The Dr. Josh Axe Show - The Future of Marketing and AI - Neil Patel

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Neil Patel has helped shape the world of online marketing as we know it. His innovative strategies and companies have empowered countless entrepreneurs to grow their brands and engage audiences. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Josh Axe goes inside the mind of a marketing master to unearth his secrets to success. Join them as Neil shares the principles, habits, and lessons that took him to the top. You'll discover: How a shy teenager turned into a marketing trailblazer Neil's step-by-step blueprint for productivity Where he sees the future of digital marketing heading The counterintuitive leadership advice that flies in the face of convention Hard-won lessons from major business mistakes Let this inspiring chat with a marketing guru ignite your own career growth and leadership. Want more of The Growth Lab with Dr. Josh Axe? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow Dr. Josh Axe Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Follow Leaders Instagram Twitter Facebook Email Newsletter ------  Links:  Follow Neil Patel Instagram Twitter Facebook Youtube Digital Marketing Blog Marketing School with Neil Patel & Eric Siu Podcast Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And the first thing that you need to do is if you want to do well, you've got to be on all the main platforms that you think your ideal audiences or that you want to build an audience on. So pick six or seven. And the second thing is you don't need to create content for six or seven social networks. They all take pretty much the same content format, either text or images or video. Some are long form video, some are short form video. One podcast interviewed that I don't know how long this will go, but let's call it 30 minutes an hour can probably produce 70, 80 pieces of content. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Growth Lab podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Josh Axe.

Each and every week, we're going to uncover the science behind how to grow yourself, your health, your wealth, and take your relationships and your career to the next level. On today's episode, I'll be interviewing Neil Patel. And I followed Neil for a long time. I've always been incredibly impressed with so much of what he's done as an entrepreneur and a leader in business. And it's an honor to have him today. You know, Neil is one of the most influential marketers and entrepreneurs of my lifetime.

And Neil's the co-founder of multiple multimillion-dollar companies, including Crazy Ag, Kiss Metrics, and NPDigital. And these are actually, you know, Kiss Metrics is something that I know that my team has used some in the past in scaling our businesses, such as ancient nutrition and Dr.ax.com. So again, we've even used his products. And I followed him to get my, to get business advice and marketing advice for many years now. And he's helped iconic brands like Amazon and NBC and. even GM as well. So Neil has a really incredible background in who he's coached and who he's helped in business as well. And, you know, and so Neil and I have talked a few times on the phone over the years. I've called him for advice. And before we started, I was complimenting him as well

because I thought he designed this whole background behind him. But in fact, his wife did. So we got to give her some props too. But hey, Neil, welcome the show. I'm excited to talk everything. kind of career and business and marketing. Well, you know, I think the first time that I learned about you was this is years really early in my Dr. Axe days when I was building Dr.ax.com, I was learning about SEO, search engine optimization and learning about marketing. And I came across your website and just started reading and learning and implementing some of the wisdom that you were teaching on that site. And this was quite a while ago. And then I remember reading your bio and it talked about how you had,

you had built this website and you've done it at a really young age and so one of the things I'd love to start off with and by the way everybody we're going to get into a lot today how to build your personal brand we're going to talk a lot about growing your business your career and marketing and things like that but uh Neil you know tell us how you got your start and how you were successful at such a young age sure so I got my start uh I was 15 and a half I was looking for a high paying job on the internet, I couldn't find a high-paying job. And when I say high-paying, I was looking for six figures. Because most of them required a college degree or certification.

So what I did throughout the whole process, I was searching on so many job boards, like Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Hot Jobs. I don't know if people even use any of them these days. They probably just use LinkedIn. But back then, a lot of those companies were publicly traded. And I'd be like, oh, Monster.com, this is a massive company. and you're talking about, you know, around the dot-com boom, you know, around 2000. And when I was looking at it, I was like, wait, I can't find a job.

But if I build a job board like them and I make 1% of their revenue, I'm going to be a millionaire. And I thought you would just pop something up, making 1% of a competitor isn't hard, didn't know how to create a website, paid a person that I found on a forum called Web Hosting Talk, hired them for a few thousand bucks, saved that money from picking up trash and cleaning restrooms at a theme park. And a few months later, had a job board, no one came to it, wasn't making any money.

Saved up more money, paid a marketing firm, didn't get results, was broke, frustrated from not getting the results, had no choice but to learn it on my own, got good at it, got a ton of traffic, but still my job board wasn't making any money because I didn't know how to monetize. And that's how I got my start

and I realized I was decent at the marketing end, but not the business end. And I was like, you know, I'm just going to go to college, get a college degree and just wrap this up and go get a high-paying job instead of just trying this entrepreneur thing. I was 16 roughly at the time.

You know, fast forward a few months. So 16 now. My first class was Speech 101. I gave a speech on how Google's algorithm works and how to get traffic. someone in that company is like oh i'm a sales rep out this company we're looking for someone like you keep in mind back then it was much more novel they're like do you want a gig hired me on an hourly basis i was making over a hundred bucks an hour gave me a few grand and then they're like do you want

just implement this for us we'll give me five grand a month i was like sold right drove them 20-ish 25 million somewhere between that range in in revenue now i didn't drive the revenue i drove the leads the sales team closed the leads, right? So it was a team effort. But I drove that much more money and incremental leads. And I did well enough where the founder of that company was a power supply company. He introduced me to his son who owned an ad agency. He got me countrywide as a client that's now Bank of America because they went belly under the 2008 bus.

They got me ING direct and they got me Blue Cross Blue Shield. And there he was paying me five grand per. account, you know, combined with the five grand I was making from his father, 16 years old, making 20 grand a month, I was just like, sold. That's how I got my start. Wow. You know, I love that. You know, I think that one of the things that I've been so impressed with you over the years, too, is your ability to also coach other people. You know, I think that's a skill. So again, I see you've got the skill for marketing and for supporting your own growth, but also you've got an incredible ability to help coach others and help other people grow in their careers and businesses.

you know, I think we have almost, I was trying to think of a question of that almost everybody would have for you. And I think most people would want to grow, most people want to grow their social media following. Most people want to have more influence, right? And so what is your, what are some of your best pieces of advice and some of the essential components for anyone out there who wants to grow their following on social media and have more influence? So the average person as of June 2023 is on. on 6.6 social networks. That's the first step that most people need to know. Most people, and I've been to so many conferences

and when I'm speaking on stage, I ask people, most people like, they know more than one, they know more than two, they're like three, maybe four, very few people think five or six, but that average is actually closer to seven than it is to six. And when I say they're on, they're on actively.

