Signs we're actually in a recession, Effects of ChatGPT on Upwork jobs, The perfect webinar, and more

0:00So Neil. Yes. Do you think we're in a recession? in the united states specifically yes i don't know the economic classification of recession because i thought it was two negative quarters of gdp and i thought we already hit that but then they said that we're not in a recession and i'm not that smart so you know i don't know but i look at it as if the market sucks whether you want to call it a recession or not the economy just sucks okay neil gives a practical answer now let me give you let me give you a more um there's some some numbers over here. So right now, Japan has all-time high stock market, I believe, or they finally just crossed.

0:42Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're doing well now. And then also, stock market-wise, their unemployment level is pretty low. It's like 2 % or something like that. Right? And they're in a recession. Now look at Germany right now. Same deal. All-time high stock market, unemployment is low. Same thing in the UK. Germany announced a recession? And then their bank had issues too. Do you see the article in the bank? Deutsche Bank? Not Deutsche Bank. I forgot what one it was, but something about taking reserves or whatnot. I don't know the exact word. So the UK, same deal. All-time high stock market, unemployment low, in a recession.

1:17So has there been any other time in history where those three countries have been in recession and the US has not? I'm going to take a guess with no based on how you're asking the question. Exactly, exactly. But the other thing too is like the economists have been revising numbers. So they'll see all these numbers, right? And they'll go back months and revise the numbers. So two years could go by. Oh, by the way, 2023 was recession. So who knows what's going on right now, right? So recession is past looking too. They don't classify recession based on what's happening today. They classify recession, if I'm not mistaken, at least in the US, when they look at two quarters, that's six months worth of data in the past.

1:59I was looking at it too, by the way. Now that I'm like, oh, they can actually revise, they can just do whatever you want, right? But 2020, that was technically a recession. And then actually, in early 2022, there's two quarters of negative GDP too. They just don't really talk about it. and by the way do you remember back in the day i don't know who was in office at this time maybe obama yeah and this has nothing to do with politically but they ended up changing how they count unemployment if you're unemployed for a while and you stop trying to actively look for a job we don't consider you unemployed anymore yeah remember that change that was years basically you can foobar all the numbers just to make your you have to market yourself really well this all ties ties back to marketing at the end of the day.

2:41It's the story that you tell. And if you can adjust the numbers, then you can tell whatever story you want. Yeah. I believe the economy is bad. No matter what anyone says, I believe just the economy is terrible. For most countries, you look at places like India, they're booming. It's ridiculous. Did you see the announcement that Apple ended up making where it was on CNBC this morning? No. Apple now generates more sales in India than any European country. Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's crazy. Dude, speaking of jobs, there's a bar graph I'm looking at over here. The title of it says change in number of Upwork jobs since ChatGPT was released.

3:25So graphic design, up. Web design, up. Web development, up. Writing, down 30%. Social media marketing, down like 5 % or so. Video editing production, it's green. It's just gone up, right? Customer service, down 20%. Translation, down 20%. Accounting up, sales up, back-end development up, market research up. It is affecting content. Customer service is what it sounds like. Content, customer service, and translation is a big one too. Social media marketing. I don't really count social media marketing at 5%. That's not much of it. It's still going down. It's going down. Over what period? Tough to say.

4:07this is

4:12either way the content that chat GPT produces right now whether you have a paid version or free version or Gemini produces is not that great you know it's going to be really hard for someone to persuade me otherwise because all the data shows it's not that great and we run a lot of experiments with it again paid version of chat GPT free version Gemini it doesn't matter it's not bad and it's improved a lot and you're already seeing a reduction, just imagine once the AI is able to produce much higher quality content. And my example of a high quality piece of content would be like being able to write something that people are like, oh, wow, I haven't heard about that before.

4:57See it before. It's new. It's fresh. It's written really well. Doesn't have a ton of inaccuracies. It's long, it's detailed step-by-step includes videos, includes images, like full-blown production. And it'll get there. Look at Sora, right? That's all going to be help for content production. Look at what they can do with images. Like you start adding all this together. I think you're going to have an amazing tool to create content. Not yet, but you will within a few years. And when you combine that with already the job reduction, I'm curious to see what happens over time. There's actually a nice framework now because right now, whatever chat GPT or Gemini outputs, it's like, okay, right?

