Why is Organic Content So Expensive?

0:00Dude, let's come back to content teams for a moment because I was looking at our cost and I was pretty pissed off. I was like, dude, we're like, it's already this year. It's like 250 grand. I'm like, how, how is this 250 grand? Right. And not only that, you're, you're, you're spending 250 grand so far on internal content. Correct. Yeah. Like brand team, like this, this type of stuff, like podcasts or like short form video, long form video. That's a lot. It's a lot. I'm like, how is it so much? And I was just so irritated, right? It's too high of a percentage for revenue. Yeah. And so, so I'm like, I'm like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to cut.

0:28Right. And then so, but the thing I'll say too is with content teams, cause you work with like agencies and all that. Right. they're either like really good for their process in the beginning and then it tapers off. But what I found is that the quality is so bad that compared to like you think about working with your internal team, like you work with solo or people like that, it's you get a very high quality consistently. But for whatever reason, when it comes to organic content, when you think about like, like some of the best content creators in the world, like let's use Mr. Beast as an example.

0:55So I've heard and I've seen this because I've talked to people that have worked for him before i've heard that his his churn is extremely high right and so it's like why is that exactly i don't know if you've seen this but i i'm getting more and more irritated my guess is hermosi has the same issue i don't know he does he does from what i've heard too yeah so but i'm like okay you try to hold content creators to like uh these uh content editors your content team to high standards but they just can't meet the standard right and but at the same time you're paying an arm and a lake for this stuff too.

1:26And so, but I think my, my hypothesis here is that we need more people in-house full-time, fully bought in. That's my take on it. Instead of using all these agencies. But the cost is too high when you do that, when you're hiring them full-time. Because that's from where? That's true. If it's overseas, sure. I think part-time from overseas, the economics will work out for you. Near shore. So when we say overseas, by the way, we should, we should talk about offshore versus nearshore. Nearshore would be like Argentina. It would be like, you know, same time zones. Similar time zones. Not exact, but within a few hours here or there, three, four, so not a big deal.

2:02I think that would be better. But I wanted to get your take. Like, what's your hypothesis on how come the quality? I don't know if you're facing this issue with your content team. Not so much. We've learned our lane. So when we create content for views, it performs well from a decent views perspective. I'm not saying we go viral, but it doesn't drive revenue. So like this week, I put a lot of franchise data out for franchise marketing. Interesting. It doesn't generate views at all. But we know for our business, franchises have been really good customers with low churn. This is your YouTube channel, long form.

2:40No, this is just charts. So that goes Instagram, YouTube. No, Instagram, not YouTube. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Facebook. Yeah. I may be missing one. Yeah. but charts have worked out really well. So putting out data for niches like franchises, it will help drive revenue for us. That's our prediction. Who do you hire for charts? Because I know like AirOps has like a research team, right? So what do you, like you have the researchers and you have data visualization people or more so just call them designers. Data visualization, I agree with you, Tess is just a designer and we have templates that we do in-house and that we do quote unquote near shore, as you would call it.

3:23The issue that we face with that is when you give them the data, sometimes if you don't double check, there's an error in the chart and they misread it. Or like instead of a decimal, they put a comma or they misplace a zero, which makes a big difference. Adding a zero at the end is like 50 % instead of 5%. So I can see that's where you get irritated for sure. That's what I'm talking about. And then the data for it, we do a few things. One is run surveys. That's the easiest thing because we have a massive audience. Two, we collect data from Ubersuggest and to the public and we scrape. Three, we have data deals with a lot of other providers like Moz.

3:58We also get data from like data for SEO. So that also provides us more data. Four is we will go find independent research firms, companies, people out there that will go and gather data. That helps us. And then the last one is we'll pay near shore people to do research like using Google, ChatGPT, et cetera, and help us come up with concepts for the charts. And what I mean by the research is, let's say if I'm doing some data on the Apple App Store, okay? And I want to do a chart on how frequently are people updating their titles for their apps in the Apple App Store versus the Google Play Store to talk about title importance for app rankings, right?

4:47A subset of marketing, but we generate a good amount of revenue from apps. It's not the biggest percentage, it's single digit percentiles for us, but still it all adds up. I can do research. I can find companies that already have a lot of this data, pull it together, chat GPT, Google, AI mode, whatever you want to call it. It all helps speed up how long it takes us to do research, cite the sources from different areas, double check them. You can't really double check the accuracy of the stats, but you can double check if the AI platforms are actually giving you accurate stats because sometimes they'll say one thing and the website says something else or it meant something else.