They're not just, oh, I have a username and login and I never log in, it's actually they're using. So that's quite a bit of platform. right like if you look at you and me same right i'm actively on on twitter uh instagram facebook tictock uh lincoln uh what's that youtube uh now threads a little bit i don't know if i may name linkedin but either way it's somewhere around there right yeah so the amount of social networks that people use is actually much more than most people think and the first thing that you need to do is if you want to do well, you've got to be on all the main platforms that you think

your ideal audiences or that you want to build an audience on. So pick six or seven. Then the second thing is you don't need to create content for six or seven social networks. They all take pretty much the same content format, either text or images or video. Some are long-form video, some are short-form video. But if they're short-form video, you don't need to create short-form video. You can create long-form videos like this. And at the end of this, once this episode goes live, I'll ask you for the footage and my team will slice and dice this interview up and create short form reels from this

and put that on Instagram and TikTok and all these other social platforms. So what I'm getting at is you need to repurpose your content. So for example, if you filmed a podcast and you're putting it out there on the web, you can do it in video, you can put the long form on YouTube. LinkedIn has a 10 minute cap.

You can cut it up into a 10 minute size and put it on LinkedIn. You can cut up in smaller segments and create reels or short form videos and put them on YouTube, shorts, TikTok, you know, Facebook, etc. You can take sound bites of this and or quotes and start putting them up on places like Twitter. You can take nuggets from this and put them on places like Twitter or LinkedIn. In essence, you can repurpose the content. One podcast interviewed that I don't know how long this will go, but let's call it 30 minutes. sour can probably produce 70, 80 pieces of content. That's true. Yeah, yeah, if you think, just to give you, just to, just to prove what Neil,

Neil here is saying everybody, you know, if we, we do this video shoot, let's say it's 45 minutes long. And then we'll take this, we'll post this on iTunes as a podcast, we'll post it on YouTube as a video, we'll take that the, the video and also turn it into shorts. We'll then post on Instagram and that'll be broken down into maybe 10 or 12, you know, video. on there, we'll also post it on Facebook. I'll have my team who writes articles take some of the best pieces of advice Neil gives during this interview and then we'll post it on leaders.com as an article, which will then post to LinkedIn and then it will take the best quotes here that Neil has and we'll post

those to Twitter. Anyways, just to prove your point there, you're 100% right. This is the most effective way to do this. And I think a lot of times, people, Neil, people feel like, well, I need to do this all myself. I need to post everywhere myself. I need to do it all. And listen, if you're doing this just out of pure hobby or for fun, maybe that's true to start. But you can hire somebody like I did early on. I hired a part-time assistant for 10 hours a week. And they did all that part for me, right? So I mean, it really, somebody could probably with thrown out a number there, $500 a month, hire somebody to actually

do a lot of this for them. Exactly. You can find a lot of people on Upwork. So as we discussed, how do you get more followers? One, you join more than six social networks. Two, you create content, whether it's podcast or videos or whatever you want, and then repurpose it because if you're not pushing out content on a daily base on all the platforms, you're not going to grow.

Three, start doing collabs with other people like interview styles like this, and we both are pushing out the content. It helps us both get more followers. Even if you're starting from scratch, you yourself can interview people who have an audience, and that'll help you get an audience once they start pushing it out to their followers. So you don't need an audience to ask someone to be on your show or to be interviewed. And the next one that I would say, and this is the most important one, especially right now when everyone's talking about AI, is to create unique content.

Most people right now are focused on how they can use AI, just help them create a ton of content that's regurgitated information that doesn't have anything unique in their. and people don't care for that. What they want to see is unique stuff that hasn't been talked about before. No one wants the same regurgitated stuff over and over again. Yeah, it's so true.

And we're seeing that more and more. And I think, you know, I was talking to my team about this recently, just the importance of also having personal brands, oftentimes or a person actually attached to businesses. I think when I think about 50 years ago, not to say that icons weren't important because they were. But I think now more than ever, the companies that I'm seeing really grow and grow

really quickly, they have a personality. Again, Elon Musk is a great example, right? You know, Tesla and SpaceX and now Twitter, or I guess it's X, you know, business. You know, it's, you know, everything is personal brand. And I think it's like people, people want that. People trust a person more than they do a brand that has no sort of, you know, doesn't feel like you have a relational connection there. And I think there's such an opportunity, as you're saying, there's an opportunity for micro influencers now to go out there and make a living. In fact, we have a friend staying with us right now, and he does TikTok. I want to say he's probably 23 years old.

And he makes money full time, just posting on TikTok and Instagram. So anyways, there's an incredible opportunity for a lot of people out there. When you think about somebody who's in the space and they're just getting started, and as you're saying, they need to add. value or they need to be unique, right? What are some of the creative ways that just for yourself and your own business? Because one of the things I've felt that I've noticed about you is you put out a lot of content and a lot of great and unique content. How do you get in a rhythm and flow or that level of innovation plus productivity? What is your personal workflow in order to

do that? So the way I get a lot done throughout my day, and get a lot of productivity is I sleep early, I wake up early don't drink any caffeine or anything like that, don't need it, don't drink alcohol, I eat really clean like no fried food or I don't need tons of sugar or any of that kind of stuff

I work out every single day at least 15, 20 minutes, worst case I'll do a high intensity interval training exercise ideally I try to get in like a 45 minute to hour workout at least five times a week and I don't go to sleep without having all my emails read and all my major tasks that I need to accomplish for the day done. There you go. That's good. That's a recipe for success. It's a lot of levels of these are a lot of

really good disciplines that add up over time. I love that. You know, one of the things I've recently got into, and I've kind of always done this, but now that I've read a study on it, I'm like, oh, that's what I do. But timeboxing, right? It's like if I have a two-hour time spot, I am obsessive of this is all I'm doing right now with excellence, right? And so I think that's a common characteristics I see with people like yourself that get a lot done. And then I also do intermittent fasting, which I'm not saying is good or bad for you, but I always feel like I have more energy from it. I've been doing that for I don't know how many years, but maybe like five, six years. Yeah, I think it depends on a person, but I think for a lot of people, intermittent fasting has loads of benefits and especially for clarity

of thinking that early on in the day, I think it's got, it really has, has tremendous, tremendous benefits for a lot of people. You're right. It allows me to be, for me, it's helping me become sharper and allows me, I've noticed me completing my task quicker. I also spend less time eating because I'll eat from 12 to six, two meals a day, you know, not that hard. Yeah.