5:34The question is how, okay, whatever it outputs, how do you write something that's like 10 times better than that? So how do you skyscrap whatever the output is? And that's going to be something way better because whatever it is that they're outputting, they think that's the best result, right? The AI thinks it's the best result. So just do 10 times better than that. Easier said than done, but it makes a lot of sense. Cause like, for example, if I type, like tell me about George Washington or whatever, right? It'll just give me some generic answer. Just do 10 times better than that. So yes. And you can also ask the AI to keep making it more detailed and thorough.

6:03But what we found is when, even if you split up a piece of content part by part and you're having AI help you section by section, which is what Jasper originally did to get the content link that writers really wanted. The issue that you end up having is you get a, a lot of fluff, a lot of duplication, and you get a lot of, like it doesn't hit hard, right? In which it doesn't just get to the point, it doesn't have a lot of meat, it has a lot of filler and that's also fluff, but the points just don't hit hard. Like when you and I create a presentation for a conference that we're speaking at, we think about the storyline, what stats and data are we gonna show?

6:40We think about, hey, when the end is coming, how can you end with a big bang? Like those kinds of things matter when you're writing content as well. And it's hard for AI to produce that at least for right now. This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization as worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers.

7:13If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's single grain, grain like wheat. and we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Dude, you know who did a really good job? I have two paths I can go down right now, but we'll start with this one. I did a co-webinar with Nathan Latka's founder path yesterday. And how'd that go? he set it up really well.

7:49It's probably the best webinar setup I've seen. And so it basically drove, I think, 40 or 50 leads for us, which is great. And then maybe four or five of them were MQLs, were super qualified to work with us, which is good. There's the business result. But the way it works is you go into it. You know how Tony Robbins, when he was doing the virtual ones, he had screens everywhere? So he had some type of setup like that. And you can see he's like, everyone, turn your camera on. And then if you don't turn your camera on, I gave Danielle, who's his marketing leader, instructions to remove you from the webinar.

8:22Well, that's not nice. Why would you want to do that? It keeps them there. So you have 320 people on the webinar, which is a good amount of people. And then he hypes things up and he's telling a story in the beginning. He's like, I'm going to show you stats on this company over here. Stay to the very end. So he's hooking you to the end. And then he's also asking you questions during the webinar. He's like, hey, tell me what revenue you're at right now. Because his whole thing is lending money to these companies. Tell me what revenue, what are you doing to grow right now? Are you trying to grow right now?

8:49But he's not doing all the questions at once. He'll do one in the beginning, maybe the revenue question. And then 25%, he'll ask another question. 25%, he'll ask another question. And then what he did with my section, it was really quick. It was maybe 10 minutes or so, but he was driving it. So I was sharing stuff around AI-assisted content, programmatic, SEO. Boom, it moves to the retention.com CEO. He shares a bunch of stuff he's doing on how he's spending$400 ,000 a year. Let's back up here. So the webinar was you, Nathan. Me, Nathan, and the retention.com CEO. Okay. And who hosted the webinar?

9:19He did, I'm assuming? He hosted the webinar. And then you guys, he's not part of retention.com, I'm assuming? No. Okay. So retention.com. You mean as an investor? No, I didn't know if it was a similar company. No, no. Different company. I don't know much about retention.com. Retention.com, I'm assuming, promoted the webinar? Retention.com promoted the webinar. We promoted the webinar. To your email list. You guys both on there. You guys talked for an hour, including Nathan and both you guys. Was it Q &A style or was it presentation style? No, so I only had 10 minutes in there. The retention.com CEO also only had 10 minutes in there.

9:51And then Nathan, most of it was him driving stuff, but he kept changing the context and switching things. He was sharing stuff around ClickFunnels. Then he was sharing stuff around, hey, this is a good company to buy. What's an example of stuff with ClickFunnels? He was sharing stuff around like, oh, this is how they grew in the beginning. and eventually they had to, I forgot what he was teaching exactly, but I know for retention.com, he was showing numbers around how they struggled in the very beginning and then how their revenue grew from like 10 million to 22 million or whatever, right? So he tries to share a lot around numbers, but he keeps people hooked.

10:22He's like, stay till the very end and I'm going to show you a business that's available for sale right now. And he shares this newsletter, this marketing newsletter called Stacked Marketer and then just shares how much revenue, it shows the full P &L, right? And it keeps people interested, it keeps people hooked. And that's like the fact that I'm even talking about it right now means that he's done a pretty good job. Yeah, he did a good job. And what's funny is when you talk about ClickFunnels, ClickFunnels at the beginning, I don't know if you knew this, grew through affiliate marketing. Like just crazy promos.

