Eric Siu on Programmatic SEO, podcasting and affiliates

I've probably talked to a couple hundred people on on that pod and the Common Thread is there's a level of focus that's required if you want to hit the outsized outcomes that's not saying everyone needs to go for the outsized outcomes but if you want like a Warren Buffett type of scenario where they're holding like $188 billion dollars in cash right now and they own a bunch of companies well it's just Relentless focus at the end of the day it's not about not so much about

diversification and the late Charlie Munger but Charlie Munger I was watching a video yesterday he was just saying that you know if you're if you're really have an edge in what you understand you really don't need to diversify that much I think the problem with a lot of marketers especially affiliate marketers is that we try to do too many things and that's one of the biggest lessons and it wasn't until I got punched in the face myself where I learned that that lesson actually makes a

lot of sense I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by stat Welcome to the bi podcast I'm chatting with Eric Sue who runs the leveling up Podcast which as of today has over a thousand episodes since 2014 he's also the co-host of the marketing School podcast with Neil Patel and he's the founder of single grain which is a digital marketing agency and I'll stop right there because I could go on for quite a while

Eric welcome to the show yeah thanks for having me John excited to be here so I want to start off with uh a powerful question which is for 10 years of doing this leveling up Podcast featuring guests Like Pat Flynn Alex Heros Patrick Campbell and getting to pick the brains of some of these amazing entrepreneurs on how they level up what are some of your best learnings for um just leveling up and like the best insights from all of that yeah I think the the the

common thread I think i' I've probably talked to a couple hundred people on on that pod and the Common Thread is there's a level of focus that's required if you want to hit the outsized outcomes that's us saying everyone needs to go for the outsized outcomes but if you want like a Warren Buffett type of scenario where they're holding like $188 billion do in cash right now and they own a bunch of companies well it's just Relentless focus at the end of the day it's not

about not so much about diversification and the late Charlie Munger and then you can't really see them but um Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are over here they're they're these two bronze bust if you're watching the video um but Charlie Munger I was watching a video yesterday he was just saying that you know if you're if you really have an edge in what you understand you really don't need to diversify that much I think the problem with a lot of marketers especially affiliate marketers is that

we try to do too many things and that's one of the biggest lessons and it wasn't until I got punched in the face myself where I learned that that lesson actually makes a lot of sense I think I understand because I've made those mistakes for nearly 20 years and it it took me the punch in the face to realize you know what just do one thing sell your affiliate businesses build the affiliate software that you were meant to do and um yeah it was a pretty

painful lesson but I'm glad I at least learned it there you go focus is King okay so I was introduced to you by Miel suski who's from Surfer SEO and he's like you got to talk to Eric about uh programmatic SEO so I want to ask you what is the right way of doing programmatic SEO today given what we know what's happening in the background with Google yeah totally so setting the context for everyone there was a Google helpful content update and there was like a

basically like a Google AI update that happened in the last couple months and actually as of this week there's another update that happened with a reputation abuse update that happened right and so um and we can go into all of those but the main thing is um if I were to answer your question directly programmatic SEO is I'll show a real life example here it's about building templated Pages at Scale based on Geographic keywords or uh you know different type of you know you can have

different type of modifiers right could be like HubSpot Alternatives Salesforce Alternatives those types of keywords right now if I were to simplify based on Geographic or geography you might do fun things to do in Rome fun things to do in Japan fun things to do in Los Angeles right and that's why a site like Trip Advisor drives over 131 million visitors per month from SEO alone and they that traffic alone if they were to pay for it would be $67 million a month for that traffic

so it's a lot of money and they rank for about 121 million keywords or so um something something like that or actually sorry I got that wrong it's about 24 million keywords um bad memory but you know the key thing for them is they're creating so many permutations of these p pages and they're generating these pages programmatically that they're when you combine the sheer amount of volume that they're producing plus their domain Authority they're able to rank for all these right now the the key thing

with with if you want to do programmatic SEO if we want to get into it a little bit is that you need to make sure that you're designing these these page templates and you need to make sure that the keywords that you're going after are actually the keywords that uh make sense for you and often these are you know middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel type keywords and um you got to make sure that you're pruning these pages too because if you're going

