The Pomp Podcast - #433 Eric Siu on Hacking Revenue on the Internet

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Eric Siu is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain. Single Grain has worked with companies such as Amazon, Uber and Salesforce to help them acquire more customers. He is also the author of a new book called Leveling Up: How To Master The Game Of Life. In this conversation, we discuss marketing, SEO optimization, relationship banks, how to become IG famous, turning distractions into productive skills, book funnels, and launchpad businesses.  ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today.  ======================= Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Try CoinList Pro and be first to trade on network launch. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and earn $10 in BTC after you trade $100. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Eric Hsu is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain. Single Grain has worked with companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Salesforce to help them acquire more customers. He's also the author of a new book called Leveling Up, How to Master the Game of Life. In this this conversation, we discuss marketing, SEO optimization, relationship banks, how to become IG famous, turning distractions into productive skills, book funnels, and launchpad businesses. I really enjoyed this conversation with Eric, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into

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projects you can sign up for coin list today with coin list dot co slash pomp again coin list dot c o slash pomp and you can earn ten dollars in bitcoin after you trade 100 so on coin list you'll never be late to the party head on over to coin list dot c o slash pomp coin list dot c o slash pomp last up don't forget that i read a daily letter to over 80 000 investors about business technology and finance i break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry, you can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Eric. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan

Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Eric here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Yeah. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. For sure. We're going to try to make this one of the most action-packed, actionable, and information-filled episodes that we've done. Eric is a wealth of knowledge, so let's get into

it. Maybe let's just start with your background and kind of what you've done up until today. Yeah, sure. So I'll try to keep it brief. So name is Eric Hsu, and I mainly kind of hover in the marketing world. So I got a podcast called Marketing School, another one called Leveling Up, and then I have a couple of businesses. One's an ad agency, and then one is a software company called ClickFlow. I have operators running those businesses. And then other than that, I just, you know, I've got a book coming out called leveling up. I just try to try to play the game of life. And honestly, like, you know, used to come from an e-sports background. I was just like, man, like I just need to find something where I feel like I'm playing a game every day.

And honestly, it's just like, it's just business and like creating stuff. So yeah, that's my background. I love it. That's a great way to live life. As I was thinking through what could we possibly talk about? Cause there's so much stuff I ultimately settled on. You've shared a million ideas publicly, and I figured I would just throw them out there at you and we can kind of riff on them. The first one I want to go through is SEO. You have created probably more content than almost anyone I know on this topic. And you have a recent tweet thread that says over 1 million blog posts are published daily. Google is shrinking organic results. SEO is harder, but that's fine because you're strong. Here are a few creative things you can do to drive your organic traffic up.

and the first um kind of uh suggestion is to buy other websites talk through why that's such a good idea yeah so maybe maybe i'll rewind real quick just to just get paid the some context for people around seo so i i think you know a lot of people right now especially in tech um you know they do demand generation and all that and it's like demand generation is just running facebook ads or google ads and like there's actually a lot more than that when it comes to marketing and so i think SEO is one of the most unfair advantages you can establish because what happens is if you have a lot of traffic come to your website, let's say a hundred thousand or so, you can retarget those people later. You follow them around with those ads. You can, you can do a lot more, right? And

then you can plug in, you know, other stuff like customer data platforms, email, like all these tools, you know, that you have access to, and you don't have to keep, you know, paying these big app platforms and, you know, you're kind of at their, their, their whim, right? If they decide to ban you, they ban you. So anyway, SEO, you know, the two most important things still to this day are content and links, right? You still have to have a lot of great content, a lot of links. And some people that, you know, they make so much money. Some of my buddies, they make so much money. They don't know what to do. They don't want to pay taxes on it. So they just deploy the money back into content and links and they just make even more money, right? That's the game of SEO. You

just keep compounding. It's just like investing in stocks. It's just like putting money into crypto. It's the same deal. So when I talk about buying websites, the problem with SEO is that it takes too long. People aren't patient, right? It's like 18 to 24 months, probably 36 months journey to start to see some good stuff happen. When I took over my company, Single Rain, the ad agency, we were doing maybe 4,000 visits a month, which was nothing. Now, you know, we're up to 320,000, which is pretty decent for a marketing website. But we took those tactics and I started another blog with a friend, we went from zero to 4 million visits a month. Right. And so it's the same stuff. And so, um, but instead of waiting zero to 36 months or so, or 36 months, we'll just

call it that go and look at other websites that have a good, um, an SEO it's called a domain authority. So, you know, you're scored on a scale of one to 100, zero to 100. Um, you want to buy a site with, you know, maybe 80 plus domain authority. And ideally you might, you could check out some of these brokerage websites like Flippa.com or Effie International. There's a lot of these brokerage websites. And you can say, you know what? I don't want to wait. I'm just going to go buy a website. And, you know, when I buy the website, I'm just going to go, you know, create a bunch of new content. It's going to rank. And then I'm going to be making a boatload more money. And I can use this website as an acquisition system that will pay me in

perpetuity and get me more leads instead of saying, I just got to go to LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google and try to buy more leads. What do you see people monetizing with, right? So they go and they buy a website. They've already got great domain authority. Is this, they're monetizing through ads on the website. They're selling products, a mixture. How do you see that working? Yeah. You're looking to, you're looking to arbitrage here, right? Cause you're looking for websites that have good traffic that, that are, that are not monetizing the right way, in my opinion. Like if you have a lot of traffic and you're just monetizing off of ads, you're probably not thinking it through and you're probably just bored of the website.