Hey, talk to me about this. So I think there's a combination as an entrepreneur of being highly strategic and making a plan, but also just going out there and doing it. kind of see two people that sometimes get themselves in trouble. One, they're so strategic that they never do anything. And another group of people that they have no strategy, they just start posting and doing stuff. So talk to me about sort of the balance or what you recommend and how your workflow works in terms of how do you strategize and plan, but then also how do you just get stuff out there? So the way strategize and plan is I typically look at what's the goals,

what do you need to do to accomplish the goals? And you can get a lot of those insights by just looking at your competition, whether it's a business, or whether it's, if your goal is to get more social followers, looking at other people in your space and seeing what they're doing, and you start coming up with a plan, hey, this is the trends that I've noticed that other people are following, this is what they're doing to get results, and this is what they're posting or this is how they're running their business. And what you want to do is you just want to then start going and executing it. Once you feel confident enough, and if you're not sure what you're doing, literally just reach out to a few people, you can ask them, or you can do it.

YouTube searches there's no joke on how much information is out there for free that'll give you ideas and it'll help validate your ideas on top of that and then from there go and execute it'll never be perfect it'll never go as right as you want and I'll never it'll never happen without any issues you're always gonna run into problems and that's okay you can learn to adapt and pivot and and just modify as you're going and executing. So I want to talk about AI for a minute. And this is something I know that, you know, you have a pulse on.

In fact, I've been watching some of your posts on Instagram and learning myself from you on this. In five to 10 years, how is search going to be different? How is AI? How are we going to be using AI? Like how will the world have changed and even our lives based on AI? So I've known a lot of people that work at Google. And Google, in theory, has one of the biggest indexes of the world's information, right? They've been scraping for a long time, gathering biggest search engine out there, all the data points to it.

One thing, when you search on Google, and you would know this better than anyone else because you're in the medical field, how many times have you searched on Google and seen misinformation in your field? Well, on both sides, I mean, a lot. I mean, you know, a lot. It's never perfect, right? There's a lot of misinformation out there. Google has tried to fix misinformation for a very, very long time. It's not like they take this for granted and they don't focus on it. They've had updates like the medic update or things called Your Money, Your Life to make sure that hopefully the information out there isn't affecting people in a negative way, like people giving financial.

advice or medical advice and hurting people because there's people out there and again you know this you must have seen sites and people saying oh this product cures cancer you do this you'll be good and it's like oh yeah people really pitch whatever they want to end up pitching and what you'll find is the way i i works is it's scraping the web kind of like google's index or microsoft's index for chat gpt or you know google has their own barred uh which is their version of chat GPT. And when you're scraping all the information out there, it's really hard for AI to decipher.

This is accurate and this is inaccurate. Surgeons have been trying to solve this problem for ages, and they haven't solved it yet because more misinformation continually happens on new topics each and every single day, even some of the old stuff. And when a lot of people believe it, even if it's false, you know, you still see it. So it's hard for the AI to create content,

that is 100% accurate, right? Chad GPT's talked about how a lot of the content that's produced by them is not 100% accurate. Bart understands this because they know when you search on Google, a lot of the rankings are inaccurate or the listings on page 1.

So when search uses AI, keep in mind they don't want to harm users. So their purpose of AI is to give suggestions, not to necessarily, and I say necessarily, because sometimes it will, but not always to give you the answer. It'll help you uncover the information faster

and help you come to the answer quicker. And the reason that's their focus is the last thing they want to do is provide you with misinformation. Because it's one thing for you to read an article when you do a search on Google and be like, this is off. It's another thing for Google to just give you the answer

and it being off, right? Then you're going to be like Google sucks as a search engine versus, oh, this site sucks. Let me go back and look at another listing. That's a very key element there because if Google gives you answers all the time and some of them are going to be off, users would be like Google sucks. And I'm not saying Google sucks because that's what would start going through their heads. Search engines using AI are trying to help you uncover what you're looking for faster.

That's their goal. And that's what you're going to see. Even if you're trying to buy a product, I'm looking and Google gave the example of this, I pedal to bike, or I mean, I pedal to work on a bike, and it takes me five miles a day, and I go through up and down hills. Here are all the bikes based on the reviews that could be useful. Oh, I prefer the color red, and I would like it to be electric because if I don't want to pedal, I can just click a button and it'll just help me up the hills. Here's the tent that you should look at if you're interested based on other people's feedback, right? That's what they're trying to do.

And the big shift you're going to see in search over the next five years to answer your question in a short and firm, you're going to start seeing them provide more suggestions without you clicking over to websites. And then the other thing that you're going to see is you're going to see more long-tail searches. So right now, people may search banana nutrition facts or, you know, how healthy is eating a banana? versus I have a kid and a dog and I'm looking to do an outdoor activity today in Vegas. What's the best place to go that's not too hot that my kid and dog will have fun with? Wow. Yeah, I can see it. You know, Neil, I've been using chat GTP a really pretty significant amount.

And the thing that I found is that, yeah, there is actually has a lot of misinformation, right? It gives you this misinformation. Like, in fact, I've asked it to cite medical studies frequently, and I'm like, that's not the study at all. Like, this is a complete miscitation. So I had to stop relying on it in certain senses. But to help me, let me give an example. I was trying to come up with a title for my next book. And I was trying to think about ideas around personal growth or this or that. But it helped me ideate about, you know, 50 different ideas for book titles and topics to do videos on.

