Neil Patel & Eric Siu's Holiday Productivity Tips

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about what Eric and Neil are doing for the holidays or did for the holidays. I mean, we're still in the midst of the holidays right now. And it's funny because we just talked to Brad from recordeditpodcast.com about how the holidays are a challenge sometimes. So let me go first. I was just, you know, Jordan Peterson, right? No. Okay. He's the guy that wears a suit, talks philosophy all the time. But he said the mark of a successful man is if you drop him in the middle of a forest, he can't help himself but to take out an axe, start chopping trees. Right. Right.

0:34And that is like me right now. I try to relax. I try to sit around and do nothing. I can't do it. Right. I just like read a book. Okay. No, that's not enough. I have to actually be doing stuff. Right. So we, you, your company, my company, we both give this week off. We're off until the second. So basically Christmas week is off and then we're off to the second. Right. And so I think we should take this time to talk about how we're spending that time and how we're being productive with that time. Because I think for you and I, and even Brad here too, we can't stop thinking about work. It is hard.

1:06For me, my biggest struggle has been I have very few people to talk to on a daily basis, more so to bug. How are the sales numbers? What are we going to end the year at? What's our pipe looking like for January? It's just like, all right, I need to give people their time and their space. I have increased my texting to those people because I'm not trying to bug them on the phone. That's still bugging them. Yeah, not as bad. They can text when they want. The good thing about Neil is he will keep doing it right. I schedule my messages to hit. I even take into account what time zone they're in and everything.

1:39And I'm like, okay, I should send this one on the second. I should send the next one on the third. But Neil is just like, let's do it. And I actually think that's probably the better way to do it. I keep into account the time zone. But I have people at all times. You can schedule the message, right? Send later with iMessage. You know that? I did not know that. See, I just saved your life. No, but I don't want to schedule it later. I want to sass right now. And you know, WhatsApp, iMessage. if they don't want to be disturbed, they can put it on do not disturb and answer it later on. And then I'll go check back and be like, I sent the text.

2:09Are they still on do not disturb? So you're constantly thinking about work. You're not calling like you would normally call. You're changing it to text. What else are you doing? Random dinners and lunches. I did a lunch meeting yesterday. I put air quotes in meeting because they're not really meetings. I met up with one of my buddies, Yaron. He owns a breakfast joint called Fortelli's. He has two locations. Why does that sound familiar? He's thinking about franchising. And I was like, oh, that's a pretty good idea. Really amazing breakfast. Is that nearby? On Melrose. And then there's one in Marina del Rey.

2:43Dude, their Uber Eats always has buy one breakfast burrito, get one for free, which I love. Oh, very good. And then I also, I did a dinner meeting. Met up with Dan Fleshman, Albert, and you know AJ as well. I don't think you know Albert. But yeah. And then today I'm doing this. Yeah. This counts as a meeting. Yeah. This counts as a meeting. Yeah. And then I'll take the kids to Century City. Oh, the mall? Yeah. I might go there after this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll take them to Century City. I was telling my kid, I was like, dad needs a pair of white shoes. Because my favorite white shoe brand is actually Common Projects.

3:24Yeah. They don't make half size. So they always hurt my feet. Uh-huh. So then I was like, okay, Kohan has very similar looking shoes, half the cost. They're usually comfortable because Kohan is Nike. Probably won't look as good. Don't really care. I'm just not willing to have my feet hurt when I walk. I don't care how bad something will look. Yeah. So, okay. I mean, for me, okay, I mentioned earlier, like I'm reading a couple books right now. I was telling, do you use your nose to breathe or your mouth to breathe? My nose? Okay. So there's a book called Breath that I'm reading right now. It's mind-blowing, right?

