Why Now is the Time to be BOLD with Neil Patel

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Imperfect Action. Today, we'll be breaking down why now is the time to be bold. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Neil Patel into EO Fire Studios. Neil is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web. Forbes said he is one of the top 10 marketers and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. And today, Fire Nation will talk about what's working in social media, what's working in SEO, how AI is changing the world of search, and so much more.

0:44And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Neil and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy, and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode all about how Liquid IV is using marketing to shake up the beverage world, dives deep into the strategies that have propelled Liquid IV to remarkable success, a must listen. Listen to Marketing Makes Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

1:13Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Neil, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, everyone. Thanks for having me. Most people look at success as being financially well off. And I don't think that is true.

1:54I think that's far from it being true. And if you hit that goal, which a lot of your listeners have and they've done really well, over time you realize there's more to life than success. Success is doing well financially. It's doing well in your family relationship. It's doing well with your health and not being overweight. There's nothing wrong with

2:18having a few extra pounds and not having a six pack. But if you're 100 pounds overweight, you're going to have health issues. And what you'll find out and that I've seen firsthand, because over the years, I've done somewhat well, but I've met people who have done much better than me and they're miserable in life. And just making a lot of money doesn't mean you're successful. Fire Nation, these are wise words. And as I was chatting with Neil about pre-interview, we actually got to hang out IRL in real life in Boston in September. So I've seen him pretty recently and I can tell you, this guy is looking good.

2:53He is lean, he is a machine, he is making things happen. And man, when you were talking about that, Neil, it was bringing me back to 2014. I'm in San Diego, California. I'm in the third year of a seven-figure year of my business. So the money's rolling in. Finances are great. Net profit is super high. And I wasn't that healthy. I was definitely packing on a few extra pounds. I was definitely sitting behind a computer too much, not eating as well as I could. definitely not exercising to the level that I should be. And I was in my mid-30s, so I kind of thought I could still get away with it. But the reality was you can't get away with the Fire Nation.

3:34And I spent now the last, what is that, nine, almost 10 years now completely dedicating myself to having optimal health and wellness for the very reasons that Neil is talking about. I love this quote that's so important. The healthy person wants a thousand things. And that's exciting. You want a thousand things. You can do a thousand things. The unhealthy person wants one thing and that's to be healthy. And you don't want to be in that situation. So today, Farnation, we're talking about why now? Literally now is the time to be bold. And Neil, let's be honest, social media, it's in a little bit of a flux right now.

4:12I mean, it always seems to be, but AI seems to be a little bit of a disruptor. We'll be talking a little bit more about that in search later on in our conversation, but specifically for social media, what is working today? Sure. So funny enough, I have tons of stats and data that I've posted about of social media, what's working on Twitter. And there's a few things that people really get wrong with social. So we analyze 6 ,302 ,491 posts on social media to see what's creating the most engagement. And when you look at engagement, 31.38 % of the engagement is coming from short form videos, 15.51 % from long form videos, 13.84 % from interviews, podcasts, and expert talks.

5:02When you actually combine those three buckets, which are the largest bucket, because you could just do an interview like you and I are, record the video, do an expert talk. It also covers a long form video. It also covers short form videos because you can clip things up. that's what's getting the most engagement. Live video only gets 12.37%, and this is from recent, right? This is the last 30 days. Memes are at 10.31. User generated content is 10.12%, other was 6.47. Included in the other bucket was text-based content. And when you look at text-based content, majority of it that's getting the engagement is how-to stuff and list-based articles.

5:49It was those two that are really driving majority of the engagement. And what's even more funny is when we're looking at social media, most people think like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, these networks are the best. When we're looking at what social networks are providing the highest ROI from a return on ad spend, You know, it's not the networks that we're thinking. Twitter actually is producing the best result or X, whatever you want to call it. And the main reason being is a lot of advertisers are pulling out. LinkedIn is very expensive because of people advertising job-related stuff as well.