5:25So you just double check it and then you can put it together, cite your sources in the footnote and then boom, you got a chart. So it's a combination of one of those that is what allows us to produce charts on a massive quantity. We're not perfect where we do every single day out of the week. We hit most days, but I would say on a given year, if I had to guess, we'd probably miss five to 10 days. So we're pretty consistent. When you look at webinars versus charts, would you say those are like your top two? No. From a content standpoint or a marketing standpoint? I'm just talking about leads.

6:03Lead volume or leads that close into revenue? Leads that close into revenue. It is actually events. So speaking and hosting your own events. Kind of. All right. So I went to Milan last week. Uh-huh. Okay. I forgot the conference name. I don't speak Italian. I went in and out. It was a good event. But I went to Milan last week. Okay. They paid for first class travel. Ita Airways? No. British Airways. Okay. Milan from LA, you can't get a direct flight. You have to fly into Rome and then? I flew into London. Okay, got it, got it. And then from London, I went to Milan. And then Milan, I went from Milan to Madrid, Madrid to London.

6:50And I did events in all three places. That's right. But someone paid for the ticket and the hotel while I was in Milan. We paid for the rest. Inner country flights aren't that expensive. And I typically used to charge for speaking, but in certain countries, they don't have the budgets like they do in the US or in some of these countries that don't have the funding. So we don't really look at how much money they're going to spend. We look at who's in the audience. So that event in Italy, I should know the name of this. I don't know why I don't know the name. It's supposedly the biggest marketing event in Italy every single year.

7:26So it's great for us to be there. And there are enterprise corporations there, but there's also startups. So we did get some good leads and good branding. That helps us out, call it like three years later after us giving speeches. We see it. It really does help, but it helps years later. What helps in the short run and long run, and this is better for us, is when we go to these events to speak, we will then set up our own in-person events and we'll invite specific companies. So we'll reach out. Some of them may be clients. Majority are not clients. We invite them into the room and we give a talk on something that they may be curious on, like how to deal with marketing budget changes in the world of AI.

8:11Big companies have that issue. CMOs are like, my CFOs are asking me to cut, right? Very specific problems to our ideal customer type or how to generate more sales and conversions when organic traffic is going down. Yeah, and this is like what? This is intimate. This is like, we're talking 50, 100 people. No, usually like 20 people. Okay, 20 max. We try to pick the companies and do 20. And you have like food and all that. And you speak. Food, everything we speak, we'll ask questions. And typically when I'm speaking, if it's like a 30-minute speaking spot or 45 minutes, I may speak like 30 minutes of the 45 and some people on the team will speak for 15.

8:54It shows potential clients how our team is smart, they're valuable, all the data is not with me or all the knowledge is not with me. so then it helps them build relationships and look better too because they're speaking to audience and you're budgeting like probably three five grand for these yeah i don't know what it costs yeah i should i should ask five i i don't i don't ten ten is expensive and we're only taking a room for like a few hours call it like two to three hours max probably one to one to five five under really high end i think is what five seems expensive yeah five's really expensive shouldn't be more than a few grand is my guess if you're going luxury you're going five grand yeah no it is that luxury hotels it's so but like it's like a standard lunch type of thing and you guys are in like a no usually we don't do lunches what are you doing then we'll do like morning sessions like uh 9 30 yeah so you already skip breakfast so you may have like little appetizers cookies smart guy smart guy uh for for tatas for titas i don't know what they're called what are they called for tatas i think spinach for tatas and then you have a little it's like one of those little conference rooms and then everyone's like around coffee someone's pouring water giving people okay it's like a it's like a thousand two thousand two thousand max call it two three max because it's that luxury hotel yeah like five-star hotel so but i don't think it's more than three grand i'm taking a guess here and then we'll do q a and then we're talking with each of the people after we're done with the q a because we have the room for three hours this helps us build our pipe this helps us build relationships, this helps us get a lot of larger accounts that are paying millions of dollars a year.

10:28This is the main thing. This is the main thing that really helps. And this for sure was not your idea. Whose idea was this? Brazil kicked it off. That's smart. Brazil kicked it off years ago when I was traveling. They would do intimate events with like 50 to a hundred people. That's where you got that number from. Because when I first told you about it and it was work for Brazil. I was just guessing. I don't remember you telling me this. Yeah, we told you. we used to try to do 50 to 100. And very rarely were we ever at 100. It was more closer to like 50 to like 70. Yeah. And I would do a session and we would partner with the hotel and a lot of times the hotels would do it for free.