And then like my wife and I, my wife, my wife's pregnant. And so we're like, hey, thanks. But we're like, well, here are some baby names we like. What are some other baby names that are similar to these names that have a similar meaning or a similar, you know. And so I think everyday people, as you're saying, I think sometimes people think right now with barred or chat, GTP or any form of AI, this is for somebody in the technical field. But this is going to be a valuable tool for really everybody, including my wife and I, trying to. figure out baby names. Yes. And it's funny because right now people are under, they're underestimating what AI will do for them five, six years from now. And they're overestimating

what it can do for them today. They think right now AI can solve all their problems and automate their businesses and just provide growth that doesn't work that way. Five, six years from now, possibilities are endless because technology is, you know, evolving at such a rapid pace. and going back to what you were saying, AI can be used to help you solve basic problems. I need to write a note to my dad. You know, give me some ideas. And what you can do, even though some of the outputs that AI creates are off,

it can be a starting ground and then you can go and then modify it. It can save you a lot of time. It's not perfect, but it still can save you a lot of time if you just go in and modify what it's giving you versus creating something from scratch. Yeah, absolutely agree. I think our writers for leaders.com have found it probably is cut down, their research time by about 30% or so. So we've definitely seen some improvements there.

Another question I had for you is, anytime that we're in the field of social media or marketing, things change rapidly. I feel like every year they change even more rapidly. And that's one of the reasons why I love to follow you and read your blogs, but also watch a lot of your videos on YouTube, but also Instagram. And what are some areas today of marketing,

marketing or just online trends. What are some things that are, you know, that have that, that are dead now? And then what are some things that are really growing and flourishing and you think are going to be the future? Sure. So some of the things, there's actually not too many things that are dead. What we find is they just don't work as well. Right. So it's just like emo marketing still converts extremely well. It just worked better from an open rate perspective, a quick rate perspective, etc. six years ago than it does today. Still works, still profitable, just not as profitable and as good as it was five, six, seven years ago, right? And what we're finding is most of the stuff that's dead were shady tactics. Like, oh, you can rank at the top of Google, buy this bot, it'll just

click on your listing and not click on the competition so you just rise up. Like a lot of those things are deads, but they were just like phony, fake black hat type of stuff. And there was those kind of strategies for most things. Like in social media, oh, just follow a ton of people and you'll be super popular because a lot of them follow you back and unfollow the ones that don't follow you. Right? Like those short, gimmicky things, most of them are dead. The stuff that's really working right now is a content repurposing.

We talked about that because if you end up doing that, you can end up being on all major platforms. And the second thing is live content. Platforms really want live content and they're seeing it harder and harder to actually get users to go live. The reason they want live content is because they're also competing with attention, just generally in your day. Whether someone watches TV or whether they're watching you live on Instagram, they want you live on Instagram over watching the Kardashians on TV, right? So that's another one.

Another big trend that we're seeing right now that companies are starting to leverage, but they haven't been leveraging enough, is actually podcasting. There's less than 10 million podcasts, but yet there's over a billion blogs. Blogging is a saturated space. Podcasting isn't that saturated yet. And it's growing at a very rapid pace. So a lot of businesses are, A, looking to create podcasts. And B, they're looking to advertise on other podcasts to promote their podcasts because they found when they do ads on other podcasts that are similar and put an ad spot for their podcast,

it creates much quicker growth in viewership. Wow. And then you'll build up a much low audience that you can sell, et cetera. Another big trend that we're seeing is communicating with customers through multiple channels. And I'm not talking about social media, just like how you're on social media. And when you post something on Instagram and TikTok, even if someone follows you on both, they may not see your content on one, but they may see it on another because of the algorithms. People are also starting to do the same thing in marketing with their communications. So people aren't just using email now.

They're using push notification. They're using messenger bots. they're also using text message marketing. Those four combine allow you to get more in touch with your customer when you want versus only just relying on email and someone may not opening up the email. Yeah, wow, that's good. Yeah, I think, you know, when I think about, one of the things we're doing a lot more now, too, is sending text messages, direct messages, right?

I think these are things that people are doing more of. You know, I read an interesting study the other day, and I think you're going to intuitively already know this because of, you know, you have such a good pulse on what's going on. But I wrote a study that said, basically, you know, when you look at the baby boom or generation and sort of the later Gen Xers, they are very, very attuned to cable television, right? So that's still how a primary way they consume their information.

You go to millennials, it's via streaming. So it's Netflix, right? Disney Plus, it's those sort of channels. But Gen Z, when you look at the way that they consume information or entertainment, they're more likely to just sit on YouTube or TikTok for six hours just watching their favorite influencers than they are to go and pay a subscription to cable or whatever to actually watch a produce TV show. That kind of blew my mind because I mean, I'm very, you know, I'm very close to Gen X. And so for me, it was like, okay, streaming, whatever, but for me to sit there on YouTube for

six hours a day. But there are a lot of people that do that, right? There are. So the last that I saw was Gen Z prefers YouTube. for once over and that happened last year they preferred YouTube over Netflix which is kind of crazy to think about but there's a lot of interesting stats just in general that we take for granted like McKinsey did a report and they found that roughly 55 to 60 percent of at least the last one I looked at 55 to 60 percent of large corporations are already using AI and implementing and they have been for many many years but when you look at AI now it started becoming mass stream

everyone's like, AI, it's great for content generation. Well, it doesn't cost that much money to create content or pay for content. The real value in AI is systems and processes, at least right now. And when you talk about marketing, where we're seeing a massive trend with in marketing is most corporations are spending a lot of money on ads. Google did roughly $160 billion a year or did in the last 12 months in ad revenue, just from ads on Google. partner sites, Facebook does over 100 billion a year. You know how much wastage there is? Companies are not starting to use AI to analyze their analytics in real time,

combine all the different sources into one place, analyze that data in real time to give their team more insights and then their team figures out if they want to take action on that data or not, which is allowing companies to make better informed decisions and save money quicker and redeployed into other places that could be more profitable. Yeah, you know, I think that like first off when I hear that, I'm, It makes total sense that AI is able to do that and that larger corporations are able to benefit from that. How about for small businesses and entrepreneurs?

