweets everywhere about people hiring operators and it felt like everyone was doing it.

Here's the reality:

HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah has stayed involved from the very beginning. Now the company has a $32B market cap.

Gary Vaynerchuk stays involved. When I was doing the pod with him the other day, he showed me his WhatsApp chat with 30 of his media team members. He still writes the copy for his posts.

Zuck recently said in a video that he likes staying involved in the details and doesn't believe in modern delegation teachings (I'm paraphrasing).

Obviously everyone knows Elon is involved with everything from engineering to product for SpaceX, Tesla, X, Neuralink, etc. 

At the end of the day, you have to stay involved.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't hire operators to take over areas that you're weak in. You can't build a great org without them. So definitely do that.

But don't hire someone, disappear from the business, and expect the same intensity and growth.

That's a one-way ticket to eternal pain.

At the end of the day, no one cares as much as the founder. WPEngine's Jason Cohen  put it best when he said the founder has this invisible hammer to make things happen. It's a superpower that only the founder and potentially a hired CEO have.

Remove it and you're handicapping the company. 

So how do you stay involved? 

You focus on the things that you're world-class at and love. Offload the things that you dislike and suck at.

Dharmesh, for example, has never had any direct reports since day 1 at HubSpot. When AI first started taking off, he put together his own team and quickly shipped a few products that he thought would benefit the company. Then he handed them off to the HubSpot team.

He couldn't have done that with all the bureaucracy of a publicly traded company.

Dharmesh loves building and isn't a fan of people management, so he just focuses on building.

I've made the mistake of hiring and expecting someone to grow my business and I can tell you it has been costly.

Tread cautiously before you think about handing everything off and riding into the sunset. 

Chances are you'll be riding back. 😬

Top longevity experts like Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia aren't just doctors and researchers, they're also marketing masters. Here are some lessons I learned from a longevity summit.

For context, here were some of the speakers:

Bryan Johnson
Jay Shetty
Jim Kwik
Sara Gottfried, MD
Steven Gundry
Mark Hyman, MD
Ben Greenfield
 
Takeaways:

1. Andrew Huberman spends an INSANE amount of time preparing for his content.

He spends 12 to 100 hours preparing for long-form solo podcast episodes. Then he spends another 3 to 11 hours recording it.

Topicwise, he mostly chooses what interests him the most from 4+ pages of his research.

2. The best marketers sell subtly 

At the event, Jim Kwik had a main stage talk and a breakout room talk.

In both instances, he delivered immense amounts of value. What most people didn't notice is that he was subtly selling the whole time.

During his main talk, he'd continually reference his content. He might speak about a convo he had with someone on his podcast that 'has 100 million downloads'. 

Or he might refer to his book 'Limitless'. Or he might have a downloadable resource with a QR code that people could scan.

Or if he was teaching a framework from his book, he would tell us all that we could learn the entire framework in his book.

He wasn't telling us to buy directly -- he was subtly guiding us to the solution without being annoying about it.

I'd say that his value-to-selling ratio was probably 98 to 2. 

3. Everyone is a creator

Huberman and Attia have big medical podcasts. Bryan Johnson has built a nice following on YouTube. Jim Kwik and Jay Shetty have podcasts dedicated to their respective niches.

Sara Gottfried has a few books under her belt. The list goes on.

The content creator world is only going to get bigger in a world where AI is taking over. One of the few remaining things you can trust is an authentic personal brand.

People ultimately like doing business with people at the end of the day.

Content creators are the new customer acquisition platforms which is why brands like AG1 have been religiously sponsoring people like Huberman for years.

4. The best creators will eventually build their own products and services

Jim Kwik has various coaching programs and courses. His idea of helping everyone optimize their brain to reach their max potential has a wide audience TAM so it makes sense to capture the market with low to high-ticket educational programs.

Peter Attia charges $149/year for his podcast membership where he shares behind-the-scenes content as well as Q+As with his community.

I believe most of the doctors still do 1 to 1 coaching with clients. For example, one of our Single Grain clients who was attending the summit tried hard for years to become a private client of Peter Attia's. It's not cheap -- 5 to 6 figures annually. 

I believe that if a creator is selling ads, they're most likely leaving money on the table.

