How the Lex Fridman podcast increased this guy's revenue By 93%, AI will saturate educational content. Here's what to do, Does SEMrush's employee advocacy program drive business?, 50 German companies are piloting the 4-day work week, and more

0:29So there's this post over here from Levels. numbers over here look it's it's all it's all green right pretty impressive so his numbers just went through the roof yeah just by being on the lex friedman podcast it was a three-hour podcast and he talks about like what was the revenue um the difference was 30 something to 50 uh 36 000 to 52 and i think this is for one of his sites that's yeah pretty good and he has like a lot of different websites so good for him yeah so i think that's i mean like there is in fact an ROI here, especially if it's a very highly listened podcast. And his episode was just about how to make money online, basically.

1:04And a lot of his websites are like, Nomad List is about finding a great place to work remotely, right? Or he has job boards to hire people. So it all adds up. It connects. So Kieran Flanagan, I think he's SVP of HubSpot. So he says this, he says, AI will saturate educational content. Marketers will need to invest in personality-driven content. how you do this. I believe many B2B brands will heavily invest in personality-led content over the next two to three years and work with creators to do it. So I'm not going to read everything here, but three main points here. Number one, hire in-house influencers.

1:40Okay. Number two, launch a creator program. Number three, do drops with creators. We're kind of talking about this stuff over here. So we might as well continue the conversation. Dude, I'm with you. And then the other problem is, is not just AI will saturate the educational content. AI is also saturating marketing in the way that everyone is using AI in their marketing. And we don't see it doing crap for conversions anymore while it used to before. By the way, this is why we're doing this in person. Cause it's like, this is us it's raw thinking and it does well. And then the thing is I've been using that overlap tool more and more.

2:12I'm just like, dude, my posts are performing way better on X threads and LinkedIn. It's great. What does the overlap tool do? Just go type and join overlap.com. It's free. What it does is let's say we take this podcast episode, it'll find the right moments and chop it up. It's kind of like Opus, right? But it actually finds great moments and they're probably like three to five minute clips. And so now, because we talk about a lot of different things, a lot of it gets lost in translation, right? And we've been doing it now and yeah, the reach is like 10 to 20x more and I think we can get it even higher.

2:43So that's something that's worth having your team do as well. Try Join Overlap.com. Yep, yep. But I like some of these ideas. So hire in-house influencers. So can you find emerging talent with authentic personalities? We talked about the best marketing campaign ever or something. I think that's her Instagram name. And she did a good job of promoting that drink. Remember, she like Gary Vee came in and stomped on the can. Yeah, where she said, I bet you I can get more followers than my boss. Just crushing cans. It's that gal. Yeah. And so like, how can you hire more people like that with talent?

3:17Maybe they're coming out of college and then, you know, maybe they get a starting salary. and if they do better, maybe there's some other incentive tied to it, but they can ramp with you. You know what I mean? I'm curious to see how much that really boomed their sales out of everything, right? Because their follower count grew really quickly. I have no idea. Yeah. But I do believe she's a star. You know what I mean? Yeah. Funny enough, can we talk about that podcast, Brad, that you're doing? Like next week? I don't know. Okay, okay. We'll wait, we'll wait, we'll wait. Okay. But launching a creator program, too.

3:51So set up a program to create partnerships with the best creators in your space. Create incentives to share in the upside of their channel exclusively on custom content, ad spots, editorial collaboration, but they own the channel. Have creators. So it's kind of like a, it's almost like a partnership affiliate model type of deal. Yeah. Yeah. And then do drops with creators to include creators in your campaigns when doing feature content drops. Give them exclusive data points, imagery, short form vids. So, you know, I think SEMrush and Ahrefs are doing a decent job at some of these. and then speaking of SEMrush they have this this program this employee advocacy program so I'm going to open this over here and on a side note, congratulations to Brian Dean for selling his second company to SEMrush.

4:34Do I have that in there? Or do you have that in there? I don't know but I just saw it on X the other day. He sold exploding topics He sold two companies to SEMrush. Yeah, good for him One was Backlinko, the other one was Exploding Topics So Olga, the VP of Brand Marketing at SEMrush says, we got 9 million additional impressions with employee advocacy this year. And that's only posts about SEMrush. Last year, we had 2.8 million for the same period, which is freaking strong. Impressions is a weak metric, absolutely. But this is surround sound and it's necessary now. And so it just shows some of these posts over here.

5:04So you can see like Victoria, she's like writing something about engagement and then she gets like 1 ,600 likes. And then this one over here has 500 or so. A lot of their team is actively posting on LinkedIn. I haven't seen this work really well for a lot of companies. Have you? They got 9 million impressions. The question is, should people be doing this? I think if you're a publicly traded company and you have some resources, you can give this a shot. But I think for the majority of companies, you're probably better off putting your time elsewhere. yeah and uh speaking of summer i was looking at their stock yeah they've been doing a good job and they're showing profitability and they've been growing nicely good for them yeah what's their stock at now uh it's around two billion dollar market cap and 13.8 the last time i was checking them they were like at eight or nine dollars so i gotta take a minute to tell you about the agency owners association this is a peer group for agency owners think ypo or eo but for agency owners.

6:07And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency.

6:38This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. There's 50 German companies right now that are piloting the four-day workweek. So I have a screenshot over here. So it says, I think it's from Wall Street Journal. I took a screenshot. So meanwhile, in Germany, 50 companies are piloting a four-day workweek for the study by University of Münster, aiming to determine whether less work and full pay might be appealing to workers.