to produce tens of thousands of these Pages you can't produce a bunch of crap right you actually have to be reviewing these pages so I'll stop right there I'll pause for a second but that's the high level for programmatic SEO it makes sense I mean I'm sure you could just blasto 200 Pages easily but if you're not actually going through and like you said pruning them I think that's where maybe everyone makes a mistake and probably where I have a fear of actually trying to do

it but going okay if I'm going to launch these how do I do it in a carefully in a careful way where there's still quality behind it like you said uh it's got to have value otherwise why bother yeah so John one thing that we do with that is internally we we built that that single grain we built an internal um tool that allows us we basically quality score these pages and so if we produce let's say 10,000 Pages let's say you know 2,000 of these

Pages don't drive any traffic in the first 30 days well those pages are automatically going to be deleted so we're programmatically doing that piece and then you know initially when we start with the first batch of let's say you know the first batch of 25 to 50 pages we might have a human in a loop to just double check those pages and then if if all 50 of those look good chances are the rest are going to look good and then we'll have that quality score

tool in there to kind of double check and automatically delete pages at scale and how would you recommend or what are some ideas behind using chat GPT to try to come up with like ideas yeah so for chat GPT let's say that we use like a HR or we use like a semrush or a surfer for it to come up with different keyword keyword ideas so initially let's use a Trip Advisor example so hey you know I'm a travel website and um or sorry let's reset

for a second here's the prompt it might be you're the best SEO in the world and you're trying to optimize using programmatic SEO and you're trying to drive millions of visitors right so you're setting the tone for the prompt right there and then you're saying okay you know our website rings for keywords such as fun things to do in Japan fun things to do in Rome fun things to do um and blah blah blah and then you know we're we're worldwide right and uh we want

to aim for you know the the biggest countries or the biggest cities in the world um can you give me those keywords right and then that could be an idea that um that they'll shoot off to you that maybe they'll give you a list of maybe a 100 keywords or so and then you can dump those keywords into like an hress and they'll suggest another set of keywords for you to go after and then you can build your list that way and then you can prune

the the keywords that you don't necessarily want to rank for that's one way you can go about it yeah I saw one of your posts I think it was six months ago on LinkedIn I talked about how you could use chat gbt for one of these examples and I actually copied it for affiliate marketing and I was kind of surprised that how insightful it was like it I just assume that chat GPT wouldn't really understand my space in affiliate marketing but it basically gave me things

that I'm like oh I feel guilty that I'm not even doing that yeah it does it does um and that's a good point John it does when you give it a role and you say you're the best copywriter in the world or you're the best YouTube headline and thumbnail Creator it does a pretty damn good job of making headlines really interesting or whatever it is you need them to do because once you give it a roll it's GNA hone in on the data that it does

have that it's trained on already and it's going to give you something that's a lot more specific if you're too broad with what you're asking for then unfortunately it's pulling from a broad data set and that the answer that you're going to get is going to be a more broad answer okay now I want to try to come up with some good ideas for the affiliate marketing space so we're a SAS company we're like the QuickBooks for Affiliates but we believe our Affiliates are problem aware

but not solution aware so one of our goto markets is to do affiliate program reviews and then the categories um what are some ideas that you would have for not just doing programmatic for the sake of it but maybe a good strategy or a good idea behind it so specifically in your space yes okay so again you are just to recap again you are it's like a QuickBooks affiliate so you're targeting people that are small business owners no it's it's like the QuickBooks for Affiliates so

it pulls all your stats commissions into a single app got it okay great and then you're you're asking about how I was specifically use this with AI well it could be AI but it could be just like a generic strategy of going okay what are like we know from the categories that could be very programmatic so it's like gambling as one example has different niches and then there's different countries that have different markets within each thing um as as one example yeah so I don't know

your spa I'm I'm trying to figure out like what uh it sounds like I need to understand your product a little more is it so it's like it sounds to me like it's an all-in-one type of affiliate tool tool tool that's pretty accurate it's like a CRM it does business intelligence but the most important central part is how much money did I make today yesterday stores all the data right down to the campaign level got it got it got it okay so what I would do