So what I would do is I would reach out to these people and ask if they're interested in partnering up. So you might hit them up on LinkedIn. You might go find their email addresses. You'll find their contact information and then just hit up a bunch of them and say, a certain percent are going to respond to you. And then instead of saying, I'm going to invest in your company, people get kind of like, they don't really want to talk to you if you say that, but I'm going to invest, different story, or sorry, I want to partner with you, different story. And then that's how you get the conversation going. Got it. Another suggestion in this thread was to monitor your decaying content and then update it. Explain that. Yeah. So what tends to happen over time is if you don't tend to your garden, right, things start to get unruly, right? You know, the kale starts to go everywhere, the carrots, and I don't have a garden, I'm just making things up. But, you know, the point is, content tends to decay over time if you're not upgrading it. So one example of this is Wikipedia. so Wikipedia they had this uh page on Abraham Lincoln over the years like it first started out with 5,000 words there was 8,000 words and now it's like you know 15,000 or 20,000 words or so point is people are constantly updating the content over time and Google likes freshness right you know we just use Google as the main search engine um but also like if you take a look at Yelp or you take a look at TripAdvisor you have a lot of UGC user generated content

they're constantly you know updating it for the website that's how they get stronger and stronger or it just kind of defends their, their kind of organic search moat. Um, so what you could do is you can use whatever analytics tool platform you have and just look at your top posts over time and see if they're losing traffic. Right. Um, we actually have a tool that's out there for free. Um, if you just Google click flow content decay, it's totally free and it'll actually monitor like when you're losing like, you know, 20%, 80% of your traffic. The whole idea here is that if you have like a top 10 or top 20 list of posts, cause 80, 20 rule, the top 20 would drive to 80% of traffic. Um, you don't want to lose that traffic. So what you're doing ideally is

maybe you're adding, you know, maybe a paragraph or even more content to these, um, you know, every couple of months and you're tending to your garden. People just like create content. The problem right now with SEO is like create a million plus blog posts a day and we're just going to leave it. Right. It's like, you don't buy a car and then, you know, you drive it for two weeks and you're done right it's just like you want to make the most of it absolutely the next suggestion is to test titles tags meta descriptions to drive a higher click through yep so you know when you think about um those of you that run ads or like you're testing email subject lines you're when you're running ads right you're testing like on google for example

you're you're ab testing titles and a description um or if you're testing you know email subject lines, you want to see which one gets a higher open rate, right? So same deal, when it comes to to SEO, what you want to think about is, you know, if I have a title, you know, marketing blog versus like best marketing blog, you know, updated for 2020 and beyond or whatever. The second one is probably going to get a higher click through rate. And so what you want to be doing is, you know, you can use a tool like Google Search Console, which is completely free. And then you look at your content that has a, this is getting a little into the weeds, but hot, you know, it has a high impression count, but a low click-through rate. So, you know, Google's showing your post a lot,

but you as a marketer, whoever you are, the site owner, you're not doing a good job from a marketing perspective because marketing's job is to bring people to the point of sale, to get people to click, right? So it's the same deal. Like if you're doing title testing for ads or emails, like why aren't you doing it for SU if you're getting good traffic? And so same deal with ClickFlow, we created a solution to make it easier. I'm not here to pump that. I mean, just, you know, Google search console, you can do it completely for free. So absolutely. What about using frequently asked questions that schema, um, as a way to a better rank? Yeah. So there's actually, um, so what's happening right now with Google is, um, you know,

they're, they have to please their shareholders, right? So they actually removed that whole, you know, don't be evil thing. Um, so they're making, you know, they're making the ads look like search results and, um, you know, they're making an uncertain search engine result pages. Like it's hard to see the organic results period. There's like all these snippets and stuff. so um what you want to be doing um when it comes to faq schema so faq schema is like you know if i type in um you know uh anthony pompliano or you know i don't know um wardrobe or something like that right so um people might have an faq like you know what well what is you know what does pomp put in his hair or whatever right there's like a bunch of other questions so that pops up

as a box and that box imagine if you're seeing a box on a search engine result page you're higher you're, you're, you're going to be more likely to click that cause it's taking up so much real estate. So if you want to implement FAQ schema, talk to your web developer, I would just type in FAQ schema plugin, um, for whatever, you know, uh, CMS or content management system that you're using. And then boom, you have FAQ schema for your website. You're going to get a higher click through rate, hopefully. Um, and there's a lot of different ways to do it, but I would just hand it off to, you know, whoever your, your developer, your engineer is. And then if you have a WordPress site, there's a lot of WordPress plugins for it. Absolutely. So switching gears, you had this tweet