6:31But there's other networks like Snap and Pinterest that provide a good ROI. And from the organics reach perspective, the ones that produce the best results, Number one was LinkedIn. It produces the most engagement. Then Instagram, then X, then YouTube, then Pinterest, then TikTok, and last but not least, Facebook. Now, I just feel like there's a cycle when it comes to social media. Sometimes things are just on fire. For a while, the rage was TikTok. And then Instagram had reels for a little bit, which was a little bit of thunder, but not a lot. Of course, there was Snapchat back in the day. And, you know, I feel like LinkedIn, like really, really way back, maybe a decade ago was hot, then it kind of got cool.

7:16And now it seems to be hot again. What can you talk about when it comes to the cycles of social media? Of course, some don't make it. They just kind of fade off into obscurity. But, you know, the ones that do, how do they cycle? The easiest way to look at cycling is every few months, just Google how many pieces of content or how many posts a day are published on LinkedIn or Facebook or X or whatnot. The networks where people are creating a lot of content, uploading videos, images, et cetera, making posts, those are the ones we are not going to do as well. The ones that aren't generating a lot of content from their users, like LinkedIn, they're struggling the most from all the networks that we're seeing.

7:57they give you the most love because they have the least amount of content. They don't have a choice. So look to see what's the social network of the month that everyone's talking about and posting on. That's typically the one that you're going to have the least results on because it's the most competitive. And it goes hand in hand directly. Fire Nation, we always talk about, are you just jumping into a saturated market? Are you just looking at what you think is successful right now or somebody who is successful right now and saying, you know what, I'm going to become a pale, weak imitation of that person.

8:29You're going to fail every single time. You want to be the individual, unique, special differentiator that you can be. And if you choose a platform, like, for instance, Neil's talking about LinkedIn, that's not specifically getting a ton of content, and you create a lot of content, guess what? You're going to get rewarded disproportionately. Think about these things. Now, we talked about social media. Let's flip to SEO. I know this is an area that you have really become an expert in for a long time now. So what's working in SEO today? It's actually backwards of what most people are thinking. So when we look at SEO right now, majority of the people who are creating content for SEO are using AI by far.

9:13When we look at the data of how many people are using AI, we served 1 ,051 marketers. 640 are creating content purely through AI. That means no human intervention. 282 are using AI in combination with the human. Only 129, right? So less than 15 % are actually creating content that's just human written, and no AI. But check this out, it gets even better. When we did a study or experiment to see what's ranking higher, AI content or human written content, 94.12 % of the time, human written content is outranking AI based content. So then we went a little further and we ran an experiment with 68 websites, we created 744 articles, and we took these websites and we published an equivalent amount of AI-written content along with human-written content.

10:14In the first month, AI content produced 28 visitors, right, on average per article, but the human-written content produced 71 visits. In month two, the AI articles on average produced 49 visits a month per article. This is just from search. The human-written content produced 155. Fast forward to month five, the human-written content was producing 283 visitors a month on average through SEO traffic per article. The AI-written content only 52. Now, you could make the argument that, oh, but you can crank out way more articles because it's easier to crank out AI-based content versus human-based content.

10:58When we looked at how much time was spent, on average, the human-written articles were taking 69 minutes. AI-written content was 16 minutes. And the reason it's 16 minutes versus 69 minutes, whether you have human or AI, you still got to post it to WordPress, click the publish button. Sometimes you got to adjust the formatting. And with AI, sometimes you got to adjust the – what is it called? You got to end up adjusting the content to make sure that it sounds right, it's accurate, because sometimes there's just things that are off. And even though it's quicker to write AI content in general, when we looked at how much traffic you're generating per minute of spent, with human-written content, it's 4.1 visitors per minute spent.

11:50With AI-written content, it's 3.25 visitors per minute spent. Fire Nation, this is why I love chatting with Neil. He is a person that dives deep into the data. He doesn't just have assumptions and then just get on a microphone and spout about those assumptions. He does the work. He studies the data. He looks at the analytics and then he makes decisions based off of that. And we have a lot more to talk about, including AI and search. When we get back from thanking our sponsors. Things change fast in the online business space. And when you have a team to manage and a business to run, it can be tough to keep up with all the latest and greatest marketing trends.