in this scenario and it might it might be an element of programmatic uh to start with you might not even need programmatic here um but when I think about software and we'll go back to my example about um Alternatives right so HubSpot alternativ so you would look at all your competitors and do competitor plus Alternatives right um and then you would also do another modifier might be uh your competitors versus your company name right so versus does really well Alternatives does do really well um when

it comes to software and then from there I I probably would have to go top of the funnel because there just aren't a lot of keywords here because again like programmatic works really well for e-commerce if you have a lot of skews or it works really well if you are if you have a lot of geographic locations right that's where it works out well um and then you could you have a big multiplier effect there I think in your situation you're going to have to go

one level higher if you want to get programmatic to work and then I think you're going to have to think about okay um you know how do I check my gambling Revenue every day how do I check my you know Niche Revenue every day right and I think there's a lot of questions that could be answered and then where you add that modifier of the niche that you're that that the affiliate Niche and then I think you can create a lot of content around that um

and and go from there it sounds so simple but it's I kind of feel guilty that we didn't even think of something as basic as like how do we get our Revenue every day uh just to give you some feedback of ideas that we considered were uh how to get the apis from the fet program so you can pull the data in and ironically enough because people are problem aware but not solution aware they look for those keywords because they're trying to do this themselves they're

like I had no idea you even existed yeah exactly so that's perfect right I mean You' have all these blog posts and then you have many uh call to actions as the blog post goes through just you'd c those right and you you maybe you'd have like a product Leed growth motion I don't know how works for you guys but you you you might have like a like a premium version that they can sign up for and you can get them into the funnel right so

um you know you would know your funnel a lot better than me but that's how I might think about it yeah we've we've been product L growth all the way for the last year and I don't think we want to change that great happy your work for you so the next question is I feel that social media and videos becoming more prominent and more influential and would you say this is going to be probably a stronger goto market for Affiliates given SEO given SEO yeah I

mean SEO is getting harder I think you and I are both aware of that um but I would say to me YouTube is the biggest opportunity for the next decade I I just don't see that going anywhere uh I think LinkedIn and Twitter are certainly nice right now because they have good organic reach and then you know whatever your whatever is that you're selling I think you just got to focus on where the organic reach is um and the interesting thing if I to go higher

level right now is when you look at some of the most successful investors in the world whether it's Mark andreon or you look at Brad gers you look at Bill Gurley all these people had invested some of the best companies in the world and uh Ben Horowitz right who wrote the hard thing about hard things he has a podcast with Mark andreon so you have a lot of these investors that are creating content now it's because they're understanding they're realizing that the the new customer acquisition

the new demand generation is actually creators at the end of the day right because distribution is becoming more and more democratized and SE is becoming harder and so you know traditional media is kind of going down and um you know you have companies like ESP end like they're they're struggling they're starting to struggle a little bit um and you have platforms like the Tik toks of the world who knows what's going to happen to them and YouTubes where um you're going to be able to to

to capture the attention and so the fact that we're doing this right now I think John you see the value in it um to to be able to post this podcast to YouTube chop it up for audio as well and then chop it up for shorts and then even chop up and use those shorts and post you know I have a caption and post it to LinkedIn um that's the way to get organic reach right now and uh those that are playing the game are going

to reap the reward for the next decade yes well you already answered another question but given someone who's been doing podcasting for 10 years plus your other podcasts I mean I mean the question I kind of don't want to ask is like should I do two podcasts yeah it's interesting to me um I posted a thought yesterday about how I'm evolving the leveling up Podcast but because there's too many interview podcasts right now and so um you have to Zig so here's a little side lesson

when everyone's doing the same thing you have to Zig where other people are zagging so 10 years ago when I was doing it it was novel right and then it's very much interview podcasts have very much become a red ocean and you know my thought recently was like I have a lot of stuff to say but when I when I do interview podcasts I want to respect the other person I want to get insights from them and so it it it comes from like a situation