about, uh, don't ask people for coffee or to pick their brain until you've deposited in the relationship bank. And I found that a concept of a relationship bank. Really interesting. Explain that. Yeah. So I think, I mean, and I've done this in the past. I mean, I'm sure, you know, um, you have a lot of people that reach out to you asking you to just get coffee or talk to you for five to 10 minutes. And, you know, I actually put this on LinkedIn too. Like I kind of exaggerated. I was like, it's downright as offensive. Right. Um, cause you want to, you know, stir people up a little bit, but, um, I found what, what, what's worked best for me. Cause like, instead of asking people, you know, I'm going to pay $5 for like your most valuable

asset, your time that it's not an equal trade-off. Right. But if I am looking at your tweets, for example, looking at what you're interested in and I offer to help you, maybe I make it, you're like, Oh, I'm looking to hire some engineers or whatever. It's like, Hey, here are three engineers that I know. I happen to have a recruiting agency. boom i've actually helped you i've looked at your stuff that's a little bit that's that's saying something and i've actually gone out and done the work i'm not making you think about anything and i'm just gonna you know the concept of i'm gonna make little deposits every day maybe i want to get on your radar whatever it is exactly um and then at some point i'm gonna make a

withdrawal right i'm not gonna make a big withdrawal but my whole thing is like i i just like you know making more deposits more than anything so i have a margin of safety so when I make an ask, it's like not that big of a thing. And I'll give you some examples. I mean, there's two people I'm thinking of right now. One guy actually works for VaynerMedia now. When he wanted to work for me, he wrote an 8,000 word blog post, right? Guy went to Michigan and he was like, yeah, here's what I would do. Here's what I'll do. Here's what I'll do. And I'll tell you what, I'll do it for you for free for a month. Right. And I'm just like, dude, this guy gets me. And, you know, guy turns out to be an all-star and then he's working for VaynerMedia now.

and another guy he um he's like hey look i follow your podcast i'm gonna i'll write some emails for you to help you get more conversions and i'll do it for you completely for free for a month like not only are you not only have you looked at my stuff you've fallen you you put together a strategy and then you say you'll do the work and then you say you'll do it for free for a month and you have no ask like that's the dream so that's way better than like asking for coffee especially if you're like trying to ask warren buffett for his time right which you probably won't get. So absolutely. Another idea is this idea of you don't actually have to talk to the end customer in order to get the customer insights in every situation. Sometimes you do have to talk

to him, but other times you don't, what are some of the hacks there? Yeah. So I did, um, this is, I did two podcasts episodes. One was with, um, the level CEO, um, Sam Korkos. And what was fascinating to me was when I opted into, so it's like a patch you use to kind of monitor your metabolic state, but he, he was like, Hey, let's get on a 45 minute call. I was like, Oh damn, this guy's doing customer development. And when I, when I got on the call with him, I was like, Hey, tell me like, how many calls have you done? He's like over a thousand. I was like, Holy crap. Right. I was like, I don't think I could ever do that. That's, that's a lot of patients. Right. And that's like, you know, that's great. But anyway, I can't do it. So

I talked to the CEO of a superhuman Raul and he was like, look, man, like I met up with like maybe 30 people 40 people or so in san francisco we had coffee whatever um and then there's the coffee thing and then um i guess it's equal trade but then he was like you know what um i just made a simple landing page um using like wix and then you know whoever wanted to sign up for the tool could sign up but then right after they signed up they would ask them um hey like you know what's your what's the worst like your biggest frustration with email like what would you like to see right and then he'll get a ton of responses and he'll just cherry pick the ones he likes and so he was basically doing customer development at scale because he was getting automated

responses he was cherry picking but he was just responding really quick to people and that helped guide his customer development so there's two ways to do it you can do it the i i love what sam corcos did with levels and then i would actually prefer roles because i'm lazy so absolutely well and this feeds into the next idea which is basically kind of like creating the ideal client profile, right? So whether it's more of like a retail consumer or it's a agency based client, it feels like knowing who you want to work with is almost as important as knowing who you don't want to work with. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's actually a lot of good ideal client profile templates out there, but I mean, so for our SAS company, as an example, we might

have people that are, you know, you have people that are mid-market companies, you have enterprise, And then we try to stay away from small business, but you know, maybe for mid market, they're doing maybe 10 million annual recurring revenue enterprise, you know, probably let's just say, you know, hundreds of millions or billions plus, and then they have very specific things they're looking for. Maybe enterprise levels, you know, maybe they're looking for business intelligence more so than like, you know, um, different features for, for the mid market. Right.