Are there any tools out there that what are some of the best AI-driven tools that you think entrepreneurs and small businesses could benefit from? So I love Mid-Journey. Mid-Journeys for images. You got chat GPT. You got BARD. Those are three that you can just use for free. Now, there's a lot of other companies integrating AI, like in marketing. We do it at UberSys, we do it, or competition like SEMRush does it,

Jasper does it. There's a lot of options. But what I would tell people right now is there's not any one leader in the AI space other than Bard and ChatGPT. And Bard is producing better results for most people. Most people don't know that ChatGPT's index is from 2021. Maybe it's getting a little bit more updated now. Bards is a few weeks old, right?

So the information, the output you're going to get from Bard should in theory be better. For example, if you're asking chat GPT stuff about COVID, BART is going to give you much more accurate results because it can pull more recent articles than chat GPT, for example. And what I would tell anyone who's interested in AI is, A, don't worry about building a ton of AI tools if you're an entrepreneur. B, look at all the tools that exist, a lot of the free ones. Test and try a lot of them, see what works best for you.

But C, and this is the most important one, is there's going to be a lot of duds in the AI space, and let other people spend the time and energy to figure out how to make these tools more practical and useful. Because even if they provide the tools, you've got to figure out how to integrate into your workflows and your systems and figure out how to effectively use them. And then start investing more time into it versus just being the one who's experimenting all day because you can get trapped in this, you know, a rabbit hole of tons of AI tools. And then you look at your output. It's actually not going up. You're just spending a ton of time on these tools and it's actually getting anything.

Yeah, that's good. What are a couple of the biggest mistakes that you see content creators making today, whether that's a person that's got 10,000 people on their social account or a major influencer? One, they're not posting enough. You should ideally be posting a few times a day and enough social networks. Two, you're not engaging with your audience. If you're not willing to respond to them, engage and help them. What's the point?

Social networks are all about being social. So just consider participating and helping people out. and we find that the not just the bigger profiles, but the smaller profiles don't want to take that time and energy, but yet they want more followers and they don't want to put in the energy to help out their followers. The other thing that they're not doing

is cross promoting from their channels. Again, just because someone follows you on TikTok doesn't mean they see your content on Instagram or they may not even follow you there. So you need a cross promote, and that'll help you get more followers in multiple places. And the other big mistake we're seeing is people are relying on AI to create all their content,

And like, oh, this is just quicker and easier. So let me just create a lot of generic regurgitated information versus something that's unique and fresh. People want unique fresh. They don't regurgitated information. You know, one of the things that I've seen is I've, I engage a lot on Instagram. Instagram and YouTube are probably the platforms that I probably comment on and engage with the most. And one of the things I've noticed about certain accounts and you'll be familiar with these people. You know, Jay Shetty is one.

and another's Andrew Huberman. And when I go to their profiles, let's say on Instagram, the first probably at least one hour, but probably two to three hours and sometimes even six hours I noticed after they make a post, they are responding to almost everything, every person they can comment to,

they do comment to. And we're talking about probably, I think they're ranked in number one and two in terms of the health and personal growth podcast that are out there. They're the top two. And again, you go to their social channels.

And as you said, their big thing is engagement. I mean, if somebody, if there is something that could be commented on and something that they can have a conversation with, they're doing it. So you hit the nail on the head. One of the biggest factors in these social algorithms is engagement from a comment perspective. It's easy to double tap and like something or heart it, but it's actually much more work to convince someone to leave a comment. So if you convince, if someone leaves a comment and then you start participating and it creates more engagement, more comments, that's what tells us social networks. Hey, people are engaging with this.

There's something here. We should show it to more people. That's how you get more eyeballs. You know, one of the other things, too, I was on Huberman's page. And I was just telling him, hey, I think this is great. And then I posted another study on something that he was posting on. And I want to say I had probably 500 or more likes off of his one, just adding another valuable piece of content.

And so I think that's something else as well, is that, you know, if there's a, and I've heard you say this. In fact, I was watching a video you did not long ago where you said, we, you You know, you want to be interacting, too, on pages of people that you love and respect and who, you know, you have, your, both creators are adding similar types and valuable content. Yeah, you want to interact and engage within other pages, profiles within your community. If you want to, the big thing that platforms are looking for is something called E, and it's E-E-A-T, experience, expertise, authority, and trust. And if you want the authority and the trust in your space, you've got to participate and help people out, not just ones who are following you, but within the whole community. And that a lot of times is on other people's profiles and other people's pages.

I love it. That's great advice. You know, one of the, I know that you oversee a team of people you have in multiple businesses. I want to talk about leadership for a minute. When you think about and you follow a lot of leaders, again, you've acted as a lot of leader. What do you think some of the most important things or the most important characteristics and actions a leader can take in order to grow and scale their business? So the biggest thing that I've learned in my career as a leader, if you want to do well, there's typically someone who's already done it out there before. Most of us are not trying to create an Uber. And when I say Uber, at that time, Uber was transforming an existing industry and changing it, right?

most people are creating standard type of businesses. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I have a marketing agency. We weren't the first marketing agency out there. You have a health and wellness company. By no means were you the first health and wellness person out there, right? And I'm not saying that in a bad way. We're in existing industries.

Now, you may do business a little bit differently, or you may have a different product or service or a different spin on it. But what you'll find is there's people who have worked in your space and have already solved the problems that you're trying to solve. So the most important thing that we've done to really cause growth is you look for existing people who have done what you're trying to do. So we go to LinkedIn. We look for people who have worked for two or three of our competitors.

We look for people who were in the exact roles that we're hiring for to help us solve our problems. We then look at their profiles and make sure that they were at the competition for a decent while of time, multiple years. If they're there for a year, one and a half years, two years, or six months and they quit, usually not loyal to a brand. The next thing we look for is people who continually got to promote it at that company. You interview someone, everyone will tell you how they're amazing,

and they solved everyone's problems, and they provided all these results. It's really hard to actually figure out if they were the person that caused it or someone else did. But if someone worked for two of your competitors, they worked there for many years, and they got promoted two, three times at each of those competitors and they kept going up, that means your competition found invaluable in most cases. So the chances are if they've done what you're looking to solve for your competition, and they've done it two times for your competition, right, two different places, this is a good chance they'll do it again the third time for you.