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13:05It's exactly what your team has been looking for. Visit hubspot.com slash state of marketing to get your free copy of the 2024 state of marketing report for all the trends shaping marketing this year. I recently bought Taylor Swift tickets from my niece for a show happening months from now, but I knew I had to act fast or else it would sell out. When you want the best, you have to act quickly or someone else will get it instead. It's like if you're hiring for your business, you want to find the most talented people for your open roles before the competition scoops them up. So what's the best way to do that?

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14:12Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash fire. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Do you have a message inside that you know is meant to be shared with the world? Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world, and Thought Leader can help you get there. Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDx talks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest.

14:45You might be thinking a TEDx talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Fire Nation, we are back and Neil is now going to be diving into search because let's be honest, for a couple decades at least, Google seemed to have perfect search.

15:28They dominated. But now you believe, Neil, that AI is going to change the way of search. Tell us more. Yeah, so the way I believe AI is going to change search is, first, I talked to a Google engineer. And when I asked this engineer, what's going to happen with AI, SGE, whatever terms you want to end up using? And the first response that they told me is like, hey, we don't know what's going to happen. It's a long-term result. And we really don't know because we're going to have to measure how users interact as we adjust these things. I was like, all right, great. But there are a few things that we discussed.

16:07We're like, is Google going to try to answer all questions? And the first thing they said was, no, we want to help guide. We don't want to answer. Because if you look at what AI does is AI is using what it finds on the internet. And it uses that data to come up with answers. If you, anytime you do a search, you know that you're going to get misinformation, right? And search engines have tried to solve this problem for over 10 years. It's not an easy problem to solve and they haven't solved it. And I'll give you extreme case on this. And I'm not trying to make one case or another. I'm not trying to get political, but let's talk about the vaccine for a little bit.

16:47The COVID vaccine specifically. Do you still need it? Do you not? Was it good or bad? We have articles on both sides. How do you really know when something's that new and there's not a ton of data? There's also a lot of articles on the web that say it's amazing for you. You need to take it. There's a lot of articles that saying you shouldn't take it. It's so bad for you. And there's people in both cases saying that they died on both ends, sadly, who took the vaccine and who didn't take the vaccine. And then when you look at the data currently, at least based on CNBC and Bloomberg, because I watch those channels all the time, Pfizer, Moderna, all these vaccine producers have a ton of vaccines because a lot of people aren't going for boosters anymore, right?

17:30Like you go ask the person next to you anytime if they're taking a booster vaccine, the chances are no one's taking them anymore, right? Or very few people are. So how does a search engine decide what is accurate and what isn't accurate? Because there's a lot of different opinions and there's a lot of data on both ends. They can't just answer questions. They can guide you. They don't want to give you misinformation. They don't want to do anything that can harm your health. It doesn't matter where someone stands politically. No one wants to see someone else die, right? We're all humans at the end of the day.

18:06And again, that's a really extreme example, but it just goes to show how hard their job is to use AI to just answer questions. And if the question is, what's two plus two, that's easy. They already answer it. But they're trying to do more of that guiding with AI to give you more insights. And we're also seeing a pattern of people typing in longer queries into search engines, pretty much asking a question and expecting an answer. See, that's really interesting, Fire Nation. and that actually shifted my mindset a little bit about search because I would always say, hey, I have a question. I'm going to go to search and I'm going to get the answer.

18:43And in fact, I mean, Google's gotten really good when you enter a search, it actually typically comes up. You don't have to click on any article because it just gives you that little shadow box of like what typically hold your answer. Like what's the capital of Nigeria? And boom, it'll be there. So you're not like clicking into a post anymore. You have to like skim and read for that answer. and now what Neil's talking about is really interesting to me of like especially on the more complex questions where there's maybe no 100 % right answer because there's two sides of the equation there's so many different opinions etc etc a lot of factors can be factored in it can guide you it will just say hey this is what some people are saying this is what some other people are saying this is what the data that we're receiving is like you take it from here individual and make an individual decision based on your specific situation.