where I'm just trying to learn but the the audience doesn't really learn about me right and so now I'm thinking about changing up where maybe 70 80% of the time John I'm just focused on doing solo episodes much like how Andrew huberman does solo episodes and then maybe % of the time those are the people that I really really really want to talk to and then that balance will leave me satisfied from a learning and teaching standpoint so that doesn't answer your question directly um but

that's how I'm I'm thinking about it so should you have two podcasts um I don't know because for leveling up again that was satisfying my curiosity for marketing school that's Neil and I reacting to marketing news but I think what was missing with leveling up was I need I need another forum for me to go deep on research and teach there right so I think it's really whatever works for you and if it's two podcast three podcast four podcast um whatever works for you yeah I

I did remember listening to one episode from you where you talked literally about this where it's like Zig when everyone's zagging or something like that and it's an interesting Insight because I think a lot of people when they understand the power of a podcast Channel or YouTube they you know they go they go into it but they're not thinking what can I do to separate when more people are coming into this but the only thing that gives me is I mean maybe you know this to

be true is not everyone wants to do what you've done or do what Mark's done or set up their own podcast and get uncomfortable and make all the mistakes right well here's what I will say I mean it's the the bar to start a podcast now has never been lower and so you see a lot of NBA players starting podcasts right so Paul George has a podcast Carmelo Anthony has a podcast Dwayne Wade starting a podcast LeBron James and JJ reck just started a podcast um

Shannon sharp has one like everyone has a podc podcast now right um and it's it's kind of entertaining but I'm realizing they're all kind of just saying the same thing now and um it just becomes this Echo chamber right so I do think it's very important to Z where other people are zagging because what you the comments you eventually get from people are like oh my God this is such a breath of fresh air right and when you start to get comments like that you're moving

in the right direction so um you know I just the final thing I'll say around this John is I realized I needed to make a change when I met with someone about a month ago he wanted to do like a business deal with me and and when I got with him on the call he was kind of you know he didn't mean to but I could tell he was kind of talking from a position of power over me right um and I just kind of like

Let It Go and then as we talked more and more he realized he's like oh crap like you're actually legit I'm like what do you mean he's like well I thought you were just a guy that like did these YouTube podcasts but like you're actually an entrepreneur and you're like in all these groups like ypu and things like that I'm like well yeah he's like yeah I wouldn't have KN one from your YouTube and I'm like okay something needs to change that might be true but

I personally find that ridiculous but it's understandable yeah yeah it makes sense I mean not everyone and I appreciate that John but it's um not everyone has the time to do the research and um they only see what they see right so it's good that he caught that content but um you know how do we make it easy to discover the whole enchilada all right let's pivot right back into AI are you kind of concerned for some people that maybe they're going to be totally lost

to see and displaced by by by AI yeah I mean I I told my team a pretty crude thing two weeks ago during an all hands I said um you know the book sapiens no okay so there's this book called sapiens it's a pretty popular book which um I haven't read through the whole thing but I read the the the author's other book so sapiens is a pretty good book um talks about the history of mankind but he wrote he wrote this other book um I

forgot the full name of the author his name's youall but he wrote another book called 21 questions for the 21st century and he has a chapter in the book that talks about how there will be a useless class of human beings um I when you think about the power of AI and Elon just said this in the interview maybe two to three days ago about how artificial intelligence is going to be way more powerful than biological intelligence and you just think about it this way John

like you what you and I have learned through our entire lives is just stud studying pattern recognition and when these large language models are being trained on data they're just detecting patterns and they're using inference to predict the next um whatever the answer is that you're looking for right um and that's all it is at the end of the day it's training off of pattern recognition and so if you think that what's lacking right now is overall energy and compute there's going to be more of

that there's going to be more and more chips coming online um technolog is going to continue to advance there's just no way that computers won't be smart than us this is just a very beginning right now and so if that's the case I just told the team I was like guys like I don't know about you I don't want to be useless right and if you want to be useless like don't work here right like I I will do whatever it takes to make sure that

