The Real Numbers Behind Our Top 10 Marketing Podcast, How Much We Spend On Our Content Per Month, Is It Your Company's Job To 'Teach' You AI?

0:00Let's share some real numbers behind our top 10 marketing podcast. so how many downloads do you think we get per month right now 200 000 yes exactly 200 000 um and how much do you think we spend on the podcast per month right now based on my last bill yes 14 000 no it's actually 6 000 it was actually condensed all into one it's 6 000 total so it's three each that oh so you're saying that bill was for multiple months yeah because there's there's some vendors that like stacked it all up our pre like our previous yeah okay yeah so it's 6 000 a month um and then how many views do you think we get per month on our youtube per month yeah 10 000 not a lot it's oh no no no 45 000 okay yeah it's not bad but you know what's been taking off on our youtube do you think it's the long form or the short form short form yeah the short form like all the videos are like starting to move now the long forms are starting to move a little more.

0:56And then I will say on our YouTube, a lot of people are commenting, I don't know why this doesn't have more views. So we talked about this a long time ago. If you have a small YouTube channel, what happens is you're looking for the unsolicited response rate, which is these people that are saying, I don't know why this doesn't have more views. Cause that actually means the content's good. And I look at the retention rates and all that. So all that to say, that's where our numbers are now. But I think over the course of this doing for doing this for seven years we have over i think 120 million downloads and that's where we are right now and then the cool thing also numbers behind the podcast too we can share this right um we've had sponsors like linkedin's um shopify this year and there's another one and then we're going to work out a deal with amazon um with one of these companies i'm not going to name which one but they're going to do like an influencer deal with us where they'll pay us like 60 grand or something um i have to interview two people for like 15 minutes each good deal yeah neil doesn't have to do it i have to do i'm like 60 grand all right but that's where we are right now like i will say that um we before we used to handle our own sponsorships now we have uh yeah media handling it yeah so um what other numbers do you want to know uh but that goes back because eric and i were texting back and forth because i got a bill from him recently uh it was seven ish thousand dollars roughly for each yeah for each so that means we spent 14 so i was emailing and i was trying to find out from someone on your team how much we spent yeah so i found it out this morning i was like i need to know right now yeah because i thought i'm like how the heck are we spending i'm like i'm not spending 14 grand on this yeah but at six grand i don't think it's worth cutting on any of it because i emailed your person and cc'd i'm like it's not worth spending this much money yeah but if our yeah you probably freaked him out because you sent like five emails at once yeah but if it is really six grand i don't think you should change anything that's just my feedback If you want to change, we can.

2:47But you may want to let, I don't know, whoever sent the bill that they don't need to change anything. I think we're in a good spot right now. Same with the shorts. I might as well just keep them going if it's only six grand a month. My take on this is the only thing I think will change for our YouTube is I kind of just want all the podcasts to be. Because right now, Neil and I are recording for an 80-minute, 90-minute session or so. I want it to kind of all be in one so we can have longer retention. And I think that will probably do better for us. But overall, I think we have a good flow going.

3:17Now, do you want anything else on this one before I move to the next one? I agree with you. I don't know why we don't just do a 90-minute episode instead of all these. We don't need to do these short ones. I don't like them. And who cares about the views anyways? I do think the longer ones will get more views ultimately. And I do think it will get the right people watching this too. I think the right people watch this one. But you are speaking at my Global Marketing Summit in two weeks or so. I'll be speaking there too. sean cannell who's an expert with youtube he will be talking about um how much we spend on content each month so he was guy yeah vegas guy so how you just mentioned you're spending 30 grand a month on your blog right now how much are you spending on the other stuff per month uh social media call it like 35 ish a month grand okay um and then there's tons of internal costs and I don't know what my internal costs are.