11:03And the reason they would do it for free is because it was all A-list brands and they want their hotels to be more well-known for business travel. Oh, that's smart. So you can also partner with the hotels and get some of it for free. You need to have someone managing this. Was Marina from your team managing it? Marina combined with the country leaders. Yeah. Because we need someone on the ground. There's a lot of logistics around this. There's a lot of logistics. Like even doing this, like you do like a three-day event, hardcore logistics. You do like even three hours, still a lot of logistics.

11:26So when I travel to each, when I travel, let's say I'm getting paid to go to Milan, I'll stop in other organizations or other countries and do these kind of events wherever we have offices. Now, I didn't get a chance to stop by France because I had to come back. You mean you invite them to your office? No. Funny enough, I haven't seen most of our offices. but we invite them to these events at the hotel and it's usually the hotel i'm staying at got it so super convenient for me just walk downstairs i walk downstairs because i'm typically jet lagged so i wake up for this do it and i go right back to sleep oh um so we'll do these so i did it in madrid italy and i did it in uh london yeah okay on top of that we do another kind of event We have customers that we know we're talking to that we haven't closed.

12:17And we're talking to companies we've done outbound or doing outreach to companies we want to work with that we haven't been able to get as a customer yet. We'll offer me going to their office and talking to everyone in their marketing team about a certain type of marketing. Oh, so you hit them outbound. This is like another part of the sequence where you're like, hey, kneels in town. Or if they've also come inbound as well. So I'll give you a great example. Like in Italy, we were in a pitch for SEO with Generale. So Generale is an insurance company. I think their market cap is like a$50 billion euro or USD market cap.

12:54So a massive company. So companies like this, when you go speak at their office, then you actually have a conference room. Not a conference room. They have auditoriums built into their buildings, right? So I gave a speech on SEO. They loved it. We did not win the deal. I don't know who we lost it to. I was kind of pissed off that we lost it. Because you showed up too. Showed up, made the effort, but they probably had good reasons. Maybe we were priced too high. And I knew something was wrong because after my speech, a lot of people said, amazing speech. Your company would be amazing to work with.

13:29But I'm not the only decision maker. There's a lot of other things and budgets and other things that go involved. So when I had like two or three people say that to me - You knew it was over. I knew there was a good shot that it was over. And I was also dealing with a local pitch, but we still kept a relationship with them. So now we pitch for me to go to their corporate event and me to speak about AISC or GE or whatever you want to end up calling it. Of course, we would make them pay for at least the travel. And we'll do this with a lot of corporations. A lot of times we don't generate any revenue and we lose the deal or we're not even invited to a deal.

14:08but I would say at least 15, 20 % of the time, I know that's not a high rate. We end up getting a deal out of it. But I think the key thing is that in-person touch point, they remember you. Because most people aren't going to do that. It's not just that they remember you. I'm not saying that's the only factor, but that's a big factor. No, no, no, that is a huge factor. I want to go a little bit deeper on that thing where you say they remember you. Yes, they remember you. We've done this. Dude, I did this with a lady. she worked at a huge company. I forgot which one it was. I think it was Oracle.

14:42We didn't get the deal. She worked at another company, did it again. We didn't get the deal. Third one, I believe, was Thomson Reuters. And she said, I want to work with you at all my other companies and now I'm able to get the budget. So I want to work with you now. Yeah. And she ended up hiring us. I forgot for which region. But where I'm getting at is when I'm giving a speech at these big corporations, how many people do you think they have in marketing? if they have a$20 billion market cap, $50 billion, whatever it is? $50 to$100? Globally, more, right? They're too big of companies. You probably have hundreds, if not thousands of people in marketing when you're worth$20 billion,$50 billion.

15:20I'm saying when you go to their main office. When you get the main office, sometimes it's only 30 people. Sometimes it's 50 or 100. Sometimes it's 200, 300, if I'm lucky. But a lot of those people, how long do you think they're going to stay at that company? Not very long. Two years, three years. And then... Yeah, some of them are lifers. Some of them are executives. Yeah. But a lot of people switch. Yeah. Then they fan out to other big organizations. Uh-huh. Yeah. And then they already know about us and then they invite us into new pitches. That's my point. Like they got that touch point with you and not many people are going to show up in person.

15:53And that's why I like the in-person. That's why I've always liked the in-person stuff. So we do that a lot. Yeah. The hard part is it's really time consuming. Yeah. on my time. Yeah. So much so, like, I still think about buying a jet today. Like, I was talking to my buddy Mustafa. Yeah. Because he has a jet company here. Mustafa. Oh, I thought it was from Lion King. No, no, no. No? That's Mufasa, I believe. Yeah, that's Mufasa. He has a jet company and deals with a lot of people out here. And I thought about buying a jet and one that would take me overseas. And I've contemplated it so many times.