So I'm just saying that you really have to understand kind of who you're going after. Um, and I actually, here's the thing. I literally just got off a podcast with, uh, Justin Kahn from Twitch. and I asked him about his failures and here's what he said. Um, so Twitch sold to Amazon for a billion dollars. Um, great exit. So he was like, you know, the common thing with all my, my failures was that, um, I didn't do enough. Um, I didn't do enough customer development. I didn't try to focus on one segment. I tried to do maybe two, three, like that's too many segments. Right. And that led to, you know, trying to go all over the place and serve everyone. So

if you're starting out, focus on one. And then if you're going to, you know, at a certain point, you know, you're doing this for six to 12 months, you'll understand who your ideal client profile is. I think what we did as an agency a couple of years ago was helpful because we looked at, you know, the lifetime value of each customer. And then we just saw that like, oh, it turns out that we serve SaaS companies the best. They stay the longest and they pay the most and they're like not a pain in the ass. So we decided to focus on being a SaaS marketing agency versus everything else which is kind of all over the place on the map it also creates this level of like uh i want to be in the exclusive club i want to be accepted into uh your customer base right which is like a

weird uh dynamic but it definitely creates this uh this fomo feeling a little bit yeah you i mean you got the power i mean it's um i think you're creating the right incentives because it's like people want people that that specialize you don't want to go to you want to go to like an orthopedic surgeon for like you know very specific things or like uh like an eye doctor right you don't want go to a general doctor. For sure. You mentioned a couple of really great entrepreneurs. One of the things that almost every entrepreneur has that is successful is an advisory board. I've seen you talk quite a bit about the importance of a really strong, successful advisory board. How do you think about that? I think earlier in my career, I would read a lot of books and then

people would be talking about peer groups and advisory boards. One thing I did, I'm trying to make this practical for everyone. If you Google mastermind talks, dinner PDF, you'll be able to find a PDF. And what I did was I gathered like-minded marketers because I didn't have a business at the time. And, you know, I would have them come over to my place. I'd buy dinner. And then, you know, we put people in the hot seat. I put together like an agenda and everything. So people talk about the latest marketing tactics and strategies, hot seat, one thing they're struggling with. And we all kind of just help each other, right? You have a little mini community there. And then as you level up through your career, then, you know, as you get stronger,

then I would say, you know, there's a lot of different peer groups, right? There's entrepreneurs organization, there's YPO, and part of both, I love both of those. And you get you get to basically have like a mini board of directors, right? So I remember when I first joined EO, entrepreneurs organization, I was, you know, 27. At the time, everyone else was like 35 plus and they had a way more experience than i did and what you realize is that you don't know what you don't know right and so this group what they do is um they'll like one guy shared like his cash flow uh forecast with me like 10 weeks i was like what what is what is that right and then um you know they're just what happens is i'll share a struggle and then everyone else will

share an experience they won't give direct advice and that to me is a little advisory board there because i'm kind of i'll know what to do next based on what i think i should do i'm not taking any advice. So that's one example of advisory boards. And obviously I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, I, right now I'm on a couple of advisory boards for like some, some, some companies out there. And, you know, in some cases they're just asking me for advice, maybe once a month, like we'll get on a call for like an hour. In other cases, I might be a little more involved, but that's another example. You might, you know, give a person maybe like, you know, half a percent, 1%, 2% equity, and you know, you're on their advisory board or you have them join yours.

Absolutely. Now, the reason why everyone is obviously listening to this is the next question, which is how to become famous on Instagram. Everyone wants to be famous on Instagram. I saw that you guys did a podcast episode on this that was really, really interesting based on kind of all the different hacks and tips.

Maybe walk us through kind of how you guys think about that strategy. Yeah, so this is, you know, we have a podcast called Markings. Go and do it with another marketer named Neil Patel. To be fair, my Instagram isn't super huge. it's like 24 K he's at like a 200 K or so. So neither of us are Instagram famous, but we know a lot of people that are, and we know what they do. Um, so, you know, the, the one thing that we

found to work really well is just siphoning off of someone else's audience. Um, so it's like, if, if I am, let's say I'm at 24 K, what I would do is I might reach out to someone that's at 50 K or 75 or a hundred K. I don't want to go too big because it's too far up. Right. I like, ideally what what you might want to do is you know if you're at 24k but you have some other assets that you think might be able to help that person again you want to make it an equal trade so i might say hey look i have 24k here but i might have a podcast over here that's the angle and then um you know let's go ahead and do a live on instagram and boom all the people coming that's seeing the live now they know they now know you by association and you get bigger faster um giveaways

always work well i think they're you're going to get a lot of spam and a lot of kind of people that are just there to be tire kickers though. Um, but you can use a tool like King Sumo giveaways for that. Um, but we haven't been super big on trying to grow our IG fast just cause it's not, you know, both of us, we serve kind of B2B audiences. So, you know, we'll let it grow organically and then see where it goes. But you know, if you do have other assets, um, like an email list, that is like an unfair advantage. So, you know, leverage that when you can, especially for growing a podcast, by the way, if you have an email list, dude, unbeatable. Absolutely. And one of the things you do in emails, obviously, is you write copy. I've seen you talk about maybe more landing