4:10You can leave that alone. Yeah, so 65? 65 on contractors. Yeah, that's per month. Per month, not including the podcast. If you want to include the podcast, 68. 71. Oh, 68, 68. It's only my half, right? I was giving you the whole thing. You're giving me the whole thing. No, no, no. I don't want the whole thing. Yeah, so on my end, it's probably closer. I want to say it's like 15 or something like that. But I think it's helpful to tell you guys these numbers too because some people are spending like 200 a month or 300 a month or whatever um neil spending a good amount i'm spending a decent amount i think i used to spend more it was like closer to 25 but it's at 15 right now but i think it's going to go up a little more because we're adding some contractors who are let's just say very skilled and they're they're costly but does this include ad spend or no no oh yeah because my numbers are really bad at their ads although technically that's been makes money so that's been for your agency though not for your content right yeah but the content is spent by the agency this i pay myself but i you know me i'm really you know picky about my bills i took every single i know so so yes so neil goes into this mode where he's like ready to tear everything apart i was like oh he's doing it yesterday he's doing it so so did i check this morning i got a bill from eric for like six seven grand i'm like what is this six seven grand this is a lot of money he starts texting me it's a flurry i'm like yeah he's in that mode right now So I'm just going to leave him alone.

5:36Okay. One final thing. Do you have anything else? By the way, dude, after I sent all those messages, no joke, I looked for the first time because someone on your team, it was either in the invoice or in a reply mentioned TikTok on there. So I haven't ever checked out our marketing school TikTok channel. I don't even know we have one. I didn't either. But I've never checked it out, like not once. And I looked at it and I was like, huh. the content the editing isn't bad this is some good stuff i'm like i should take this and send it to my team and just like repost more so i can record less yeah why not i agree because it's not like we make tons of money from i was actually thinking that too because some of our content like okay i would say this content is actually pretty good right and i actually want to take it and just post it up to leveling up so when you and i talk about marketing and we don't talk about politics i think our content's way better yeah you and i when we are on the phone with each other we're both really opinionated i'm not saying we're mean or we don't disagree with others we're just opinion and we talk a lot about politics but we should probably not talk about politics to other people yeah we can leave that alone we can try to leave it if it's politics and marketing we should talk about it yes but when you and i are just talking about business and we're going over our own business.

6:57Well, really, the light bulb went off for me because our last recording session, you mentioned that people like it when we talk about our own experiences. And I was like, wait, it's just easier if you and I just talk about our own experiences versus anything else in marketing. Moving on to the next one. So you saw, we both saw the Shopify CEO, Toby Lutke. He leaked a memo on AI and he shared it. and this is interesting to me and I'm keen to know what you guys are doing but two three weeks ago I was writing this AI standards of excellence for single grain and this is a 12 page document right and I had a couple of people on my team review it and then someone said I think we need a curriculum for this I think we need training for this right I started preparing a curriculum this curriculum is like six or seven pages right here's what's gonna happen 30 60 90 days or whatever and then Toby last week or this week is like yeah you know at Shopify, our expectation is that we expect you to understand AI.