16:27How many days do you travel this year? I don't know, but my hours are a lot. Yeah. Because they're quick. Do you think over 200 days this year? No, this year was lower. Yeah. So we track my speaking, how many speaking requests we get. I believe the average we got for inquiries last year in 2024, I got a chart on this. I believe it was around 12 speaking inquiries per month. Not all of them are qualified. Plus our team does outbound. If you look at this year, it's seven to nine. So let's average out an eight. seven to nine speaking spots a month or inquiries. So I've actually started getting hit up less.

17:07Could be I'm not as relevant or because I don't get as much Google traffic so people aren't seeing me as much or maybe I'm not getting as many social media views because my content type, I've changed the type of content I've posted in the last year and a half. Now, when I go to events, people still want to take pictures. They still want to come up, talk. So I haven't seen any changes there. If you look at a lot of the content I post today, would you agree that more of it is strategy, high level, targeted towards bigger companies and smaller companies? Or would you disagree with that? I'm looking at your profile now.

17:41Okay. So a lot of it, I would say it's more strategic because there's a lot of charts, right? So I'm looking at your Instagram right now. There's a lot of charts. If your traffic is dropping, like a lot of it's targeted towards like SEO. Google wants this. Because what Neil does with webinars, by the way, a lot of it's AEO, SEO, because that tends to open the doors quite a bit more. I've noticed that with my webinars too. It's the AEO SEO stuff that converts well. The other stuff I talk about, ABM or whatever, doesn't convert nearly as well. No, but today my webinar was on unlocking apps for optimization synergies.

18:11Which is still kind of SEO to me. Yeah, but the reason we did it is because a lot of the companies we work with, with ASO are large enterprises like Dick's Sporting Goods, right? And we got headed by Netflix. We lost the RFP on the Netflix ASO stuff. My point is like, it's a form of SEO that you just kind of move to the side, right? Where like it's still relevant to enterprises. And I'm looking at your reels right now and sure, they might not get nearly as many views as you got like last year or so, but it's all targeted like Google ads, SEO or whatever. It's targeted towards, would you agree, it's targeted more towards my ideal customer?

18:43Yes, yes. And still 10 ,000 views per video is still a lot, I'd say. Yes, but we used to get way more views. Like I'll crank out trends at the end of this year. Trends always gets views. It always gets views. But if I did a video on like, how to use AI to create. 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.

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19:57Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. A week's worth of social media content in less than a week and get double the amount of your average views. I think it would do so well, but I don't think I'd generate any revenue. You get a bunch of individual contributors who want to execute on this. So we went away from creating content like that because it wasn't driving revenue. Yeah. Would you say that your Instagram, your reels drive you revenue? Not really. you know the thing is people will never refer that they saw a real and they converted they probably they probably saw it in passing but it's like to me it's just a touch point of like there's actually numbers on this i forgot who did this but remember we've been talking about the rule of seven and then i said i think it's like the rule of 21 now i saw a stats recently i forgot which website this was but it's like it's actually a rule of 27 now and so i think this is just one of the touch points yeah no there's there's a lot of touch points um we think it's still worth it don't get me wrong it just ends up being that when we're trying to speak at events and drive revenue we found that most events that want to pay me to speak don't drive revenue so we don't we try to shy away from them like i get hit up a lot to go to the middle east we don't generate a lot of revenue from the middle east like a lot of these government programs will hit me up and pay to speak and they'll pay a nice you know pretty penny to have me speak but dude dude, I've been in some of these countries like Saudi Arabia where I'm getting paid to arm and like to speak like extremely well plus a 20 grand airfare, right?

21:26Like, you know, the airfares are dropping the bucket in front of what they're paying me. And then no joke, I speak, guess how many people are in the audience for a big event, one of their biggest conferences? How many people are in the audience? Yes. 20 ,000? No. More? No, sometimes it's like 10 people, 15 people wait wait wait for their biggest event and they paid you an arm and a leg for that there's 10 people in the audience 10 15 that's insane and i even spoke with someone who was high up in saudi arabia um really well-known celebrity and then i think that one may have had like 30 people in the audience yeah but when i walk around the event a lot of people want to say come up say hi take pictures talk to me and one of the guys who brought me there he's like man you had more people want to take pictures of you than the skype co-founder and i was like well the skype co-founder has more money than me so who gives a shit how many people want to take pictures yeah of me like i'd rather have his money than my money dude you want to know what's funny um this is um i was at a lunch yesterday this is kind of as you said that i was like i realized something um when you were speaking at the global marketing summit this year the ypo one right so um i was i wasn't watching in the beginning but um one of my friends i was eating with yesterday he's like oh you didn't watch neil's talk i was like what did neil say he's like yeah so when neil's question was like So who here does over 50 million?