page copy, but it applies to emails as well. Most people write copy trying to be interesting or trying to kind of catch people's attention, kind of clickbait, right, is the terminology. You're much more focused on writing copy that highlights you can solve somebody's problem, right? What's the nuance or what's the difference there? Yeah, I think for me, I just realized that you know, whenever I try to sound interesting, I end up sounding like an idiot. So, so what I try to do instead is I just try to be helpful. Like that's the only thing that's been, that's the one thing that's been super helpful to me throughout the years. It's just, you know, if someone needs something, I'll be out there. Like if I find an interesting insight, I'm going to try to share it

with people. And like, I'll always ask people like, you know, what do you need exactly? What's the number one thing, right? And I've, I've naturally, like that wasn't natural to me, but I've learned to make it more of a natural habit. So when I think about like, Oh, like what's something I can what's something of value I can post out there. That lens is a lot more helpful than, Hey, I want to create some content and I want to be famous. I think chasing status more so than trying to be helpful is not the best game. So. Absolutely. And I guess when you're writing that, how do you kind of make sure that you're actually articulating that you can solve the problem? Are there certain frameworks or tests that you run or anything that you'd say? Like,

I know that I'm hitting on the right spot rather than just, Hey, I just wrote an email to a bunch of people. I sent it and, you know, cross my fingers and hope it works. Yeah. I'll talk about this in the context of maybe like a Facebook ad. Um, just so I think it covers more. So if you want more tactical stuff, I think, um, you know, there's a book called breakthrough advertising, which is now you can buy for 125 bucks or so. Um, I bought it for 600 cause it was out of print at the time, highly recommended. It really taps into human psychology. Um, and the whole skill of copywriting has not changed. We're all, we all still have the same needs. Um, there's another book called the 16 word sales letter written by this guy who's a copywriter for, um, Agora,

which is they do over a billion year and they're primarily like a financial newsletter. So that's kind of tactical on that side. Um, for me, what I do is, um, from breakthrough advertising, there's this framework that I use. So it's upside. So it's U P S Y D. And I got this from these digital marketer, digital marketer podcast. And it's basically from the book. So basically you're taking a prospect from unaware to problem aware to solution aware to aware of your solution. So that's the why. And then you give them a deal, right? So a video ad can do that, but also a long form Facebook ad can do that too. Right. And what I'm looking to do when I do that is, um, you know, what can I do? What kind of story can I tell exactly? And also I'll run

the copy through a sentiment analysis tool as well. You can use Grammarly. I'll tell you if your, your, your content's positive or not, but I use the sentiment analysis tool as long as it's positive. Um, cause generally you want your content to be positive then, um, you know, we're, we're good to go. But for me, I'm, you know, I'm just looking to say like, you know, one, one, like here's how you do modern day SEO and then boom, boom, boom, here's like a tweet storm. Um, and I'll give a bunch of tactics, right? Like that's, what's worked best for me. Um, and yeah, I think that's the framework I use. You also have talked a bunch about, um, kind of people who are building companies being vision driven. Uh, I think a lot of people say in a

pitch deck or something like, Hey, here's our vision for the company, but it's not so much a measurable vision. Um, in the tweet, you talked about Microsoft saying we want a computer on everyone's desk, right? Or SpaceX and we want to get to Mars and something that you can kind of tangibly measure against. Talk a little bit about how you've seen people do this well. Yeah. So I think when it comes to, you know, for me, vision, mission, values, like that stuff used to be like, oh, like that's so intangible. Like what are you supposed to do with that? And then you realize the vision is what ultimately what matters is the people, right? But if you want to keep the people together at the company, you got to have a great culture. And how do you have a

great culture, we need to have a unifying vision, right? And so, you know, whether it's, you know, we want to put a PC on everyone's desk, or we want to organize the world's information, that's something that's motivating and something that people can wake up for every day, right? And I remember Howard Marks from Activision. So, he's got an interesting story, but he's like, look, you know, we want to, his vision is we're going to help all entrepreneurs, right? And he's like, well, you say it's broad, but like, that's what a vision is. Like, it's not supposed to be attainable, but it's supposed to be motivating and inspiring. So I used to have like very specific numbers. Like, um, before I learned all this, I was like, Oh, the goal is to make it a hundred

million dollar company. Like that's not motivating at all. So now, you know, I've got the book coming out. I'm like, Oh dude, you know, what's easier. Like my mission is to level up the world. Cause I just like learning and I like teaching. And because I do that, that's led to all these other opportunities. Right. And it just feels right. And so when you tell your, like when, when people are trying to join your company, like what's the vision? Well, the vision is to level up the world. Like you can wake up and say, let's do it. Let's do it. Right. Versus like, oh, it's to be a billion dollar company. Right. That's like not as motivating. Absolutely. You've talked a lot about this idea that people get distracted in today's digital internet based world. There's