7:54We want you to be reflexive with AI. We expect you to be a self-learner and just hear the expectations and that's it. Right. And I looked at that and I was like, I was getting so mad at myself. I was like, what the, like, why am I doing this curriculum thing? Why do I need to like teach you how to do every single thing? So I, I like ripped that thing apart and I'm back to just the standards of excellence. And that's all we're going to do here. The expectations with AI, you figure it out or you don't, if you don't figure out i will find someone else that will figure it out and that's how i like this attitude yeah i love that attitude i get along with it very well yeah this is your attitude but like what like what are you guys doing with it we're the same i'm like because i remember you tell me you're going to create a video i'm like cool i would love to watch the video yeah i wasn't going to send it to any of my teams i was just curious what you're creating i'm still going to create it i'm recording tomorrow actually so i found a studio in century city that looks like your studio that you use in Hollywood oh cool yeah send me the information because mine's far yeah I'm walking to mine so oh I like that yeah well I think we have lunch tomorrow too I think uh no it's not tomorrow we have a we I can cancel it by the way no there's no lunch tomorrow there is check your calendar sorry guys this is a detour because Neil and I don't get it when we hang out we have a lunch tomorrow if you want to do we can still have it on my calendar that guy's not coming he's not coming at all he's not coming we could schedule it for another time but I was like oh I can just leave it there too so up to you yeah let's do lunch okay let's do it all right so going back to it um yes i am still going to record a long episode on our ai standards of excellence because i want new employees to watch it and i'm happy to share that document too because it is more extensive than his but my point is i think your job as a ceo because then i started putting polls up on linkedin and x as well and i was like whose job is it to teach you ai so on instagram it was like 97 it's your own job to learn it right on on linkedin guess what all the other channels were like it's your own job to learn like 90 plus percent on linkedin what did they say what percent of people do you think said it's the company's job to teach you ai 90 plus percent on linkedin for sure it's the opposite 45 i'm just like what like what like linkedin's a different platform they typically put it more on the corporation than some of the other platforms yeah but anyway i think I love how Shopify approached this.

10:07It's just like, hey, look, this is simple. This is like one or two pages. These are our standards. And if you don't want it, if you're not down with it, it's okay. And then Maven was a company I invested in. They do courses, right? So Gagan, I think is his name. He tweeted, he's like, oh, a lot of Shopify employees have come signing up for our AI courses. And these are expensive courses, like two to$6 ,000. I think they're paying out of their own pocket. Good for you on making money on the course business. No, no, I don't make money on it. Oh, you have Maven? I don't know how they're doing right now.

10:36I hope they're doing well, but I think, yeah. So anyway. Goggin's a growth hacking conference guy? Goggin, yes, and he also did Udemy. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so I, by the way, you remember Andrew Chen, right? Yeah. Okay, so here's an episode topic. This is a good topic here. So he has a tweet here that says, he writes these essays. So it says, every marketing channel sucks now. So I'm going to read a little bit here. Okay. So it says, uh, the options for marketing are pretty grim right now. Here are my complaints. SEO takes too long. You're competing against listicles and Reddit threads.

11:15Google might screw you over at any moment. Maybe AI one boxing, uh, will kill your traffic next year anyway. Okay. That's number one, two influencer marketing, get a big spike of traffic, but none of it converts. The spike goes away after a few days. Big creators are too expensive and a slew of small creators need to be cobbled together. Lots of babysitting. Okay. I'm going to go down one more email marketing. Hope you like spam folders. Building a good list takes forever. open rates are less than 30 % and CTRs are less than 5%. So I hope you weren't expecting a lot of clicks. I'll read one more and then we can react to this.

11:42Viral loops. You need to actually have a great product. All the contact spamming techniques no longer work. Neither email nor SMS. Your UX will be ruined by aggressive pop-ups and onboarding schemes and it's nearly impossible to get a viral factor greater than one. So here's what I'll react to this and I'm 99 % sure you could react the same way. All this shit takes work, man. It works if you're willing to put in the work and And thank God, because I love when marketing is getting harder because that makes it actually easier in my opinion. So I don't like it's not that every marketing channel sucks now.

12:12It is marketing is harder now. And I love that. But go for it. 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. Say 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.