That's all I can fit!

#longevity


Is your agency ready for the future? 

I've been diving deep into how AI is about to reshape the entire industry – from employee productivity to radical new revenue models. 

Get the inside scoop in my latest newsletter👇

Eric Siu ✓ on LinkedIn • 4 min read

Why Agencies of the Future Are Going to Be Wildly Different

Welcome to Leveling Up. Today’s newsletter is a 5-minute read. 

Here’s what we will talk about:
-Ahrefs’ actionable AI tools
-The CEO of CovertKit’s proven flywheel
-How companies erode their own messaging
-Why MrBeast stays winning (for real this time)
+SEO on Autopilot: Using AI to Drive and Convert Traffic in 2024


Eric Siu ✓ on LinkedIn • 5 min read

Why Mr. Beast Is Getting Even MORE Video Views Now

Elevate your YouTube strategy with insights from Pat Flynn! 

Learn how he grew his YouTube channel, Deep Pocket Monster, and achieved success with his Card Party events. 

Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from a YouTube pro.  

Eric Siu ✓ on LinkedIn • 2 min read

How Pat Flynn Turned a Childhood Hobby Into a 6-Figure Business

Kevin Espiritu, founder of Epic Gardening, shares his journey from starting a gardening blog to building a multi-million dollar business. He discusses the growth of his YouTube channel, the importance of SEO and content strategy, and the acquisition of other gardening blogs to expand his reach.

Eric Siu ✓ on LinkedIn • 3 min read

How I Bought an $8 Million Company with a $1 Hat | Kevin Espiritu

Is the need to sleep 8 hours a myth?

I recently attended a private longevity summit with speakers like Andrew Huberman, Jay Shetty, Peter Attia, and Jim Kwik and wanted to share some takeaways (so you can live longer without spending thousands on a ticket).

Here are some unorthodox sleep tips I got from Michael Breus. (Disclaimer: I am not a health expert so please do your own research.)

Dr. Breus, also known as The Sleep Doctor, shared that the need to sleep 8 hours is a myth. He only needs 6 hours per day. Others might need 7. Others might need 10.

Everything depends on your own body at the end of the day and there's no need to stress about getting 8 hours of sleep daily.

One thing that I immediately implemented after getting home was his recommendation to get rid of any clocks in the room.

I didn't realize how much anxiety the clock was generating for me. Just think about this -- if you wake up 1 or 2 times a night, you undoubtedly look at your clock to see what time it is.

If it's 1am and you need to get up at 6am for an important meeting, your mind starts to think about how you *NEED* to get good sleep in the next few hours, or else your performance will suck.

That's sleep anxiety.

If you didn't have a clock in the room, you simply wouldn't know and the pressure would be off.

Worked like a charm for me.

He also shares a fascinating story about chronotypes. He had a patient who was failing at her day job - let's call her Sally.

Sally would frequently arrive to work late, fall asleep during work hours, and generally ship poor work.

When Dr. Breus asked if he could call her boss, he said that he couldn't care less because he was firing her at the end of the week.

Her work schedule was changed from 9-5 to 11-7.

What happened next was miraculous - the boss called the doctor back and asked him to talk to some of his other low performers because Sally had completely turned it around.

Why? Because she had the chronotype of a 🐻. Bears typically perform well later in the day.

Most companies structure their working hours for🦁s. That's because 1. most entrepreneurs are lions and 2. it's become the accepted way of doing things.

But what if you adapted different schedules for people based on their chronotypes. And what if you grouped them together at work so they could work more closely with each other?

How much more productive would your organization be?

For more like this, level up your business and marketing with 14,000+ marketers and founders in my Leveling Up newsletter here for free: https://lnkd.in/ey639hmZ

#sleep 

Is modern dating doomed?

If you want to find and win your life partner, you’ll want to listen to this.

