The mastermind that does $35M a year with 5 employees, What correlates with positive or negative search rankings?, Political agendas now affect a company’s marketing plan, and more

0:00So Neil, do you know about, there's this mastermind, it makes$35 million a year with five employees. Sam Ovens is mastermind? No, actually he shrunk his down, right? He shut it down. He shut it down all the time. He doesn't do it anymore. He focuses on school. Yeah. So let's start with Sam Ovens first. So he basically, he had a$30 million a year mastermind and like five employees. And a lot of the money was being spent towards ads. And I think he was charging like 30, either 35 or 50 grand a year. I know that's a big delta, but he would just run, it would be two live events per year. I don't know, it would be two virtual events.

0:34and you know how like I do my mastermind, right? It's like there's speakers, we do events and all that stuff. There's like, you know, there's nice hotel, blah, blah, blah. It's not like that. The way he did it, which is how - This is Sam Ovens? This is Sam Ovens. And then I'm going to go to the next one. So Sam Ovens, he would have like 100 people or 150 people go to his office, right? And then everyone would just sit like a table, like an actual classroom. And then Sam's just like, all right, what do you guys want to talk about? And it's like, what's your problem right now? Just go down the list.

1:00What's your name? Oh, my name's Neil Patel. My problem's this, blah, blah. Then he has a good sense of what everyone's struggling with. And he's like, okay, your problems with YouTube. Who here is good at YouTube? Okay, great. You guys are speaking on YouTube tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. And then he'll cover some topics as well. But he gets the mastermind to chip in. And lunch isn't anything fancy. He just calls in a couple of taco trucks. They eat the taco trucks, right? And they go back to learning. It's just like two days of grinding out on the business. And that's how it works. And then he'll do like a virtual session.

1:28I think he did like a call each week or so. this other mastermind$85 ,000 a year. I'm not going to name the name because I'm not supposed to be revealing this. 85 ,000 a year or 35 million a year? Or are you going to a different one? No, I'm going to the same, the original one I was talking about. So this mastermind is targeted towards, let's say like, what was it? $84 ,000 a year that they're charging, not in revenue. I was like, wait, 84 ,000 is not 35. 85 ,000. It's actually for a year and a half. So it's a weird model, right? 85 ,000 for a year and a half. And let's say it's for real estate agents.

1:59It's not actually for real estate agents, but it's targeting industry. What industry is it? Real estate agents. Is it really? No, it's not. Just tell us what industry. It doesn't make a difference. I can't because this will just reveal it. I don't know any of the masterminds. No, forget about you. People are going to sleuth the internet, right? What general industry? Is it tech or marketing? It would be more akin to real estate. It's in investing. Okay, so yes, you're getting closer. Okay, so imagine it's a mastermind for real estate agents, but it teaches real estate agents how to invest for themselves.

2:33So it's like teaching people how to buy and flip homes and make money through real estate. No, no. It's not actually the real estate industry. I'm just taking you down that path. Now it's confusing everyone. So let's just go with, it's real estate. We're playing a game of Neil's trying to guess what mastermind is. But I think I'm already onto it. I don't know what it is. No, you're not. But it must be on investing. It is on investing. Yes. So this is a mastermind that teaches people in a certain industry on how to make more money because these people have made good money, right? Imagine if you work in finance or something, you made good money, right?

3:03Finance is investing, bad example. Anyway, so what they do is it's five employees and same thing. They'll do a couple events a year and they're just like, okay, here's how to invest. Forget about your 401k. Here's how you actually should be investing. Here's some deal flow over here. Here's how I'm making this money over here. And that's all it is. and my friend was telling me, he's like, this is the best business ever. They're so chill, easiest thing. And I'm just like, yeah, masterminds are a solid business. I want to join this mastermind at 84 grand. No, you don't. You already have more money than all of them.

3:35I thought it was about rich people talking about how to make more money from their money. I'll tell you about it offline. But anyway, so it sounds like they're trying to pitch people, pay 84 grand a year and we'll help you get rich quick. Not get rich quick. It's people in a legit industry that are middle-aged and these are all like good people they're not like they have money but they're not like wealthy they're rich not wealthy i wouldn't want to take 84 000 from them that's a lot of money well good thing you're not running a mastermind but um i feel like i would feel bad yesterday i was at lunch and then three of the four people had a mastermind i was like man everyone has a mastermind wait who are you at lunch with i was at lunch with uh our friend Billy, Billy Bosch.

4:17Okay, cool. The other two you don't know. The other two are these gals that run different businesses. Billy lives in LA now? No, he came back. Just visiting. He's, yeah, he's like doing some business stuff. I thought Billy ran a supplement company. What happened with a mastermind? What kind of mastermind does he run? He doesn't have a mastermind. The other two do. Anyway, just wanted to tell that story. So, yeah. This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders and Leveling Up Founders is an invite only event for founders It happens once a year, usually during August. And past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on.