If they did it only at one of your competitors could have been luck. They did have multiple competitors, there's a good chance they'll be able to replicate it for you. Can I tell you, I love this answer so much. And if I were asked the same question, it might be a very similar answer. And some of this is based on an ancient principle. In fact, a lot of times it's called the law of modeling, a part of what you shared. But it's also an ancient ethical principle. In fact, there are many types of ethics, but I studied this in college.

And so one of those is called virtue ethics. And so it's like, well, how do you know what a virtuous thing is? How do you know what's good and evil? Well, the number one way throughout history to know that is asking the question, well, what would a virtuous person do? So, for instance, what would Mother Teresa do? Or if you look at the Christian faith, what would Jesus do? If you're a Buddhist, what would Buddha do?

Or if you're a marketer, I want to be a marketer like me, it's what would Neil do? But anyways, all that being said, but that's, this is such a key principle because I constantly see entrepreneurs and people trying to say, well, I'm just going to figure it out myself versus doing what you're saying and saying, who are the best people, let's say, the best five people in my space and go and model. and doing what they're doing for success. In fact, throughout history, you know, mentorship and, you know, and learning the trade of your father or someone else was sort of like, you know,

being an apprentice was the way that you learned and grew. And for me, like my greatest growth came from, you know, following my mentors to a T, just doing what they said. So anyways, I love what you said there so much because it is one of the greatest laws of leadership out there. So good. And it's one of the biggest mistakes I see people making. They hire based on what they like.

yes, you need to look at things like cultural fit and values and ethics and, you know, are they going to execute and all these kind of things. But typically, if someone worked for your competition, multiple of them and they continually got promoted, there's a good chance, you know, they fit the box in most cases. Yeah, so good. You know, there are a lot of content creators. I was having this conversation with my team as well. And I said, you know what? When you look at content platforms, like Forbes, for example, I'm trying to, we're trying to grow leaders.com. that business and be able to be eventually, you know, early on, I said, I want to be a competitor of Forbes

and bring a lot of leadership and business and personal growth content to the world. And I realized that their model, it works for them right now only because they started so early and they're so big right now. But you look at the companies that are growing very quickly. To me, they're all personality-driven companies. Again, I know that this is more of a political company, but just to give an example, like the Daily Wire, they're on the right, but man, their influence is really great. or we could talk about individuals, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, you know, you know, so it's personal. People, people bond more with personalities and individuals than a corporate faceless company. Well, when I mentioned some of those people or maybe other people

that come to mind that have really rosen very quickly and that they've become very popular, what are some of the things that you see them doing right? You know, what are the things that have made someone like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brands so popular today? Well, a lot of times they'll be somewhat polarizing in the content that they end up putting out there.

And if you take a hard stance, if you look at the United States, and I don't know about the rest of the world, I travel a lot, but I know this for sure in the United States. It's actually, it's become more and more polarizing, right? People are either more left or more right, and they have very specific views.

And I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm just telling you that's just the reality. And when you look at content, when you take a hard stance on what you believe in and other people disagree, it is much easier to get a following really quickly. That is a big thing that you're seeing a lot of these personalities do. And it's worked out really well from it. And I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't do that, but that is a quick way to grow a personality or you're following much, much quicker. I remember this guy, you know, years and years ago, he went on Dr. Phil, and this guy didn't actually believe this. He was a marketer.

And his whole thing where men are better than women. And he never really believed that at all. He just put on this personality and created this website as a joke. And he's just like, oh my God, this is super polarizing content. And you're not talking about like five, six, seven years ago. You're talking about 10 plus years ago. Now, of course, I didn't think that he should have done the experiment in the way. in the first place, but teach their own.

He wanted to do it. And he ended up creating that, had this fake persona, and it just blew up super fast because he's just like, men are better than women. I'm like, I don't agree with that. But that's what, you know, he was making that pitch. And even he didn't agree with that, but just had millions of followers and silly. And the main reason is. Well, today we see this, this big conversation around a similar thing on, you know, example,

Andrew Tate, right? There's a whole side of masculinity and a very strong side of femininity. And it's even turned into almost the political camps as well, which is crazy. But this is true. I mean, this now, I think it's more true now. You know, I was thinking about this the other day. I'm a big John Maxwell fan. I've read probably 10 or 15 leadership books by John Maxwell.

But I was thinking to myself, I thought, I wonder if John, if he came out with those same books today, if they would be quite as popular because they're not polarizing at all as part of my point. I mean, they are incredibly value life lessons that I love, but I thought, I wonder, you know, I was just trying to think of sort of the difference between some of those books today versus some of the books. And I still think they'd be popular, but I don't know.

I mean, there's more competition. They're not polarized. Anyways, as you said, just the, you know, being polarizing is, is those people are the people that are the most popular today. By far. And we're seeing it, you know, create mountains of movement when it comes to followers by being more polarizing we don't really recommend it to people but if you really want to build your brand quickly polarizing really helps

now most people we work with our large corporations they're not going to be polarizing nor what i ever tell them to right doesn't they got to be neutral and try to gobble up as much market share as possible yeah yeah that's good well look at what we've had recently i mean and this happened more in the left but something like bud light right it's like hey let's be polarizing And for some companies, it has been incredibly damaging. That's a really good point. Financially, you know, their numbers, you know, they lost a lot of market share in Bud Light because of it. And I'm not saying it's good or bad.