In my interview with Dr. Orion Taraban from PsycHacks (5M YT views/mo), we talk about:

- When the average man’s sexual marketplace value exceeds the woman’s sexual marketplace value
- Is monogamy outdated?
- Who really should pay for dates
- What the ‘red pill’ actually means

Listen to the interview here: https://lnkd.in/dxAW3sCQ

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction and Background
01:22 - The Decline in Relationships and the Impact of Online Dating
14:23 - Questioning the Concept of Monogamy and Introducing Monogamish
29:47 - Different Desires and Needs in Relationships: Women Seeking Commitment, Men Seeking Access
37:22 - Understanding the 'Red Pill' and Effective Relationship Strategies
38:29 - Why Successful Women Date Mediocre Men
43:52 - The Reasons Behind Failed Marriages
50:39 - Exploring Relationships through Behavioral Economics
55:11 - The Art of Subtle Negotiation in Relationships
01:12:17 - The Role of Transactions in Relationships
01:15:34 - The Power of Instagram in Dating
01:18:27 - The Business Model of Orion Teraban
01:21:00 - The Vision for the Business
01:40:28 - The Definition of Love

Today’s newsletter is a 3-minute read. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover: 
-How to increase YouTube views
-Seven SEO strategies that always work
-What I learned from a ‘longevity summit’

7 SEO Strategies That Always Work

His Pokemon YouTube channel is blowing up faster than his main business
— and it started as a pandemic hobby with his kids.

Is Pokemon just a kid's game? Think again.
During the pandemic, Pat Flynn started a YouTube channel called Deep Pocket Monster "just for fun" with his kids. Fast forward to today, it has 800k subscribers and is actually more profitable than his established business.

Here’s why Pokemon beats his business:

Cross-Generational Appeal
Deep Pocket Monster thrives across generations, fostering a strong community feel. It's pure entertainment, a stark contrast to the ceilinged audience of his main business.

Building Community Through Events
He hosts exclusive events for his viewers, fostering a sense of camaraderie some have likened to summer camp. While expensive to run, these events create a powerful connection that fuels growth.

A Team of 2
Deep Pocket Monster thrives with a lean team, offering higher profit margins compared to his established business.

Of course, the Pokemon industry goes up and down but he’s just here to ride the waves. By focusing on niche content creation, he has built a loyal following that goes beyond trends.

Even a "casual" channel can become wildly popular and profitable if it taps into a passionate community.

Watch the full video here: https://lnkd.in/gSTwbaMH 

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction and deep pocket monster
02:22 - Card party events
03:49 - The fallacy of view chasing
06:28 - Creating a community experience
09:31 - Growing the event and world records
13:04 - The cost and value of events
21:35 - The power of long-form content
25:56 - Gamifying the content experience
33:59 - Building a story bank
38:38 - The dangers of comparison and self-reflection
41:24 - Overcoming scarcity mindset and taking risks
45:16 - The success of the SwitchPod
51:56 - The power of mastermind groups
56:02 - Balancing time and priorities
58:25 - Transitioning to community-powered courses
1:04:00 - The benefits of community and recurring revenue
1:13:46 - Driving webinar attendance through YouTube
1:17:57 - The evolution of sharing income reports
1:19:21 - Transitioning from income reports to case studies
1:20:12 - The shift to a case study-based approach
1:21:38 - Generating revenue from books and courses
1:24:58 - The acquisition of Winning Edits
1:26:53 - Creating partnerships and building a community
1:27:21 - Equity and partnerships in business
1:29:12 - The concept of Commander's Intent
1:30:09 - Finding the balance between micromanaging and trust
1:31:06 - Considering a rebrand for Smart Passive Income
1:34:53 - The power of affiliate marketing
1:35:42 - The importance of aligning affiliate products with audience goals
1:37:37 - The value of advisors and partnerships
1:38:36 - The importance of selectivity in speaking engagements
1:39:37 - Parenting as an entrepreneur
1:51:52 - Staying patient and focusing on the long game

Welcome to Leveling Up. Today’s newsletter is a 4-minute read. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover: 
-ChatGPT’s huge new update
-How a business went from $8M to $0
-Google teases a paywall for a new search engine
-And how to measure the ROI of short-form videos

From $8M to ZERO Overnight Because of One Simple Mistake

Welcome to Leveling Up. Today’s newsletter is a 4-minute read. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover: 

-How to get the most out of a ChatGPT ideas prompt
-Why content is still king
-AI being added to agency contracts 
-How MrBeast stays winning

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