4:54And ultimately, it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com slash founders to learn more about it. And then you can apply. 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 marketing school.io slash agency once again it's marketing school.io slash agency to learn more and now back to the show on the side note you have something here that was really interesting um it has nothing to do with mastermind but it was uh something that ross hudgens put out yeah uh what was the tweet what correlates with positive or negative search rankings.

5:41I'll give some context on this one. There's this guy's website. I forgot who owns this website. Zippy. I seriously forgot who owns it. Ross Hudgens, he tweeted this. The tweet says, what website features correlate with positive or negative increases in traffic from recent Google updates? Do you have it open? No. Let me go through a couple of these. Zippy did the work to determine this in the recent analysis. So this graph over here, and those of you that are watching on YouTube, make sure you go subscribe. It shows first person pronouns. Okay. Correlate with, that's a win. First hand experience.

6:19So like the EAT. First person pronouns, like he, him. Yeah. That's where I like, I'm like confused. So maybe it's he, him. First hand experience is another one. Cause EAT. Yeah. Okay. Cookie consent would be another one. Okay. So these are super positive signals. Okay. And then here's the secondary. This is like pretty positive signal. So you have super positive, again, pronouns, first-hand experience, cookie consent. And then you have pretty positive would be like contact in the footer, any contact, contact in the header, and then call to action in the header, and then social links in the header.

6:54Social links in the header? Yeah. What a never guess in the header. Yeah, but this one's the smallest of the other correlations. It's not like a huge thing. The other ones are like significantly higher on this bar graph. and then let me show let me tell you the three that are four of these we do I think almost every single one of those including the pronouns no minus the pronouns we don't put can you test that well I just put the articles published as Neil Patel can you please test it I don't think it's going to impact my ranking no it just that's the number one right here that's the highest one I don't think adding pronouns is going to impact rankings hey we're running a test here I'm telling you dude we talk about being open-minded on this podcast I don't care what the results say adding a pronoun to a blog article, Neil Patel, he, him is not going to affect my rankings.

7:39Dude, look at this. It's the number one thing. What is this saying? Causation doesn't necessarily mean correlation or something like that. Yeah, but you can roll this test back. Anyway, I'll leave it alone. Okay, let me tell you the four most negative things here. Are you ready? I could try it. I'll actually go and add. That's up to you. It's your website. I'm just joking. But okay, the four most negative things here are fixed ad in the footer, which makes sense. Okay, so like an AdSense ad. Okay. Fixed video ads would be another one. And then the third negative one would be stock images and also number of ads.

8:16Wait, fixed video ads? Yeah. So it's like if you have a fixed video ad in the footer, it's just like you pitching something or whatever. Okay, so what are they again? Fixed video ad? So fixed ad in the footer, fixed video ads, stock images, and number of ads. Oh, okay. Notifications are pretty bad too. notifications like push notification yeah yeah or yeah i can see it being a negative signal okay yeah i can see it yeah you want people to come back to google instead of going back directly to website yep so dude it's just when you look at these algorithms you know it's not every change that they make impacts rankings um in a positive way or a negative way But over time, they keep tweaking it and it does get better over time or so we hope.

9:03And it's funny. People put out these reports all the time, like doing certain things impact rankings. Dude, if I had to put money on it, I would put money on that pronouns do not affect your rankings. I have nothing against pronouns. We use them throughout our whole company. But I don't think adding pronouns boosts your rankings or Google's like they use pronouns. We're going to rank this site higher. We could be reading this wrong. It could be pronouns for something else. I don't know. But it feels like it probably is like the, you know. Okay, so you're saying we could be interpreting. We could be interpreting it incorrectly.

9:39But yeah. Yeah, because it just doesn't sound right. Having pronouns impact rings. That has nothing to do with signaling to search engines that this content is qualified or a user is happy. I just don't see it. Well, Gemini's debacle didn't seem right either. That's true. You make a good point there. Funny enough, dude. Speaking about Gemini, you know, I've noticed something over the last three to four months, all right, in which it may be even longer, like six plus months. Political issues are affecting where companies and how companies do their marketing. And I'll give you a great example of this.

10:19A lot of people didn't necessarily agree with Elon and they ended up pulling their ads from X. I get it, right? but it's going further than that. I was talking to someone today and they spend, call it$4.5 million a month on ads. That's a good size budget. I'm talking about just digital ads, TV, probably another like three or four. So this company, all in all, including internal marketing expenses, then if you talk about things like SEO, CRO, organic social, yeah, they're probably spending somewhere around$100 million a year. That's a really good size market, about it. You can assume that someone's spending a hundred plus million dollars a year as a multi-billion dollar company, which they are funny enough, not publicly traded.