22:44So a bunch of hands go, right? Who here does over 100 million? A bunch of hands are still up, right? Who here does over 2 billion? So two hands go up, right? And he's like, why are you guys still here? I don't know why that reminded me of that, but I think my point is, I don't know, you just triggered that. I was being honest. If you're getting a billion dollars, why are you in the audience right now? You just never know who's going to be in the audience sometimes. Yes. Sometimes it might be like 10 people. Sometimes, by the way, One of those 10 people could be like the most powerful person in the world.

23:13Yes. But what I thought, like even those events, like your YPO event, great event. It's not a good event for us for generating business. Yeah. I would agree with that. Because we're looking for publicly traded companies that issue out RFPs. You should have gone. Are you still in YPO right now? I don't think so. The mistake we made this week. So I was with him yesterday because he came for this global business summit. Oh, yeah. Sunny's running. Yeah. So guess what? He's like, I was like, why are you at this event right now? Right? Because you're allowed to pitch each other at this event. So he's like, I'm here because last year when I went to this event, I got a Berkshire Hathaway company.

23:49And then this company pays me about$4 million a year. And not only that, they're going to introduce me to other Berkshire portfolio companies because we've done such a good job. He's like, you never know who you're going to meet. Right? And I'm like, I'm like, God damn it. Like, I didn't want to go because I spoke at a conference last week at Capital Camp. Guess who's in the pipeline now? It's a GM from a division in Amazon. like you just never know that that was a christian business conference so sometimes you don't know who's gonna be in the audience you don't i'll give you one more thing i get i still get hit up a lot eric when are you gonna do leveling up again where are you gonna do leveling up again when you're gonna do leveling up again i'm getting to the point where i'm like maybe we should just do like another marking school at some point so yeah dude with uh with speaking of amazon like when i was in uk amazon was in the audience and like we try to work out deals right so but like those are the type of companies that we invite to our own personal events like there's not that many that are that size but we're inviting a lot of companies that are worth over a hundred billion dollars or at least 20 to 50 these aren't just all vps you're inviting like heads of directors like seniors you don't you don't want a lot of cmos and stuff like that because the cmos they may dictate the budget but in big organizations it's a lot of the directors and people like that they're pushing and they're the ones who are vetting and the CMOs take their recommendation and you want to convince a lot of those people to work with you.

25:07You have to remember, if it's a billion dollar company, sure, you want the CMO. But if someone's worth like Amazon, 2 trillion,$3 trillion, whatever they're worth, directors have a ton of power. They have more power than the CMOs at these smaller companies. But you know, I will say something though. I don't disagree with the content you're making right now, but what we're saying right now kind of does reinforce the need to create content because you never know who you're going to meet. I'll give you an example. So we made a video recently on this podcast. I was talking about this guy marketing max.

25:36You remember this? That video got about like 70 ,000 views, which is decent. But who, who, you know, who ended up following me from that? It was like a, like a highly paid NBA player and a highly paid DJ. Right. But these people also know other people too. And it kind of like fans out, like people talk about query fan out. Right. But, but I'm not saying this is the only way, but you look at Gary V as an example, like he creates more wider content, right? Like he'll do like tea with Gary Vee and stuff. And I saw him on the, the, um, school of hard knocks recently. Right. And so he was like, so Gary, how much do you make right now?

26:07He's like with Vayner, like just Vayner X or whatever. It's like 340 million years. Like you combine everything else, 500 million. Right. So remember Gary, you and Gary are kind of on the opposite sides. Gary's like, I want to be known about everybody. Right. And I, but I understand that. I also understand your perspective too, where it's like, I just want to be focused on driving enterprise pipeline. Yeah. So like, there's no right or wrong way. I think it's just like what you prefer to do sometimes. Yes. And what we found is you just like, if I look at Vayner, I bet you majority of his revenue comes from not his personal brand, but from RFPs.

26:39I think you're right. Okay. I'm not saying what he's doing hasn't made a money because Gary also creates ancillary companies like Rezzy. Was Rezzy his? I think it was his. He was a co-founder. I don't know how that works out. So yeah. So, but he made money there and a lot of other companies and he's amazing marker so i think him having a massive tam like um is it v cards or v friends v friends v friends he's making money in a lot of other areas it's like good for him the mass appeal works out my play i'm not saying it's better than his by any means is more of a b2b play and if i go to a ypo networking event and i meet some people those type of customers are fine.