3:56So I'm just reading a couple of books right now. There's another one on Napoleon. Because basically how he conquers, how he thinks about business, how he thinks about dating, how he thinks about all these things. So I'm reading that book. So I'm just reading a couple of books simultaneously right now. And then I'm watching a lot of videos on YouTube. And we're spending time making content as well. But I think more than anything, I'm spending time planning for the next year. And so I'll just sit and think about, okay, what's a bottleneck, right? A big problem with me, this problem with you too probably.

4:24I have a lot of ideas. You have a lot of ideas too, right? And so I'm like, okay, but the problem with these ideas is I push a lot of these ideas through, but you can't do all the ideas, right? And I'm just like, okay, so what can we do to stop this madness from happening? That's largely coming from me, right? And so I'll think about things like that. Like what are the bottlenecks that are holding us back right now? What's stopping us from reaching? Like what are all the things we need to do to fail? And this is a Charlie Munger exercise. He talks about invert, always invert. And by the way, I finished reading this book called Worldly Wisdom.

4:53I paid$83 for it. it's a Charlie Munger book. It's only 80 pages or so. But in that book, he talks about how, and just in life in general, you should always think about not how you would succeed, but how you would fail, right? So let's say we have revenue targets for next year. Okay, what do I need to do to absolutely fail at doing this? And I list everything, right? So it's a lot of strategic thinking. Go back. You have revenue targets. What do you have to do to fail to hit the number? What do I need to do to completely fail at meeting these metrics? Got it. Okay. Right. So it's instead of saying, what are all the things I need to do to be successful?

5:28What are just all the things I need to do to fail? And then I'll just avoid those things. And when you mean by fail, are you talking about mistakes? You're talking about like, if I don't do marketing, I won't get enough leads. Like it's basically, what do I need to do to miss the numbers next year? That's all it is. And he does this exercise all the time. It's way easier to think about what I need to avoid and I just won't go there. And so it's, it's things like it's, it's so like, that's one example, but there's a lot of other examples because we're just sitting with our thoughts the whole time.

5:53And like I mentioned earlier, like, again, if you're dropped into a forest, all you can't, you're just going to pick up an ax and start chopping. Right. So we just kind of changed the type of tree that we're chopping during the break. That's all. Got it. Yep. So I got, I mean, that was a good topic from you. Let's, let's go over to that. You have a classic over here. So we're going to go over from the holidays. We're going to start with some classics and then we're going to go into some newer stuff. So you have this one over here on if affiliate marketing is dead. And I think it's an interesting one because I have a story to share because I just met with someone yesterday in the affiliate space.

6:27So you go ahead. I know a lot of companies that are still making money through affiliate marketing, like Red Ventures, right? And it's a version of affiliate marketing. In essence, it's a better version. And there's a lot of companies still doing really well. there's a lot of companies like Forbes that aren't doing as well. And what we're seeing is the companies who are doing affiliate marketing and they're just purely relying on SEO traffic, they're not doing well. The companies who have built a brand, call it like the nerd wallets, they've done extremely well and they've shifted their model from straight up just affiliate marketing to a lot of direct deals.

7:08And you've seen businesses like them do well. You may say, hey, well, NerdWallet's stock is not crushing it. It's not going up and to the right really fast or anything like that. But generally speaking, it's a solid business that's printing cash. Yeah. So it's interesting. I actually interviewed someone on Monday, even though we have this week off. I still snuck in a couple of interviews, but this is for a job interview. And I was talking to this guy and he actually used to work for Red Ventures. And a handful of people that used to work at Red Ventures now works for his company that he's at now.

7:39Here's the thing. They just laid off 60 % of their staff. They basically copied the Red Ventures model and they laid off 60 % of their staff. This guy was one of the cuts and he was a GM. He basically, you know, we talk about parasite SEO, which is where you leverage someone's domain authority, like a Forbes and you make like a Forbes advisor, right? He was doing that for a couple of other companies. But the problem is they all got hit. And basically the board was like, hey, we don't think there's much of a business here anymore and we don't want to wait to find out. So we're going to lay off a bunch of people.