7:07The EU expects the Greek economy to grow by 2.2 % this year, while the German economy hasn't grown since 2019. The crisis taught Greeks that success comes from hard work, said Alex, Greek last name, a former securities trader from Greek name, who now runs Apollo, a popular Greek fast food restaurant with two locations in Berlin. He says,

7:40So basically, Greece was kind of in trouble financially a while back. It spurred a lot of the Bitcoin boom back in the day. Now they're growing. It's because the hard work is back. Now Germany, in this case, they're trying to say, hey, four-day workweek. We talked about this four-day workweek thing. I think it's good for people, but I think it's bad for companies. Ultimately, companies help drive jobs. They help drive the economy. We've seen this experiment a couple of times. Some European companies have said this has been good, but this is showing maybe not so much. What people also have to remember is what's bad for companies.

8:21Let's say if they implement a four-day workweek, Of course, people are going to be happy because they work less. But if the company starts struggling and people are happy with a four-day workweek, what happens to people? People start getting fired. I told you I worked a four-day workweek at that company, right? And guess who had to pick up the slack? You did. I worked seven days a week after that. And what happened to the company? The company grew. I mean, I'm not just saying it was just me. Oh, the company's gone. Yeah. Yeah. The company was sold for pennies on the dollar. And what eventually happened there was, here's the biggest problem.

8:50You go four-day workweek, you cannot roll that back. Because the moment he rolled that back, everyone got pissed. Everyone got pissed, right? And so there are certain things where you open a genie and you can't just put the genie back in the bottle. No, I would not do a four-day work week if you look at a lot of European values, depending on the country like France, Italy, a lot of them just take a ton of time off each and every single year. And if that works for your company, great, do it. I think in the United States, you have a ton of innovation. the reason you have a ton of innovation is people work a lot of hours whether we like it or not and if you look at china you're getting a lot of innovative companies a lot of people in china don't know about five-day work weeks to them a normal work week is six days and you'll get one day nine nine six nine a.m to nine p.m six days a week and you look at the kids the kids are insane now.

9:46I told you, right? Yeah. But when I look at productivity, if you can be productive, if you love what you're doing and you can put in the hours, you're more likely to succeed. If you're not willing to, you're just going to breed mediocrity. And we get it. That's a big caveat, right? It's hard to find something that you like to do, but you have to keep finding it. Otherwise you're going to be miserable for the rest of your life. And I do believe it's possible for everyone to find what they like. And by the way, when I say insane. I just mean in China, the kids at age five or six, they know about AI, they know about STEM and they're pushing and that's, you're never done with classes.

10:19Even when summertime comes, you're going to go to more classes and then you're, Oh, you're done with school. Oh, you're going to go to afterschool tutor. It never ends. Yeah, dude, I totally agree with you. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP digital, so Neil Patel digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode.

10:52There's another one here on the rise of women's sports, which is unlocked unexpected marketing opportunities. So did you see this one on Wall Street Journal? No. Is it because of a WNBA player? Yeah. Some of it's about Caitlin Clark, but what's interesting is that there's a lot more reach happening for WNBA and women's sports now in general because people are interested, right? And finally, like it took a WNB like a long time to get the reach. I'm glad that WNB is getting the reach now. So it says here, makeup brands, hair care startups, and fertility clinics historically haven't been associated with sports.

11:21Now they're taking over game nights as a draw of the elite women's players, teams, and leagues attracts new kinds of sponsors. So there's new kinds of sponsors now. And what was maybe like a 10 grand or 20 grand sponsor now, it's costing a lot more because there's a lot more reach now, right? And so, you know, again, these are fertility clinics. Usually they're not sponsoring much, right? But the fact that they're sponsoring sports now, that's kind of cool. And I will say this, women's elite sports will generate around$1.3 billion in revenue globally in 2024, up from$981 million in 2023 and$692 million in 2022.

11:56By way of comparison, the NBA team sponsorship revenue alone was estimated to be worth about 1.5 billion for 2023. So it's still a ways off, but it's on its way. That's great. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year.

12:36You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this black Friday one to remember. I watch a lot of women's sports. I technically don't watch that much in sports period, but things like tennis, I watched men's tennis and women's tennis is awesome.

13:15Yeah. Seeing like the Williams sisters when they were playing, like it was amazing to watch to Caitlin Clark's team. So she's, um, the star for the New York Liberty. Actually, no, I don't think she played for Liberty. I think she played for somebody. I don't know. But anyway, the New York Liberty, at least, because they're actually a top team, I believe. I think they did this wrong here. But the Liberty this season had 47 sponsors, up from 31 last season, and 17 in 2022. So it's a good growth rate. I mean, that's almost 3x. Is she the number one ranked WNBA player? Clark's obviously rookie of the year, but she's not number one ranked.

13:51but like she'll i think she'll be up there she's a rookie yeah yeah i knew she was a rookie i just didn't know if she was like the best no no i mean she didn't get to play on team usa that's a whole other thing though oh that sucks why didn't they let her play on team usa they didn't let um the person she competed with at lsu um both of them didn't make it but what's interesting is um they played the wmba sorry there's caitlin clark and then the other gal they played the olympic team in a tune-up and they beat the Olympic team before they went to Paris. They should just put him on the team. Yeah, but there's a whole uproar about it.

14:28But yeah. You see the Steph Curry social media change? No. He removed Golden State from his social media or Warriors from it and then he put the Olympics up. Yeah. And then the rumor is now he's going to the Lakers. Oh, that'd be awesome. When did you see that? Was it today, yesterday, something like that? Yeah. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency to join the Agency Accelerator. Agency Owners Association. All right. Talk to you later. Bye.