11:03And they're telling me there was this one website that was producing a row as of around four and a half to five X, which is massive and is highly profitable based on the industry that they're in. And that website is a website where people can contribute whatever articles that they choose. And someone, one of their internal teams, like we're pulling all our ads from this website. And I'm like, well, this website, you're spending around 300 grand a month. That's not the biggest chunk of their ad budget, but you're talking around 3 % a year. I was like, why do you want to pull it from this website?

11:45I'm just curious. I'm trying to learn. And they're just like, oh, someone wrote an article on that website with different beliefs. And I'm like, but this website has tons of content that is guest contribution. It's not even a journalist or whatnot. They're like, we refuse to do it. And I was just like, okay, have you reached out to that website and talked to them about this and not showing your ads on certain sections or certain areas? Now I get it. If people have a stance on certain things like war or whatnot principles, but this article wasn't harsh. It wasn't talking about crazy political stuff or gender stuff.

12:19It was just a viewpoint in life. And they just disagreed upon it. And it was around kids and education and what you should be teaching them based on history and what you shouldn't be. So then that way, there's less opinion piece. It was opinion piece. So that way there would be less hate or discrimination in the future or racism or whatever you want to call it. And I'm not sophisticated enough to tell people what they should or shouldn't do, but it was an opinion piece. And the piece didn't say, this is how it should be. They were saying, these are the real options. Some schools are doing X, Y, and Z, and some schools aren't.

13:00Data will tell over time. And they did at the end talk about what they think is going to win and why, you know, pretty much based on their own beliefs. but that pretty much said cut them off from advertising. And I was just like, wait, you should A, talk to the website if you don't believe in it. And what I'm seeing here is like little things are causing people to adjust their marketing and not necessarily do what's best for the business. If there's hatred out there or a website has clear racism, I would agree money is not worth putting your ad on a site where someone is just bluntly being racist.

13:39But if someone just has an opinion piece talking about how to solve racism, which is what it was about, and it wasn't about like, hey, you're racist, but they disagreed with how they should solve racism. I'm like, you shouldn't stop advertising because of that. And these kind of things are going to affect how a business performs. And funny enough, when I took the call, I know the owner of the company. And I know a lot of the people in the executive team. The person who decided to pull it is mid-level. I'm not going to say anything because it's not my place, but if the executives of that organization knew what was happening, they would be pissed.

14:18They're just losing a lot of their return on their ad spend because someone doesn't want to do something that doesn't go against what the company believes in. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

14:49It was easy to use, and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click, so your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together, no issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter.

15:19Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. 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.

15:54Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify's got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into a... With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school.

16:27Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. Yeah. Well, the good news is again, like this is not a political podcast, but where it was swinging pretty heavily towards the left. Now it seems like it's coming back towards the center, which is good. Right. But you still have situations like this happening, but, um, but this isn't left or right. Like if I talked to any democratic or Republican majority, nine out of 10 would be like, what's wrong with this piece? actually probably 99 out of a hundred would be like, what's wrong with this piece? You did say this is like a political things are leading to decisions like this.

17:00Yes. But this article was about how to stop racism and racism is bad and they want to end it. And they're coming up with different solutions. This person in marketing didn't believe with their solution and their solution. I'm not saying it's skewing left or right. It's just idea of how to stop racism and what to teach our kids or not teach our kids to help reduce racism in the future. I still think racism is a problem today, right? Depending on what state you are in the United States or country. There are problems with racism and hopefully one day, it'll get better and better. Like with my kids, they're not a specific race.

17:42They're mixed, right? And we try to teach our kids. It doesn't matter what skin color someone is. You don't judge them based on their skin color. You judge them for who they are and their actions and how they treat other people and if they're good. But all I'm getting at is, dude, people in organizations are changing things drastically based on their beliefs. And a great example of this in mainstream media is Gemini. Gemini, you know, wouldn't create Caucasian people. That must've been a few people who decided that. Did you see the prompt? It was one that's like, show strong black people, right?

18:17And it made an image of strong. It's like, show strong white people. And it's like, no, it's good. It's important to be diverse. And it couldn't form the image. But that means someone programmed it and someone must have made that decision. Yeah. If I had a bet on it, that wasn't corporate Google. No. That was some individual person or two or three people that decided. And what's scary about this is you're having people in these big organizations change a trajectory because of their own political beliefs, they're there to work to do what's best for the company. I do agree. If someone was doing something bad politically or says something that's harmful to others or could cause death or any bad to someone, you shouldn't support them with money.

18:59It's not worth it. But it's just like, if someone's not doing anything bad and you're just like, ah, politically, I don't like you. It's like, that doesn't mean you should start pulling your ads. Yep. Anyway, that's a good place for us to wrap. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. Go to markingschool.io to apply for the Agency Owners Association. That is the group that Neil and I run to help agencies like yours grow faster. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.