8:08So that's what happened, right? And then yesterday, we talked to our GM that's running the agency owners association, Greg, and he was talking to an affiliate. I'm like, I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, man, because typically affiliates are very short-sighted and they just look at money, which is fine. That's what they're optimized for. And lo and behold, the deal that he was putting together fell apart completely because this affiliate wasn't reliable. So there's two things, right? One, I think Parasite SEO, as we know it, might be on a downward trend. But I think the way you're saying, if you adapt, affiliate marketing is okay.

8:39You have to adapt. We agree on that. Yes. You got to build a brand like a NerdWallet, a Bankray, a Sina, any of those. It may not be as big of a cash cow as it once could have been, but there's still a solid business there and you can still make millions of dollars. And these guys are real businesses because one of our former clients, Fundera, they were bought by NerdWallet. And our point of contact there is now the CEO of NerdWallet, right? And so they're playing business. They're buying other businesses. They're looking at other, they're looking at going direct. Like you mentioned, you have to zig or it's not even zigging and zagging.

9:10It's more so you have to adapt with the times. The affiliates that I think are in trouble are the ones that don't adapt, that are still, that still continue to be short-sighted, that are so money hungry that they won't go the extra mile and just be reliable. Cause a lot of affiliates I know are pretty unreliable people and that's just how it is, which is why like we've played in affiliate space before, but we didn't stay very long. Yeah, the most common thing that Eric and I see with affiliates is they want to work really hard for a few days a week and then chill. And then once they're making the money, they want to chill, travel, have fun.

9:40Move to Asia, right? Nothing wrong with moving to Asia, but it's like it's a different mindset. Or Puerto Rico. We see a lot of affiliates focusing on Puerto Rico. They want to chill and it's cool, but you're not wired that way and I'm not wired that way. No, but also when you look at why they moved to Puerto Rico, they are like, oh yeah, no taxes. You save money or very little taxes. and instead of thinking about tax savings, they don't really think about growing the net worth and increasing the revenue of their business. They try to just optimize on the savings end instead of focusing on how to double down and create a much bigger business.

10:11It's better to just grow. And plus, at the same time, if you're saving the money but you're miserable, then it's not worth doing it. No. Now, that being said, we have friends that live in Puerto Rico that love it there. Remember, I almost moved there. Yeah, you almost moved there. Yeah, and then I had all my stuff moving there already. It was in the process of getting moved there. Wait, you already were. You rented a place too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had signed the lease and then I backed out. I basically gave up like three months of rent. I just said, just take it. But I redirected all that stuff to Miami.

10:35And then I lived in Miami for two years. And so why did you decide to bail on Puerto Rico? I'm assuming you were trying to move it for tax purposes. Yeah, because I realized I didn't think, however much money I saved, it's not worth my happiness at the end of the day. And I think it's worth considering moving to Puerto Rico if you're married. I'm not married, right? And by the way, it's not good for dating because there's a brain drain. All the people that live in Puerto Rico, a lot of them actually end up moving to the States. A lot of people actually move to Miami. So the point is, what we're both trying to say here is you have to consider all the trade-offs, right?

11:12And a little tax savings isn't worth it to sacrifice my happiness. Totally agree. And I also think Puerto Rico is a terrible place if you're married with kids because the education system is not going to be as good as the States. Yeah. I mean, you looked at it before too, very briefly, I think. No, I never really looked at Puerto Rico. Oh, people told me about it and I've talked to people, but I've never thought about, hey, what does it look like? Should I move there? Yeah. There's better ways to save on taxes. The easiest way to save on taxes is reinvest your money. And reinvesting could be hiring more people, which is expense, or it could just be buying corporations, which gives you depreciation, right?