notifications, there's sounds, there's flashing lights. You know, you go to a website and literally it's covered with ads. Like everything is distracting. Uh, but you don't necessarily think that that's the worst thing in the world. There's an opportunity to turn that distraction into a productive skill. Explain what you mean by that. Yeah. So I think when, okay. So as an example, um, one of the, like, I don't have many notifications on my phone, but one notification I have on, um, or I had on was Twitter, right? So let's say someone like, uh, let's say, uh, James clear or Naval Ravikandi tweet. And one of the things you do if you want to grow on Twitter is you respond immediately as the first one, right, as you know. And so that to me is a helpful

distraction, because that's helping me, you know, build relationships, perhaps. And, you know, the other notifications I get, let's see, what else do I get? It's so there's that one, I don't have my message notifications on. I'm trying to think what else It's kind of escaping my mind right now. Maybe we can come back to this one. Maybe it'll just hit me. Okay. The other thing that I think is really interesting is you've been running Twitter ads.

And when I came on and talked to you last time, it was kind of this idea like nobody's really running Twitter ads. So, like, maybe there's a mispricing there. How have you thought about that kind of experiment and what have you learned? Yeah, I'll just talk about mispricing in general. I think, um, so Twitter, I think is very underpriced attention because, um, it's we're running, we're spending like a hundred dollars a day. We should probably be spending more, but we're just promoting certain blog posts. And so there's, um, there's a very big stock exchange.

That's one of the, um, my, my ad agencies clients. And, um, they saw a Twitter ad that I had out that was mainly targeting SAS people. And, um, the email thread read was like, it was like, why aren't we getting this fire? Like, like we w we want this. Right. And that led to a whole upsell conversation and led to the contract getting bigger. And not only that, we got a ton of qualified SaaS leads from that. And so it just makes a lot of sense because some of the smartest people in the world are

hanging out on Twitter, right? And so whether I want to target e-commerce or SaaS or even like you had Andrew Wilkinson on this podcast, he targets VCs on there to get them to sell dead zombie companies to him, right? so um i think the attention is heavily underpriced and he doesn't spend that much either and you know talking to him and so i think that's a great example but i think you know with upcoming book too i'm like okay what's underpriced you know what the gaming influencers out there that have couple hundred thousands or millions of subscribers i'm like dude i'm talking to all these agencies

right now like the cpms or that the cost per thousand impressions and to try this like i'm like man i should just if it works i'll do this all day because if you look at the tim ferris book he really targeted mommy bloggers a lot of bloggers in the early days and i think it was underpriced attention got them to help promote that's that's what i think happened um but same deal here right so i think if you can if you think you have a good um if you're good at sniffing out the underpriced attention go all in on it right so absolutely um you've got a book that's coming out called leveling up uh talk a little bit about why write a book you've got all these great skills in terms of reaching people on digital platforms uh some people would say hey a book's pretty

antiquated what was the thought process there yeah so wow there's a lot in there so um the the reason i decided to do the book is not to try to make money and by the way like i could have gotten an advance from it we we went through this hybrid publishing model where i have control of the rights and yet it's going to be going through a publisher i can do all the marketing stuff i want to do like book funnels and things like that happy to talk about it um and i was like look i think this message needs to get out there because you know there's three billion gamers in the world um and you know me growing up i used i spent so much of my time playing uh you know poker first person shooter games you know a lot of mmorpgs and i'm like look my parents used to look down

on me like my friends used to look at me saying it's a waste of time and all that but i'm like the time i spent all those skills are actually just like sports they're a gateway into the real world um yes you are like when you're playing a game it is kind of a shadow world but take those skills, translate it into the real world. And honestly, every day right now, like I feel like I'm playing a game. Like I can do podcasts. I can work on this. I can work on that. I'm just jumping around. It's just so fun. And so that's why I decided to do it. Hopefully if you can, you know, change a few people's lives, that's great. But I think it's the message that's more important to me than anything. So hopefully, you know, we're able to spread the

message. And again, it's not to try to make money, not to try to, you know, didn't make any money off of it, um, out the gate. And then what I would say too is, um, you know, if you want to talk about promotion, happy to talk about it, but I do. What is, what's a book funnel? So a book funnel is, and I'm sure you've seen this. Um, there's a lot of people running Facebook ads right now. Um, or maybe even Google ads to, they'll be like, Hey, pump, like I'll give you my book free, but all you have to do is pay shipping. What happens when you do that is you put your credit card information. And though the next page, you know what? I got some other stuff to sell you. And usually the conversion rate on the next page is around 10%. And so if I, I, if I have a book,

maybe, maybe you might say, Oh my God, you're Eric, you're losing money. Cause you're, you're, you're just like, you're giving the book away for free and you're shipping it and all that. But my next page might have an offer. That's maybe $30 or a hundred dollars or so. Let's say it's a hundred dollars converts at 10%. There's your $10 right there. You're basically self. You have a, when you have a book funnel, you have more control. You can actually make money on that initial campaign and then you can sell whatever you want in the backend when they're on your email list. That's the entire play. That's what these all, a lot of these internet marketers have been doing. And if you want to start a book funnel, there's software called ClickFunnels