I'm just saying financially, if you just look at it from the financial standpoint, whatever their goals were, if their goals weren't financial and their goals were to peel their broader demographic, I think they did a good job. If their goal was to generate more revenue, then, of course, it ended up hurting them. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I love to ask entrepreneurs like yourself and people that have been able to experience a really incredible amount of successes, have you had any failures in your life that you've really been able to walk away with a great lesson from? I've had one too many failures. The biggest lesson I've learned in a hard way is focus. I've tried doing way too many things, way too many times. You know, these days I focus on my agency, NP Digital. We focus on the marketing space. And yeah, we have marketing software and all that kind of stuff,

but the goal is just to help companies grow their traffic and sales online. It's our core mission, and that's what we help people do, and we do whatever it takes to achieve those results, as long as it's ethical. And we're following the law, of course. But, yeah, just focus is the big thing. And I think when people really derail from their focus, you're distracted, you're not going to put in the time and energy that something needs to succeed.

the other big business lesson that I ended up learning over the years, and this wasn't from a failure, but I read a little bit too much. And when I say I read like economists, Bloomberg, CNBC, I read a lot of, you know, just about the world, finance, etc. And I also spend a lot of time analyzing corporations, their financials, what they're doing to grow, where they're generating their revenue. and living here in America, you know, America is a great country. There's a lot of great countries, though. And I'm not trying to say America's worse or better or anything like that. But what I've learned over the years is, like, whatever country you live in and you're born in, sometimes you are in a little bit of a bubble in which you think, wow, this country has so much opportunity.

And it probably does. But if you look at most corporations, they're not generating their revenue from the, United States or UK or China. It's actually a mixture of like 100, 200 countries. It's just a massive number. And you're just like, ah, they barely make percentage wise that much money from Brazil or that much money from like Mexico. But you start adding up a lot of these little, you know, one percentiles, two percentiles,

three percentiles portion of the revenue. Next thing you know, their international expansion now accounts for like 60, 70, 70, 80 percent of their revenue, right? And that's the thing that was really eye-opening for me in which if you want to do well in business, it's not about the United States. It's not about China. It's not about Russia. It's not about Ukraine or Brazil or Mexico or any one of these single countries. The way you generate revenue is through global expansion.

Now, some countries you may not want to expand into. Like some, and I won't mention names, we don't expand into because of, you know, their beliefs or they may be. want to enact or engage in war in other countries and people suffer from it. So some of those countries, you know, like Russia, we're not in Russia and, you know, we don't want to support their economy. And I'm not saying it's a Russian people or anything like that, you know, don't want to get political here, but you can decide where you want to expand or you don't want to expand into. And we found that expansion globally has really helped grow revenue really fast for us. And it's something all the big corporations do. Yeah, yeah, you know, I've seen a

couple of things. One, it can be really challenging to expand globally if you don't have the right strategy. But also, as you're saying, you know, if you really want to be able to increase your market and sometimes tap into more blue oceans, I mean, you're able to do that. I had a friend who sold health courses. And he did it in the United States and he did okay. But then he went to Germany and certain areas of Europe and other areas and, you know, just had his programs translated. And he ended up making 10x what he was in the U.S. I mean, just to your point. It's there. And again, sometimes we might think, oh, this is only a massive, you know, organization. But the truth is he had a team of like five people. I mean, so, you know,

sometimes you can expand without, without paying a really, really heavy price. You know, I had a few other questions here for you, Neil, Neil, before you go. One is, you know, we've talked a lot about people growing their marketing. You know, you've shared some things on how to grow businesses. Talk to me about how important self-growth is, you know, growing yourself as a person, as a leader. And then what are some things that practices that you have in order to help, you know, grow yourself? I think it's super important to grow yourself, not just to create a brand, but also always to improve yourself. You know, if you just think about it in general in life, just like how you want to grow a business, you can always become, get better.

each and every single day. Learn from your mistakes, try to avoid them over and over again, try to be kind to others and engage and help people out. I was listening to an Instagram clip a long, long time ago. And someone gave, they asked their kids, you know, a few questions before they went to bed. One of them was something like, you know, what happened great for you today,

what was really tough for you today. But the main two questions was, you know, Those were two of the four, but the main two questions that they focused on, they asked their kids every single night was, what's something that someone did really kind to you today? Or what was something that, and the second one was, what is something kind that you did for someone else? And they asked your children that every single night, and it trained them mentally to look out for moments to really help other people and be kind to them. And that was a way that they just helped raise really good kids. and I look at everything in life as just little tweaks.

If you just get a little bit better each and every single day, it doesn't have to be noticeable, but after a year, it really adds up. I love it. That's such good advice. I know we both have little kids. I've seen you posting with your little one. And, you know, I was reading this, you know, psychology study recently just talking about from the ages, especially one to five years old. I mean, just, you know, just the amount of sponges and just the amount of sort of neural,

you know, habituation, just just that's, starts to happen is just absolutely incredible. So anyways, I love that practice. That is, that's awesome. You know, I think the other thing is, there's a another thing I put in a book I have coming out, but it was retention rates based on if you read it versus if you teach it. And so there's something to be said about not only, you know, the child receiving that information, but if you're as a parent sharing that, it's going to have a similar impact on you probably as well. So anyways, I love sort of the duality of that in terms of it benefiting both parts. parties when you're sharing that. By the way, I might start doing that with my daughter,

Arwin. I love that advice. That's so good. You know, one of the things I've noticed, do what? It works out really well when they're young. They'll actually try to help other kids and stuff like that. You'll see. Try it out. Yeah, I love that. I'm excited. You know, one of the things I can tell about you, Neil, is that you're also, you're very motivated. You know, I asked you earlier about sort of your day and you shared with me some of your time management of eating health, going to bed early, waking up early, your exercise regimen, all these things. How do you personally stay motivated? You know, one of the things I'm going to be covering this next week, but getting more into

that there's an epidemic of loneliness, there's an epidemic of mental health disorders out there today. What are some of the ways that you stay mentally fit? And also, you know, the studies are the more time you spend on social media over an hour, you know, the more it can start to, for some people, degrade or cause, you know, be negative their mental health. What are some of your thoughts on that? I agree with that.

I'm not a big user of social media. I get weak posts on there. There's probably, I probably don't spend more than an hour myself on social platforms on a weekly basis. My team helps with the commenting. I log in every single day. There's too many comments for me to just follow up with myself at this point. But I try not to spend more than an hour or two.

I try to just enjoy the real life for what it is. And the second thing is when you talk about passion, or when you talk about finding, being motivated, it typically comes for me passion. And what I've seen is if you love what you're doing, you don't look at things as time. You don't look at it as like, I accomplish this, I'm done. You look at it as you just keep doing it because you love it.