11:50I think if you think more long-term, If you look at the biggest companies in the world, they're not built in places like Puerto Rico. I'm sorry, right? I'm not trying to talk crap on Puerto Rico. It's just, it's hard to build a large organization in one of those countries. And I'm not saying Eric and I have built large corporations either, but we're trying to. And you have a better shot of doing that where you can find amazing talent. Yeah. The ones that typically move there, by the way, it's like you have investors that live there. A lot of investors, whether they're Wall Street types or crypto types.

12:20Yes. And it's fine. again, like we're not poo-pooing on it. I think it's just, at least for me, I didn't, I didn't think I'd be happy there. So that's what it is. You have this one over here, 10 missed marketing opportunities to leverage in 2025. This one seems like it'll be juicy. Yeah, let's go over it. I'll come up with five. You know, I already have a lot of ideas and I know you do too. I don't, but you go first. All right. One of the missed opportunities that people and companies should leverage is transcribing their video content through tools like Hey Jen. So we do it for Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.

12:55We'll take my video content, the stuff that hits and we'll transcribe it. If you have team members in these regions, we then send them the content. We let them post it on their social channels because their followers are within that region. It doesn't get as much traction as me posting it from my profile, but over time we're seeing it drive brand awareness and leads. That's good. The next one I'm going to go with is live shopping. So it took a while for America to catch on, but China's been doing live shopping for a long time and it's worked really well. I think this past holiday break, we're seeing a lot more of it.

13:28You see it on Amazon as well. I think we're going to see a lot more of it. So it's time to start adapting. This is one of those things where it's like, if you wait too long, you're going to be behind. So you might as well start getting into it and looking at it now. Yeah. Number three, AI is really popular. but when you look at content marketing, people use AI in a really inefficient way. A more efficient way to do it is look at your website traffic and see what language you get majority of your traffic from. Chances are it's one language like English. If you optimize for all the other languages where you're getting visitors from, because you can see all the countries that are driving traffic, you can drastically increase your traffic by just using AI to translate and transcribe your content, have a human review it, use hreflang and then build links locally within that region and what you'll find is whatever language you're in currently over time if you do it right less than 30 percent of your traffic will be in your current language 70 plus percent will be from the expansion so in other words your traffic should start exploding this is number four we haven't done an episode like this in probably over a year um so i would say attribution is a big one right so when you think about B2B, for example, you might use a product like HockeyStack.

14:41So HockeyStack will show you how your different channels are influencing the other ones, right? So it shows you, I think they had a metric here where they said dark social actually affects 36 % of conversions. So they have a lot of that data, right? So you can use HockeyStack. Another one you can use is HAUS, H-A-U-S. That's more for e-commerce where you can call it mixed media modeling, that type of stuff, right? So I think attribution is a big one. I think a lot more people are going to start paying for these these products. So that will be number four. Number five, turning on YouTube ads. I'm not saying that YouTube ads will help you get more YouTube traffic, but when you look at your ads on YouTube, you can start seeing the CPMs.

15:21The content that creates higher CPMs usually means you're going after a better audience. It'll give you a direction on which videos are going after a better quality of consumers or buyers, whether you're B2B or B2C. And this will give you direction on what kind of videos to create more of and which ones to produce less of. Because if you're creating videos that are really popular, but they get really terrible CPMs, or even if they're not popular, they just get really terrible CPMs, you know that those people are gonna be harder to monetize. So you wanna create content that has much higher CPMs because that'll tell you that, hey, there's much more money to be made.

15:57Number six, this one's a quick one, but if you think about optimizing for large language models, so LLMO or GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, ChatGPT pulls its search results from Bing. Perplexity pulls it from Google. Interestingly enough, I don't know if you saw me post this to Instagram, but I was like, what's the best marketing podcast on Gemini? The marketing school, I chose our pictures on there, right? I asked Perplexity, marketing school. I asked Claude, marketing school. ChatGPT? ChatGPT, nowhere to be found. We used to be found, but it's marketing against the grain now. And so I have to wonder, I wonder if all the other LLMs are pulling from Google, and then you have ChatGPT pulling from Bing.

