Why You Shouldn't Optimize for 1 Million Subscribers

0:00Here's why you shouldn't optimize for a million subscribers. if you look at social media i used to optimize for i used to run ads on uh facebook ads i run ads on google always wanted more subscribers dude you had 900 000 or so on facebook remember i have over a million on how much were you spending on facebook back in the day when i was making fun of you dude on facebook ads i think i peaked out at like 130 something thousand dollars a month just to get more just buying likes yeah yeah and it was funny i would run ads that says neil patel likes Neil Patel. So why don't you like him too? Dude, that thing converted so well.

0:36That's so funny. That's so funny. One of my best converting ads. And funny enough, at that time, I was able to make it profitable because I was running traffic to a webinar and the likes were actually converting. And when I was running the campaign, I was making more money. But having a million plus subs on YouTube or Facebook, like, dude, it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. All that matters is how qualified are those subscribers to buying something from you and the first issue is is when you look at subscribers most subscribers like even if you're like cnbc you know i don't know if you watch some of their content that they push when they have conferences they'll have millions of subscribers and it's like cool video will still get only 5 000 views one these social networks make it where if you have a lot of subscribers it doesn't mean you're going to get any play.

1:25Two, if you look at a lot of the people who are getting a lot of play, like the Hermozis, and I'm not trying to talk crap, it's worked well for them and good for them. They create content that's very applicable to everyone, right? So if you want subscribers and you're trying to make your content applicable to everyone, I think it works out quite well. But B, or the main reason why I don't think it's worth it is there's way better ways to generate revenue than the time and effort it takes to generate a lot of subscribers. And I have multiple channels where I've done over a million subscribers and I have accounts that are more than just mine that some of them actually have like seven, eight, 10 million plus subscribers.

2:07And I found that it doesn't work as well as some of the old school techniques. And let's look at it. I can try to I have tons of subscribers to help me find businesses to buy in the marketing space, which is what I'm doing. But I have a better ROI just hiring an outbound team to just hit up the ideal profile companies and just find them. Were you there at my event when, uh, so say it was like, you know, instead of, uh, trying to be famous, why don't I just go buy businesses? I wasn't there when he said that, but yeah, no, it makes sense. And I found, for example, instead of having the subscribers and saying like, Hey, who wants to sell your business?

2:45we have a much better ROI of hiring corp dev people and people who worked in the private equity field and just having them do outreach to find his businesses to buy. Or instead of creating tons and tons of subscribers and followers on social media, we find it better to get customers for our ad agency, NP Digital, to just go hire execs who've worked for bigger competitors who have a book of business. It's much cheaper and produces a much higher ROI in the long run from everything we've seen yeah so high level i mean a if you're watching this you have a business you should be focusing on customers ideally but if i were to take it one level higher the algorithms the way they were it did used to matter if you had like a million subs like you actually would get more play like you would get more viewers yeah but that's the promise anymore the game has changed right and what matters is not your it's a vanity metric now subscribers don't matter what matters are the number of views that you're actually getting yes and like also the engagement it's not just because you're buying views from like using paid it's also like how long are they watching the average view duration and how relevant the content is to your core business remember the boat we did a podcast episode that you put on uh instagram i remember you wanted me to share it yeah and i didn't on tiktok it got 1.8 million views and it was about eric was breaking down the difference between a one dollar bow a ten thousand dollar boat a million dollar boat a billion dollar boat etc and i didn't care to share it not Not that the content was bad.

4:10I just knew it wouldn't generate me any customers. I didn't really care. Okay, here's a question for you. Do your Instagram, do you actually get customers from your Instagram? No. That's the question. Okay, so that was irrelevant. You should have shared anyway, you asshole. But the point is. Maybe once a year, twice a year, three times a year we may get a customer. But our ideal customer is someone who is like a CMO of a Fortune 500 company who, you know, will give us many different divisions of their company in many different countries and languages, and it's a big multi-million dollar deal. You're not getting them from Instagram.

4:45What we do get though from Instagram, and here's where the views are important and the subscribers don't really matter too much. When people see our content on social media, it gets them to know about our brand. So then when we're in an RFP, people are like, oh, we've seen Neil and his brand. They're reputable. It gives us a better odd of potentially getting hired. yeah people have more affinity but that doesn't even get us included in the rfps the rfps go through like oh you're in forester you're not in forester like oh you haven't won tons of awards okay you have won tons of awards like it's a lot of black and white like oh our companies worked with a lot of your previous uh your employees at previous companies so we're we had a great experience so we're now willing to include you in the rfp we're just seeing subscribers as a vanity metric that's irrelevant yes it's better to optimize for views and engagement assuming the content's relevant but a subscriber number just doesn't matter that much anymore yeah so the key takeaway here is look subscribers are vanity optimize for views and ideally you're optimizing for views that are relevant to driving conversions for your business and that's all it is at the end of the day like for for example the reason why we're doing this reason why we're recording this is we think this will do well on on youtube right we are optimized we're trying to optimize for views.

6:01We're trying to hook, right? We're playing the game there and there's a game to play for each channel. But at the end of the day, if you're optimizing for the wrong thing, like the example I used on this podcast a long time ago is I optimize. What is that? Listerine. I'm addicted to it. All right. So anyway, Neil just sprayed Listerine into his mouth. So back in my early days of SEO, the way I started out was I optimized for rankings and I was like, you know, I like going to EDM festivals and I like light show videos. So I'm going to make a website I call it lightshowvideos.com. Did you? Yeah.

6:31And I got the number one ranking for it. Like it took me two months to get there. Right. And when I got there, I expected an avalanche of traffic to come through views. Right. I was optimizing for like subscribers instead of views. And what happened? I didn't get any traffic for it. I wasted all the time and effort. Did you remember when you used to come to my place in Vegas just for, is it EDC, EDM? Oh, EDC. Yeah. I came once. EDC. I stayed at your place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, look, point is if you want attention, it's views. It's not subscribers. I'm beating a dead horse now. So just go watch this next video over here and don't forget to rate me and subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow