The Future of Marketing and AI - Neil Patel

And the first thing that you need to do is if you want to do well, you got to be on all the main platforms that you think your ideal audience is or that you want to build an audience on. So pick 6 or 7. And the second thing is you don't need to create content for 6 or 7 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 interview that, I don't know how long this will go, but let's call it 30 minutes to 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 Egg, Kissmetrics, and NP Digital. And these are actually, you know, Kissmetrics is something that I know that my team has used some in the past in scaling our businesses, such as Ancient Nutrition and DrAxe.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, and 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, Neal, welcome to the show. Excited to talk everything kind of career and business and marketing. Well, 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 draxe.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 know, you had built this website and you'd 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 gonna get into a lot today, how to build your personal brand. We're gonna talk a lot about growing your business, your career and marketing and things like that. But 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 at, 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 6 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, HotJobs. 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 him for a few thousand bucks, saved up that money from picking up trash and cleaning restrooms at a theme park. And, you know, 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 gonna 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 at 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 $100 an hour, gave me a few grand. And then they're like, do you want to just implement this for us? We'll give you $5,000 a month. I was like, sold, right? Drove them $20-ish, $25 million, somewhere between that range 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 in 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, 'cause they went belly under in the 2008 bust. They got me ING Direct and they got me Blue Cross Blue Shield. And they was paying me $5,000 per account, you know, combined with the $5,000 I was making from his father, 16 years old, making $20,000 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, for, 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 their, you know, in their careers and businesses. You know, I think we have almost— I was trying to think of a question 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 6.6 social networks. That's the first stat 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 are 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 the 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 platforms. Right? Like if you look at you and me, same, right? I'm actively on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, what's that, YouTube, 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 got to be on all the main platforms that you think your ideal audience is or that you want to build an audience on. So pick 6 or 7. Then the second thing is you don't need to create content for 6 or 7 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, et cetera. 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 interview that, I don't know how long this will go, but let's call it 30 minutes to an hour, can probably produce 70, 80 pieces of content.

That's true. Yeah, yeah, if you think about it, just to give you, just to prove what Neil here is saying, everybody, you know, if 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 video and also turn it into Shorts. We'll then post it on Instagram and that'll be broken down into maybe 10 or 12, you know, videos 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 we'll then post to LinkedIn. And then we'll take some 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, this is the, you know, the most effective way to do this. And I think a lot of times people, Neal, 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, throwing out a number there, $500 a month, hire somebody can 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, you join more than 6 social networks. Two, you create content, whether it's podcasts or videos or whatever you want, and then repurpose it. Cuz if you're not pushing out content on a daily basis on all the platforms, you're not gonna grow. 3, 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 to help them create a ton of content that's regurgitated information that doesn't have anything unique in there, 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, it's, it's so true, and we're seeing that more and more. And I think, you know, I was talking to my, uh, 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, 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, you know, business. Yep. You know, it's, 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, and make a living. In fact, we have a, a friend staying with us right now and he does TikTok. He's, I want to say he's probably, he's 23 years old and he makes money full-time just, you know, 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, 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 5 times a week. And I don't go to sleep without having all my emails read and all my major tasks that I need accomplished for the day done.

Yeah, there you go. That's good. That's a recipe for success. It's a lot of levels of— these are— there's 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 time boxing, right? It's like if I have a 2-hour time, time, 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 characteristic I see with people like, like yourself that, uh, 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 5, 6 years.

Yeah, I think it depends on the 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 tremendous, tremendous benefits for a lot of people.

You're right, it allows me to be, for me, it's helped me become sharper and allows me, I've noticed me completing my task quicker. I also spend less time eating 'cause I'll eat from 12 to 6, 2 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 in making a plan, but also just going out there and doing it. I kind of see 2 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, 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 I strategize and plan is I, 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 just 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 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 it'll never, it'll never happen without any issues. You're always going to run into problems. And that's okay. You can learn to adapt and pivot and just modify, uh, 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, uh, and learning myself from you on this. In 5 to 10 years, what, what, how, 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 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, it— a lot. I mean, you know, 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 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, people really pitch whatever they want to end up pitching. And what you'll find is the way AI works is it's scraping the web kind of like Google's index or Microsoft's index for ChatGPT or, you know, Google has their own Bard, which is their version of ChatGPT. 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.

Mm-hmm.

Search engines have been trying to solve this problem for, ages and they haven't solved it yet, 'cause 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? Mm-hmm. ChatGPT's talked about how a lot of the content that's produced by them is not 100% accurate. Bard 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 the 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, but 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 5 miles a day and I go through up, 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 10 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 5 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. Hmm. 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, you know, Neil, I've been using ChatGPT a really pretty significant amount. And the thing that I found is, is that, yeah, there is actually— it has a lot of misinformation, right? It gives you 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 mis-citation. So, I had to stop relying on it in certain senses. But to help me, let me give you 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 50 different ideas for book titles and topics to do videos on. And then, like, my wife and I, 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 were saying, I think sometimes people think right now with Bard or ChatGPT 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 'cause right now people are under, or they're underestimating what AI will do for them 5, 6 years from now. And they're overestimating what it can do for 'em today. They think right now AI can solve all their problems and automate their businesses and just provide growth. It doesn't work that way. 5, 6 years from now, possibilities are endless 'cause technology's, 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 has cut down their research time by about 30% or so. So we've definitely seen some, some improvements there. Uh, 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 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 gonna be the future?

Sure. So some of the things there, there's actually not too many things that are dead. What we find is they just don't work as well. Yeah. Right. So it's just like email marketing still converts extremely well. It just worked better from an open rate perspective, a click rate perspective, et cetera, 6 years ago than it does today. Still works, still profitable, just not as profitable and as good as it was 5, 6, 7 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 dead, 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? 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's 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 lower audience that you can sell, et cetera. Another big trend that we're seeing is communicating 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 4 combined 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, 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, 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 read a study that said basically, you know, when you look at the baby boomer 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 6 hours just watching their favorite influencers than they are to go and, you know, pay a subscription to cable or whatever to actually watch a produced TV show. That kind of blew my mind 'cause 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 6 hours a day, but there are a lot of people that do that, right?

There are. So the last stat 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. Wow. 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% of, at least the last one I looked at, 55 to 60% 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 mainstream. 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, what we are 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, you know, ads on Google and partner sites. Facebook does over $100 billion a year. You know how much wastage there is? Companies are now 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 redeploy it into other places that could be more profitable.

Yeah, you know, I, I think that like, first off, when I hear that, I'm— it, 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, uh, what are some of the best AI-driven tools that you think entrepreneurs and small businesses could benefit from?

I— so I love Midjourney. Midjourney is for images. You got ChatGPT, you got Bard. Those are 3 that you can just use for free. Now there's a lot of other companies integrating AI, like in marketing. We do it at Ubersuggest, 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. Bard's is a few weeks old, right? Yeah. So the information, the output you're gonna get from Bard should in theory be better. For example, if you're asking ChatGPT stuff about COVID Bard is gonna give you much more accurate results cuz it can pull more recent articles than ChatGPT, 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 tools, you got to figure out how to integrate into your workflows and your systems. 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, 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 versus actually getting anything done.

Yeah, that's good. What, 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 on enough social networks. Two, you're not engaging with your audience. If you're not willing to respond to them, engage them, 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 to 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 want 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, 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, Another's Andrew Huberman. And when I go to their profiles, let's say on Instagram, the first probably at least 1 hour, but probably 2 to 3 hours and sometimes even 6 hours, I noticed after they make a post, they are, they are responding to almost everything. Every, every person they can comment to, they do comment to. And we're talking about probably, I think they're ranked the number 1 and 2 in terms of the health and personal growth podcasts that are out there. They're the top 2. 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, 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 the 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, I was on Huberman's page and I was just telling him, hey, I think this is great. And then I posted another, 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, just adding another valuable piece of content. And so I think that's something else as well, is that, you know, if there is a— and I've heard you say this, in fact, I was watching a video you did not long ago where you said, you know, you wanna be interacting too on pages of people that you love and respect and who, you know, you have, you're both creators are adding similar types of valuable content.

Yeah, you wanna interact and engage within other pages, profiles within your community. If you wanna, the big thing that platforms are looking for is something called EAT, 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 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, one of the, uh, I know that you oversee, uh, you know, a team of people, uh, you, you have in, 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 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 2 or 3 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, 1.5 years, 2 years, or 6 months and they quit, usually not loyal to a brand. The next thing we look for is people who continually got promoted 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 2, 3 times at each of those competitors and they kept going up, that means your competition found them valuable 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 2 times for your competition, right, 2 different places, there's a good chance they'll do it again the 3rd time for you. If they did it only at one of your competitors, could have been luck. They did it at 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, and if I were asked the same question, it might, 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? Or if you're a Buddhist, what would Buddha do? Or if you're a marketer, want to be a marketer like me, it's what would Neil do? But anyways, all that being said, but that's So 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, who are the best people? Let's say the best 5 people in my space and go and modeling 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 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, uh, I'm trying to— we're trying to grow, um, leaders.com, that business, and be able to be eventually, you know, I've— 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 growing. Or we could talk about individuals, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, You know, I, you know, so it's personalized.

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 grown, risen very quickly, and 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 Brand so popular today?

Well, a lot of times they'll be somewhat polarizing in the content that they end up putting out there. Yeah. 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.

Yep.

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 for them. And I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't do that, but that is a quick way to grow personality or your 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 were 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 5, 6, 7 years ago. You're talking about 10+ years ago. Now, of course, I didn't think that he should have done the experiment 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 instantly. And the main reason—

Well, today we see this big conversation around a similar thing on, you know, example, Andrew Tate, right? The very— 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. So, 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, 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 are large corporations. They're not going to be polarizing, nor would I ever tell them to. Right. Does it they got to be neutral and try to gobble up as much market share as possible.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. What we'll look at, what we've had recently, I mean, and this happened more on the left, but someone like Bud Light, right? It's like, hey, let's be polarizing. And for some companies, it has been incredibly damaging. That's a, that's a really, really good financially.

So, you know, their numbers, uh, 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 the financial standpoint, uh, whatever their goals were. If their goals weren't financial and their goals were to appeal to a 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, I love to ask entrepreneurs like yourself and people that have been able to experience a really incredible amount of success is, have you had any failures in your life that you've really been able to, to, 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, you know, 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 gonna 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 Economist, 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 the 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 percentagewise that much money from Brazil or that much money from like Mexico. But you start adding up a lot of these little, you know, 1 percentiles, 2 percentiles, 3 percentiles portion of the revenue. Next thing you know, their international expansion now accounts for like 60, 70, 80% 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 want to enact in 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 the 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 that all the big corporations do.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I, I, I, I've seen a couple things. One, it can be really challenging to expand globally if you don't have the right strategy. Uh, but also, as you're saying, you know, the, if you really wanna be able to increase your market and sometimes tap into more blue oceans, I mean, you're able to do that there. You know, I had a friend who, um, 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 just had his programs translated. And he ended up making 10x what he was in the US. I mean, just to your point, it's— and again, sometimes we might think, oh, this is only a massive organization. But the truth is he had a team of like 5 people. I mean, so sometimes you can expand without paying a really, really heavy price. I have a few other questions here for you, Neal, 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, uh, practices that you have in order to help, you know, grow yourself?

I, I think it's super important to grow yourself, not just to create a brand, but also always to improve yourself. Um, you know, if you just think about it in general in life, just like how you would 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, um, uh, 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 their 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 I was reading this psychology study recently just talking about from the ages of especially 1 to 5 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 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 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 gonna 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 parties, uh, when you're sharing that. By the way, I might start doing that with my daughter Arwen. I love, uh, I love that advice. That's so good. You know, one of the things I've noticed— do I—

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 it. I'm excited. You know, one of the things I can tell about you, Neil, is that you're also, uh, you're very motivated. We, you know, I asked you earlier about sort of your, um, your day, and you shared with me some of your time management of eating healthy, 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, uh, I'm going to be covering this next week, uh, 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, um, 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— we post on there, uh, 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. It'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 from 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 accomplished 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 wanna be a policeman or firefighter or astronaut," and that's what you're gonna 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 wanna 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 influencer. You know, it's a YouTube influencer is actually number one, which is, you know, which is crazy. But that's why, yo, 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 9 to 5, make money and just chill in this 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, uh, 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, and it's becoming more and more competitive. So I think some people are going to have to find some other, other, other, 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 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 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 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 US company or a European company or a UK company or 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 technology's evolved 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 $2, $3, $4, $5 million 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 wouldn't 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 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 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 the 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 pics 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, it's great advice. And I also think about it in terms of, you know, meaning and purpose. And, you know, like, we— I brought up this study earlier around loneliness, and there was a similar study that came out on, you know, the, 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, and when they went and you dig 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 look. You know, all those, all those things.

Yeah. Or like how, how like perfectly skinny they are, right? Like, I don't want my daughter growing up being like, I, I gotta be a twig. If you wanna be one, fine, as long as it's healthy. But like, be you. It's okay to have extra pounds and not have a, a six pack. It's, 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, you're eating as healthy and you don't look a certain way, you don't need plastic surgery. Or the other day I met someone and they're just like, they're using an app to see what they would look like with a different nose. I'm like, what's wrong with your nose? And they're like, oh, it's not as good as some of my classmates. 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, wanted to point out, Neil, is that there's enough— because so many, you know, young girls now are on this side of posting these perfect pics. Think about, you know, maybe it's our daughters one day, I don't know, but they're coming out and they're, they're teaching about you're worthy, you know, building self-esteem, be 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, uh, where 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, uh, let people know about some of your services and where we can follow, follow you to get more of your, uh, more of your content.

Sure. So I have an ad agency called NP Digital, 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 neilpatel.com.

Awesome. Well, again, I am a regular user and visitor of neilpatel.com. I follow Neil on Instagram, follow a lot of his reels and the information he's posting. And want to— want to thank— thank you, Neil, for coming on today. I want to thank 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, uh, other great episodes coming out here in the near future. And again, big thanks to my friend here, Neil Patel, for serving the world, putting out so much great information. And, uh, Neil, pray you have a blessed week. Thanks so much, my friend.

You too. Thank you.