16:40But my point of saying this is that number six is to optimize for Bing. Because ChatGPT is, at least for right now, they had 50 % market shares in LLMs. Now it's down to 33%. Damn, that changed quickly. But they're still the big player. So when you're optimizing for search engines, don't forget about Bing for now. Yeah, that's true. a lot of people really do forget about optimizing for Bing. And if you look at ChatGPT, they are pulling heavily from Bing from everything that we see. By the way, Grok2 also lists marketing school as number one, guys. I love it. What are we on, number seven? Yeah.

17:15Number seven, most people send emails. And when they're sending transactional emails, they drive people to a landing page. You can use a tool called Zaymo. I believe it is Z-A-Y-M-O. Like Waymo. Uh-huh, Waymo, but with a Z. And what it allows you to do is it uses the AMP technology to showcase your products or services, whatever you're selling that people can buy online through the email, like literally in Gmail or Outlook. They can click a button. They can select the size. They can select the quantity. They can check out without going to your webpage and literally just buy right then and there within email.

17:52It boosts conversions from what we've seen. The deliverability from what we've tested isn't as good as just sending HTML emails, but the increase in conversions from the revenue makes up for the decrease in deliverability. Number eight, leverage first-party data if you can. First-party data, if you have a lot of data, for example, HockeyStack, they publish a lot of case studies around different attribution models or what tends to work. or you can also survey your audience too which I guess you can call that first party data too. Neil actually does a good job of this with his ex posts. The ones I've been reading mostly now, it's interesting stuff.

18:31What are the most profitable content channels, for example? How long does it take to be profitable there? I find that actually has utility and that might not get enough reach that you want. It might not go viral but at the end of the day you have the right people that are looking at it. Totally agree and that's what we're seeing with our content in which when we get really focused and share data that we have, it doesn't get as much engagement as me talking about how Starbucks is reducing their menu and people are going to be pissed off. But the charts really do get us from what we're seeing, brand awareness with our right type audience.

19:08And that caused me to go to number nine. I've been doing this a lot in 2024, more towards the latter half of 2024. We're doing this heavily in 2025. We've seen, if you look at my personal social media profile on Instagram, at least the last week or the last two weeks, and even if you go back a little bit, my images do better than my videos. And what we're finding on a lot of social channels, including like TikTok, they want people to push out more images, but they're not. Most people want to focus on videos, short form videos particularly. and we're seeing the social algorithms give you a lot of love if you publish images and i think that's a huge missed opportunity they're easier to create especially if you're using ai like my team will take all the data that we have that our tools spit out that our researchers do and have like chat gpt or one of these tools help us out with creating charts from the data or even dissecting the data and finding opportunities from it if it wasn't for ai we would not be able to crank out the amount of research pieces that we're doing on a weekly basis.

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22:48That helps you prioritize the projects that you want to run or the tests that you want to run. and it came up with a new model. I worked together on this. It's like, you know, impact, confidence, ease is great. And what I mean by that is you score an idea one through 10, 10 being highest on the impact you think will make, the confidence that you have in that idea, and the ease, right? But I'm like, something's missing there. I'm like, okay, we should add reach. So we added in reach. That's a multiplier, right? Reach is like, that's kind of common in marketing. But then we also added alignment because you might have one goal that you're trying to work towards.

23:22But the problem with marketing teams is everyone comes up with all these random ideas. But if you add an alignment plus reach multiplied by the other three added up, that's where you get a real score, right? And so, but I wouldn't have done that if I didn't have ChatGPG with it. I mean, it does good with making charts as well. It does good with, by the way, if I looked at a video from, I think it was Alex Ramosi video. Like it was the one where he was talking about social channels, but I forgot how he scored the channels, right? So I pulled up Notebook LM, the Google tool. I dumped in the link there and then literally it just gave me all the scores in like a span of like 20 seconds or so.