10:49I remember when they did, Russell speak, I think it was Grant Cardone's event. They put something underneath everyone's seat. They've done a lot of clever stuff to grow. I don't know what they do now, but I'm assuming they slowed it down on the affiliate stuff because I'm assuming those users were churning like crazy. For sure. Actually, this is what he brought up. You just jogged my memory. I think Nathan, when he was referring to Russell Brunson, he was just saying, Russell Brunson's really good at getting OPT, other people's traffic. So whether it's through affiliate or promoting or speaking at things, he's really good at doing that.

11:22And he gets people riled up and then they start paying for ClickFunnels. That's how they grew really big. And then he created the ceremony too 2 comma or 3 comma? 2 comma club That's a whole other thing we can talk about later But the other thing I'll end it off with On Nathan Latka He sends a message to everyone afterwards Hey, hope you enjoyed the webinar Here's the slides, would you like the video as well? Yeah, of course you want the video Oh, okay, if you want the video I'd appreciate it if you would leave a trust pilot review over here Then I'll send you the video Something like that It keeps you going It's like there's a thing after thing after thing.

11:58Yeah, it's good marketing. We just send people like, hey, you want the video? Just go to YouTube. It's there. It's live stream. Or go to Twitter or wherever we put it. On your Neil Patel channel? Yeah, and we're just like, here you go. You can have it. I think if you're going to look at it, just go to his Founder Path channel. And he posted it there today, I think. And just like, those of you that want to do a webinar, just copy this way. That's the way to do it. Yeah, the only part I didn't like is you're making people turn on their video. We tend not to do that. and there's this, like one of them, if it's a mother there and chilling with their kids or someone feeding their kids or having, because people are in different times as well as someone's having breakfast with their family.

12:37Some people are happy. Some people are like, oh, really? Camera on? Okay, I'm out. They put it in chat. Yeah. So we don't try to force any of that and we also try to offer recorded version and we don't like asking people to do anything for it because it's like, if you're giving enough value, what we found is, you'll generate the revenue from it. So what kind of results you typically get from your webinars? Dude, I actually did a presentation. That didn't work. I actually put it on Twitter earlier today. So our webinars, we've changed our strategy. We used to get 4 ,164 signups per average. That's a lot, everyone.

13:15On average per webinar. We now get 12 ,223 people on average per webinar signing up. What happened? Do we do the Twitter strategy? So we take, we put out a lot of content on Twitter because it's one of the only social networks that don't, that doesn't penalize your ex. If you put out tons of content, we test different hooks. We see what works the best. We then create short form videos from the best performing ones on a daily basis. We then create a weekly blog post based on what performed the best for the week from all the shorts, which is just the same copying of the ex posts, the highest performing ones.

13:49And then on a monthly basis, we take the two top performing shorts out of all the networks because we use the same video across all five platforms. X, we don't post the video version. The five platforms are Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And we then create webinars on it. So the title or the hook, whatever you want to end up calling it, resonates more. And what we found is we've gotten a lot more signups. So it went from 4 ,164 signups per webinar to 12 ,223 on average. And that's because you changed the headlines and the hooks and all that stuff because of all the testing you do on X.

14:29On X. Okay. And if you don't have X traffic, just run ads to your posts on X and you'll quickly see which ones do well. And X may still be doing matching on advertising funds. So that can help. And our average revenue per webinar went up from$158 ,346 to$460 ,254. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need.

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16:53That's Framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. How are you, over what time period are you tracking that? Because yours is like, there's a sales cycle, right? Correct. 2023 to 2024. but when I say 2023 to 2024, we excluded a month and a half of 2023 that we started doing the new approach. So we moved that in the bucket of 2024. Our talent a year for our organization starts in October. So, cause we founded the company in October. So even though taxes we follow in January, we actually looking at, we look at our years from, I forgot October 17th or 27th or something like that to the next October.

17:35Wait, so that's 2023 to 2024. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it makes sense. So what was the revenue again? Per webinar, it went from$158 ,346 to$460 ,254. So that's the headline. How Neil Patel makes$460 ,000 per webinar. It's not really Neil Patel. We got a whole team and the help of the production. NP Digital makes$464 ,000 per webinar. And I'm not the only one who presents on there. NP Digital, that's the headline. Okay, cool. All right. Anyway, that's it for today. we went a little over as well. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency to register for the Agency Owners Association.

18:15That's the group that Neil and I run for agency owners and we have remarkably a lot of interest in it. So we're capping a number of people for the first thing that we're doing. So yeah, go there and register and we will see you tomorrow.