19:32Now, I kind of do wonder, Neil, at some point, you know, if we get real specific with these search engines where the search engine knows, hey, John is a 44-year-old male who lives in Puerto Rico who has a three-month-old son and a 40-year-old wife and has like, you know, these background as far as like health issues or these, you know, whatever it might be. I have no idea. But like inputting a bunch of things. So then maybe it kind of guides us even more into what it can assume that we're looking for when we search for something that again, might be a little more black and white. But again, that's just kind of rambling and going down the weeds.

20:11It's really interesting to see what will come. But I want to end Neil with a bang. And that's just facing reality. We are in the midst of a pretty tough economy and it could get worse. It might not. It could get worse. It might get better. We don't know. But there are still some companies who are being successful right now who are still successfully growing. Talk to us about how they're doing that. They're looking at what is causing growth and they're looking at the data. So I'll give you a prime example for this. We're in a tough economy in the UK. UK is now in a recession. We're in a tough economy in Japan.

20:49They've now also said they're in a recession. The US, whether they say it's in a recession or not, a lot of people are losing jobs. We have inflation issues. Did you know India is booming right now on the flip side? And our company is based in, I think, 19 different countries. India is our fastest growing market by far. They're not having any of these issues. It's booming. I can double each year just in India alone. The point I'm getting across is most of the people who I know that are doing well in this economy, they're looking for opportunities. So for example, you may be able to expand to multiple countries or if you're selling in the United States and you're selling a physical product.

21:29Well, if you have demand in Canada, start marketing in Canada. You already have the operations, you already have the headcount, you already have the product to ship it over there, right? There's other ways to make money and cause growth to make up for the losses. And we're seeing people get really creative. The ones that are growing the most in this economy are expanding more internationally. They're using things like ChatGPT and OpenAI to transcribe their content into other languages so they can get more SEO traffic in all these other regions. They're translating their ads using these AI tools so that way they can sell in more regions.

22:03They're putting their products and services in more regions. If you're selling e-books or digital courses, you can use things like MyGen, which can translate your videos and dub it so it sounds like you're talking in different languages. And you can now sell your courses in German, in French, in Italian, or any language that you can imagine. And you can do these things with the click of a button, and it gives you more opportunity to run Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever it may be and generate more revenue with the same resources that you've already created. and it doesn't cost much to expand them into other regions and languages.

22:40Fire Nation, there is so much to think about and digest here. And again, just another reason why being diversified, even geographically and demographically, can be so important for the success and sustainability of your business. So Neil, we talked about some awesome stuff today, social media, SEO, AI search. What is the one key takeaway you want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation today. Right now we're seeing too many people who are entrepreneurs and marketers overestimate AI and believe it's a magic wand and they can wave it and it can do anything. But on the flip side, we're seeing a lot of people underestimate what AI can do for them five plus years from now.

23:25Does it mean that AI is useless? No, it's very useful. But don't think it can just solve all your problems perfectly because you're not going going to get the quality and the results that you're expecting. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't use it because it's improving so fast. Two, three years from now, it's going to be a totally different game. Neil, Fire Nation wants to learn more from you, wants to connect with you. What is your call to action for our listeners today? Check out my blog, neilpatel.com, or my social handles are neilpatel, or my ad agency, NP Digital. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

23:58You've been hanging out with NP and JLD today. So keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Neil, N-E-I-L, in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Neil, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Neil for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals, huge goals. That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days.

24:32And we're talking step-by-step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode all about how Liquid IV is using marketing to shake up the beverage world, dives deep into the strategies that have propelled Liquid IV to remarkable success, a must listen. Listen to Marketing Makes Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

25:03Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.