and they literally have a template that you can use to build a book funnel. So that's why we went hybrid because after we make this initial push, we're probably going to switch and really use our marketing prowess. If you guys are so good at doing this, which obviously you are, uh, why even mess around with any of the book publishers? You know, you didn't get an advance. Um, and it sounds like you have a ton of flexibility. What was the advantage to working with them? Yeah. So there's, um, there's this book I really love called the coaching habit. And, um, you know, my publisher is called page two and I just wanted to work with them. And, um, you know, the, the guy that wrote, uh, the coaching habit, uh, Michael, he was like, yeah, they're a pleasure to work with. They know

exactly what to do. So they were basically telling me what I needed to do. Like I got all this stuff done with the book. They did, they handled the cover. Like I have these badges in the book. It just looks good. Right? Like the process was iron tight. Um, cause I just wouldn't want to deal with like, you know, all this other stuff. So, um, the process was locked in and, um, they told like they have their sales team working on it right now. They're like, and so for winter, they're like, um, the book is going to be our lead book. I was like, well, what does that mean? And they're like, oh it's going to be the main thing we focus on um so i was like okay that's exciting so there's this element of the book will you know this pre-covid i was like okay this book's going to

appear in the airplane bookstores oh not airplane bookstores the airport bookstores um they're like yeah we're going to sell to barnes and noble and all that all that's gone now so but the problem is i signed the contract already so that additional benefit of you know their sales team helping with all these physical locations has kind of diminished but that was one of the major benefits in addition to the process. Got it. And so what else are you guys doing kind of under your own control for somebody who's listening, who wants to launch a book? You've got the book funnel idea, which is fantastic. Anything else that you guys are doing that you think will be very valuable? Yeah. In terms of promoting a book? Yes. Yeah. So the things I honed in on, so we talked about the

gaming influencer. So we're using, we use a tool called follower wonk, which can search people's Twitter bios. And a lot of these gaming people, they put their email, their emails in the bio, And they always use like a .gg at the end of the email. So we found a bunch of emails through that and then just kind of sorted by number of followers. And then we use another tool called Tensor Social to find a bunch of gaming influencers. You can basically search for the industry

and then sort by engagement rates. And then you can actually find their emails as well and export it. So there's that. And then we're gonna be using Facebook ads and then driving them to a contest as well. so for gamers we have a contest where it's like you can win a new alienware computer a new gaming chair new headphones and all that and you know um for the main entry it is to basically uh maybe

it's subscribed to our youtube channel or get on our email list or whatever you can give like three points here two points here whatever and so hopefully that the contests tend to work really well but we're also giving away um you know the first chapter of the book away for free and then the final thing i'll say is um podcast tour that's the biggest thing right so that's that's part of the reason why i'm getting on a bunch of podcasts right now that pushes books because naturally you know people are listening to this podcast for you but also like whatever the the guest tends to say um if they you know align with that message then great so absolutely if people buy the book what are they going to learn in it? Yeah. I think, I mean, the book is basically, it talks about,

it compares the world of gaming versus business, right? So there's an anecdote about gaming and then there's a business comparison to how it's exactly the same thing. And then there's a quest, like something to do at the end, right? Where you can kind of build up, you know, those habits for yourself. Essentially the entire book is about creating the right habits and leveling up from that perspective because in life, I mean, there's there's a wealth ladder concept that you know, another entrepreneur, his name's Nathan Berry, he created it. And so, you know, I would argue that the first thing you want to do is you want to build the right habits. Obviously, you want to learn the right skills. And then you maybe you start working for someone, right? That's, you

know, what your parents want you to do. And eventually, the next step is, you know, you might freelance somewhere. And then the next step after that is you might build an agency, right? Or, you know, rewinding the step, you might build a dropshipping business, and then you might build an e commerce business where you have the inventory. And then you can move on to the next step, right? Where you eventually you have like a platform business, um, you have a network effects business, um, or you even have like a SpaceX or something like that. But the whole idea here is you're continuing leveling up to level up. Um, and it's all, it's all rooted within your habits first. Cause if you don't have the good, if you don't have good habits, like you're not

going to be able, you don't have the right foundation to level up to where you want to go. Yeah. How much of kind of the leveling up and going from the platform business strategy is, uh you're just practicing like you're literally acquiring the skills and getting better and better and you can go bigger and bigger from that versus something else is at play yeah no i i think it's um it's you're just you constantly and one of the things um so one of our core values for the agency is is um growth right so you're constantly seeking growth and you're constantly seeking how to improve and then also improve you know the world around you right and ultimately at the end of the day you know whatever's going on politically like um you know that's that's how

you add value to the world and that's how you become successful. And so I think that's what it is. I mean, you create your own luck that way. I think it's, you know, as long as you make sure that, you know, you're constantly optimizing yourself and you're iterating, know what you can't level. I just think there's no, like, if you have the right habits and you're hanging out with the right people, there's no way in my mind that you can't become, you know, the success that you want to become, right? So I just think, you know, everything I was told, you know, growing up in the Asian family, like, um, you know, your, your fate's kind of determined and all that. I'm just like, none of that makes sense. So a lot of the messaging, the way you were programmed growing