And the easiest way to stay motivated is you find something you love. And what do you love? Well, most people believe you grow up. You're like, I want to be a policeman or firefighter or ask. and that's what you're going to be. Most people don't end up being what they wanted to as a little kid. What you find what you're passionate about is you just try a lot of stuff. And typically what you're naturally good at and what you want to spend more time at is usually what you're passionate about.

And that's what you should double down on. Yeah, I love that advice. By the way, Gen Z, the number one thing they want to be, it's no longer like when we were growing up, Neil, it was astronaut. It was professional. But yeah, doctor. Well, today it's an, it's an influence. It's an influencer. You know, it's a YouTube influencer is actually number one, which is, you know, which is crazy. But that's why, you know, you're in such a good.

Dude, they believe they don't have to work. They're like, oh, I'm just going to be an influencer, travel the world, not work nine to five, make money and just chill. And it's like, it doesn't really work that way. And it's not that easy to become one. You actually have probably a better shot of being successful as being a doctor than doing really well as an influencer. I know tons of people with millions of followers and they barely make money. It's not as simple as just posting anymore. Yes, it's so true.

It's becoming more and more competitive. So I think some people are going to have to find some other careers and skills and passions outside of it. But by the way, you said something that's so wise and it's so true. We tend to love what we're good at. Whatever that gifting is that we have, you know, as individuals, we tend to love to do those things that we're good at. And so that's something that everybody should be on the lookout for there. That's really, really good advice as well. Okay.

So I'm excited to ask you this because I always love. like asking visionaries this because I can tell you're a visionary just the way you speak and the way you lead. What are you personally excited about for the future? Like what's the future for you? What what is what are those things that you know you just get really excited about right now for your future? Yeah. So for me, I'm not going to talk much about AI even though I love it and I'm passionate about it. I know there's pros and cons of it. But the big thing I'm excited for is, you know, globalization. Companies these days aren't a U.S. company or a European company or a UK company or a Brazilian company. They're starting to become global companies. And if you just think about

how big and massive the whole world is and the potential, it's kind of crazy. The other thing I'm really passionate about is technologies evolve so much. Think about how many industries aren't really leveraging technology that much. There's still companies that sell HVACs and plumbing services and make two, three, four, five million dollars a year in a local city. Imagine if they started using technology, how much bigger they can be or more efficient, they can be, or more profitable they can be, right? And a lot of these businesses that are owned, that are these older businesses that aren't using much technology,

a lot of the owners are retiring at this point, and their kids don't want to take them over. I myself would have want to take them over, but I see tons of opportunity there and I'm excited for it. The other thing that I'm super excited about as well is brands. And when I mean brands, I'm talking about personal brands and people becoming influencers. And I'm not excited that everyone wants to be a influencer. I'm excited about the potential that it's creating.

You're an influencer. I'm a micro influencer. If someone can end up building an influence within a specific vertical, and that's the key element, not trying to be just generally popular like a Kardashian, although they've done extremely well, not trying to knock them. But if you, and that's hard to do, but if you build one in a vertical,

especially a non-sexy vertical, like I'm in marketing or someone could be in AI systems automation or something like that, you can create a massive business around some of these verticals because a TAM, the total addressable market, for that vertical is really massive. But yet a lot of people don't want to create content around it. Everyone's thinking,

oh, be an influencer, travel the world, take some pigs and get paid. That's not where it's at. It's about being an influencer in a specific vertical that's not sexy, that has a massive market, and you can end up making a killing, creating a business around that sector. I mean, it's great advice. And I also think about it in terms of meaning and purpose. And, you know, I brought up this study earlier around loneliness, and there was a similar study that came out on, you know, the amount of teenage girls, the more that they consume

Instagram, the greater they had at risk of things like suicide and depression and loneliness. And when they went and you dig into that study, you'll start to find it's because all these young girls are comparing themselves to, you know, other women who put on all this makeup and change the way that they love, you know, just all those things. Yeah, or like how like perfectly skinny they are, right? Like I don't want my daughter growing up being like, I got to be a twig. If you want to be one, fine, as long as it's healthy. But like, be you.

It's okay to have extra pounds and not have a six-pack. It's okay to have a six-pack as well if you want. But if you're just struggling with it and, you know, genetically, if you're not as blessed and you're trying really hard and you're eating as healthy and you don't look a certain way, you don't need plastic surgery. The other day I met someone and they're just like, they're using an app to see what they'll look like with the different nose. I'm like, what's wrong with your nose?

They're like, oh, it's not as good as some of my class. me. So I'm like, you're in high school. Your nose is perfectly fine. And no joke, it wasn't big or small. It was fine. I was like the standards that people are putting themselves up to these days is just ridiculous. Well, and to your point here, one of the things I wanted to want to point out, Neil, is that there's a not, because so many, you know, young girls now are on this side of posting these perfect picks. Think about, you know, maybe it's our daughters one day. I don't know, but they're coming out and they're teaching about your worthy, you know, building self-esteem, yourself, be your authentic you, who God created you to be. You know, I think if there's a greater

focus on there's a real, if there's all of this dark side in this one area, well, hey, we can, you know, you can be a light in another area. We're probably, there's not a whole lot of people shining. So anyways, I think that is an exciting thing about what you're sharing is in terms of, like, helping influencers do good in the world. It's a, it's a powerful thing as well. Well, Neil, let us know, let people know about some of your services and where we can follow, follow you to get more of your, more of your content. Sure. So I have an ad agency called NPDigital, just stands for my initials, Neil Patel Digital, where we help companies of all sizes grow, get more traffic and sales through the web. And I also blog about marketing at neelpatell.com.

Awesome. Well, again, I am a regular user and visitor of neelpatel.com. I follow Neil on Instagram, follow a lot of his reels, and the information is posting. And one of the, one of the thanks, Thank you, Neil, for coming on today. I want to thanks to everybody for listening to the Growth Lab podcast. Remember each and every week we bring you the latest science behind how to grow yourself, your health, your wealth, your career, and your relationships. Also, if you're not subscribed here, please subscribe here to the show. We've got a lot of other great episodes coming out here in the new future.

And again, big thanks to my friend here, Neil Patel, for serving the world, putting out so much great information. And Neil, Neil, pray you have a blessed week. Thanks so much, my friend. You too. Thank you.