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14:29And when people like emails dead, well, if Andrew says people can't get more than a 30 % open rate, we consistently have more than the 30 plus percent. That's your own fault. If you can't get over 30. Correct. And I agree for most people, these channels don't work, whether it's SEO or social media, it's because they're doing them wrong and they don't want to put in the time and energy to do them correctly. And when you do it that way, it doesn't work out. if you look at our marketing right the way you do marketing the way i do marketing i would say the only reason it's got it's done well this year so far because i'm assuming you agree that both of us have done better this year from a market standpoint it's because you and i got involved and we just cleaned this crap up ourselves yep and here i'll give another takeaway you know where we both suck i'll just i'll loop you in with the same bucket as me i think we both suck at ig reels and yes I'll give you an example so remember the gal I talked about Chloe she she went from 100 ,000 to 300 ,000 in a week yeah she's now at a million on Instagram and the reason I brought I'm bringing her up again is because all of her content is extremely high quality and that's why I get so many views right it's broad-time content too and whenever I look at people like I think off you and me it's like we're you know we are people can tell we kind of have like an SOP or there's a process or we're batching a bunch at the same time right no uh but i disagree on the high quality i've tested high quality reels i get less views when they're higher quality than when they're not i think you and i might have different definitions of high like show me a high quality one later i'm talking about like crazy editing i think i need to see an example from you because when i compare it to like a chloe one it is come on like you you're changing your outfit in the middle of it and then there's like five different versions of you and then there's you're changing the scene you're not no no not that that's what i'm saying dude that's what i'm saying but i would if instagram reels would produce the revenue yeah that it would for it's not worth it for you bingo you got it right but when it comes to things like seo or long form video i will spend an arm and a leg because i know the revenue potential short form doesn't produce the results from us from a financial standpoint yeah and i think i i think that the place where we're both putting in more effort now is actually long form.

16:44And so, yes, you go into a studio on the weekend. Sometimes I'm going in tomorrow and I will crank out a one hour video if I need to do it. And because I'm willing to put it in one, I know it'll be good because I'm pretty decent at teaching, but two, I know it'll drive customers. Um, and then on the side, I'll spend a little more time on the shorts, but I won't put nearly as much effort as I will, uh, on the long form. Yeah. You and I are very similar. We just find that from short form content, it can get attention, but it doesn't convert well. And if people believe that it converts extremely well for most things I get for e-commerce, for social recovery, sure, certain times it can work well.

17:25But for B2B marketing specifically, if you look at people who get traffic from short form reels, and I get quite a bit on YouTube versus some of the other channels or other content formats, the ad revenue that you generate from short form is literally single digit percentiles compared to what you generate from the long form. The reason being is because they don't convert as well. Hence, I believe it's better to spend time on long form. And the data just tells you if short form converted so well in B2B, people would be willing to spend way more ad dollars on those channels, but they're not because the conversion rates just suck.

18:03This is interesting. So I'm actually going to send a message to Alex Garcia right now. I think he does a good job with teaching marketing shorts. And he does like these green screens where he's teaching in front of it. Right. And each one gets, you know, some will get like a lot, we'll get like 30, 40 ,000 views, which is pretty decent. Cause he doesn't have like a massive, like hundreds of thousands of followers. Some might get, you know, half a million or even more than that, which is pretty good. Right. Cause all he talks about is, is marketing. I'm going to send him a message and figure out to see if he generates customers.

18:30I have a sense that he does generate leads from it. But he has, it's more, I think he sells like maybe like a newsletter or coaching or something like that. I can tell you from my experience, I don't know about you, I don't think I've ever generated one lead from shorts or reels. I've generated leads, but it's really hard to close a six or seven figure contract from a short. Yep. Long form, I've generated way more revenue on both ends for six and seven figure contracts, but I find it very difficult from shorts. Again, this is a very specific B2B use case for eric and i your product or service that you're selling could be very different if you're a consumer you might you'll correct it you'll crush and that's why i'm specifically focusing on b2b so b2b i'm not gonna go sit there creating a short and change my outfit 10 times dude my teams try to get me to change my outfit and do uh two of me in a video right where you're talking to yourself i'm like no i don't want to do this and they just like why why not i'm like doesn't make us money you want to show me stuff that makes me money i will gladly put in the time and enter Will you take off your clothes for money?

19:33No. I'll take off my hat. Neil, how much does that hat cost? Honestly, I don't know. I really don't. I know how much it costs. I know it's not$100, but I don't think it's like$2 ,000. Neil has a nice hat. Yep. Well, please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.

20:00Thank you.