up, I'm trying to unwind that programming. Absolutely. You are one of the best marketers in the world. Uh, how would you say people who want to get better at marketing, uh, can go do that? Is it finding other people? Are there specific books, courses? Like what would your recommendations be? Yeah, I guess I'll just share kind of my story around that. So I was working a dead end job coming out of school. So this is when the financial crisis hit. And I was doing data entry. And my friend who was working at American Apparel at the time, now works at Airbnb, she was like, you should check out this digital marketing thing, got an internship. And what happened with the internship was a free internship. And then what I found out afterwards is hilarious. But

they hired a cohort of 12 interns and they had us writing all these articles right and by the same time they gave us all these digital marketing courses so what i did was i'll come back from work every day and i will basically come back at like you know 3 or 4 p.m i'd come to work early um and i'd study till 12 a.m right so i'd go through all these courses and i'd just go whatever i picked up on like oh seo i just go deeper on and go to google um and anyway what happened was for that that internship, they were basically using us as content writers for free. Right. And they had a bunch of content created and they started ranking for all this stuff. So, but anyway, I kept going deeper. I went deeper on like SEO, for example, and I actually ended up going to this blog called

quick sprout, which is at the time it was my podcast cohost Niels. It was his blog. And you know, what I did was I would try to email these people all the time. Cause I'd have follow-up questions, right? I learned something. So I was not only learning, I was asking follow-up questions and eventually it got to the point where people like me or other people whether it's me pestering them or whatever um they're like dude let's just get on the phone so we got on the phone and eventually with neil um we ended up meeting at a taco bell in orange county down in california and that's how we became friends but that same process that template where i was just learning and then i was also um asking questions or i was learning and trying to add value to people

kind of like like how we talked about earlier that's how i built my network around marketing where I could continue to ask questions because the stuff you learn online, maybe it's like 90 to 95% of the stuff people are willing to share. The problem with marketing is if you talk about it, everyone starts to do it. And then your tactic becomes invalid or your strategy. So you typically, just like with business and like these business or marketing, you want to hold five to 10% of the things and not share it. So ideally that's why you build your network of, you know, smart business people are smart marketers. Absolutely. Where can people go find the book? Yeah. I mean, they can go to their favorite online retailer, just type in leveling up Eric

Sue. Or, I mean, you can get a free chapter of the book, you know, at leveling up.com. Awesome. Where can people find you on the internet? Yeah. There's me on Instagram at Eric O S I U. Same thing with Twitter at Eric O S I U. Those are probably the best two spots. Awesome. Before we wrap up, I ask everyone the same two questions and then you'll get a chance to ask me one uh the first question is what is the most important book you've ever read and you can't say your own yeah uh most important book i i thought about this um a while back but i would say the most the one that comes to mind first right now is the hard thing about hard things just because the entire book is about struggle and that's

basically what life is so yeah that's a fantastic book uh ben horowitz uh from andreessen horowitz Highly recommend that one as well. Second question is more fun. Aliens, are you a believer or a non-believer? Believer for sure. Wasn't there just something that just came out about how there's like 300 million galaxies or something? 300 million planets supposedly exist.

I always joke and say, when I was in middle school and high school, there was only nine. And the big debate was, is Pluto a planet or not? Now we're at 300 million. So I don't know how we went from nine to 300 million, but that's where we are. Well, how do we know anything?

That's my whole thing, right? I would say still as human beings, we're fairly primitive right now. Like, how do we know, you know? Well, we probably don't, right? It's probably some estimated guess of like, oh, we could see, you know, X number of square miles. Here's how many planets are in those square miles. So like, you know, if you multiply that by the number of square miles

we think are out there, like this is what it could be, right? So something math like that, I'm sure. Yep. What question you got for me to wrap up? I would say, what do you think? So, you know, Winklevoss twins are like, it's going to go to 500K. where do you think bitcoin's going oh like over a long period of time because their whole thing was the 500k uh over time right i don't think they put like a time frame on it uh i tend to think

that they will look uh very very bearish with only a 500k number on it over a long period of time you know i'm talking 20 30 years i think for sure we'll see uh a million plus dollars uh bitcoin um the big question is because i think you'd get to like about a million if you got to 2x the gold market cap right so like you know not unreasonable uh over a really long period of time um the number that i put out publicly more short term is 100k by the end of next year we'll see right uh so far so good uh right we're we're trending in the right direction but uh as we know this thing has a has a mind of its own and super volatile and, uh, and we'll rip people's faces off in both directions. So, uh, you know, we'll just wait till, uh, the end of December, uh, 2021 to see what, uh, what

happened. I love it. Awesome, Eric. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. I think people are really going to enjoy this, uh, highly recommend the book, highly recommend them following you on social media and we'll have to do it again in the future. Thanks for having me.