you'll never be useless working at at at single grain um and what that's going to require is that's going require us to be at least the top 5% of people we can only hire the top 5% of people we have to be very strong at Innovation and to be very strong at Innovation you have to be very strong at strategy right that's what's going to separate us from from the other people and strategy leads a good creative as well and so if that's the case then

there's going to be a lot of people that are you know working off of universal basic income if that's what you want to call it and um here's the other thing that that I think will actually be a blessing in disguise John so I'm going way out there right now Way Beyond marketing I think people are going to realize that once they have Universal basic income and they have a lot of time for leisure that Leisure is actually not the objective because I don't know about

you John but maybe in the very beginning when we were a lot younger we were like you know what um I I would rather you know I would just love to retire and and and and live on the beach right and just you know and just relax but that gets boring so quickly so people are going to realize that Leisure isn't the goal and they should be productive and I think the world's going to become a lot more productive with humans working on different things the

world's going to become a lot more creative over time I hope you're right in sense that you know we need kind of a purpose in life and maybe some people they just get complacent and they get into you know certain pattern but I hope that's the truth um jumping on what you just said I talked to someone who's got an AI company and I asked him a question something similar to what you said I said what's your take are we going to be is it Panic

or like opportunity and uh party time and he basically said it's Panic so I said what about people that work in business intelligence and data visualization he's like yeah most of that could be uh replaced with AI and I was like wow there's so many people going into business intelligence right now like they're literally starting a career learning these skills and to think that this could be just eliminated so quickly I'm like I was telling people a year ago this is the space to get into

yeah well John I think I think I partially agree and disagree with him I think shortterm with AI over the next 5 10 years there will be panic I think long term though it's going to be good it's going to be net positive for society because when we think about every Revolution that's happened in Industrial Revolution a lot of farmers were displaced right and then they found different work so and then they panicked in very beginning oh my God we're all going to lose our jobs

right um the printing press when that first came out like things change over time and I do believe that because we're adding more intelligence to the world that it's going to be a net lift for everyone it's gonna be a rising tide lifts all lifts all boats and but again people are going to freak out I think it over the next five ten years but I think it'll balance out over time okay uh pivoting to something else if people say that someone that goes from sales

and marketing they'd be a good fit and then people that go from marketing to sales it's like you bring insites into another another um field so would you say that from your uh experience being on the digital marketing side maybe I'm assuming Less on the affiliate marketing side what could people in the e-commerce space pull into affiliate marketing that would kind of give them um give them a level up or an edge yeah so on the e-commerce side let's see so e-commerce people very F I

mean Affiliates are very focused on the numbers as well especially their numbers um and on the e-commerce side there's a lot of I think people are very open to experimentation they're very open to trying new products new Services New tools I think people in e-commerce are very open to Partnerships as well um I think a lot of Affiliates they like to work as as kind of solo guns um and so I think that's something they can learn as well but a lot of things you know

when I think about Affiliates Affiliates are very rapid testers they move very quickly and they're quick to try new things too um same thing with Ecom people right and so I I think at the end of the day it comes down to a lot of Ecom people that I know are at at the next level it comes down to the relationships that they're willing to build so whether it comes to Partnerships or um with people or the people that they hire I think they know how

to build teams they know how to work with people and they know how to scale big businesses so I think that you know bring bring that over to Affiliates will take Affiliates in the next level because when I speak at like an affiliate world or something like that um people are very focused much more on me me me I think you know big e-commerce companies are much more focused on Wii and that helps everybody grow makes sense um next question is as someone who invests in

companies and startups what are you looking for in Founders as well as businesses to invest in yeah so one obvious thing would be so when I look to invest in companies I look for a large Tam so a large total addressable Market but the biggest thing that I look for is I'm looking for a killer and let me give you an example so I invested in a company called Eight sleep and I actually spoke to the CEO last week we did a live podcast in Miami

and his name's Mato Mato you know he played he played Sports hardcore he raced cars before as well and the the key thing about him is that he sees this as a company that he's just going to work on for the next 10 20 30 years so he has a very long time Horizon too so sleep obviously that affects the entire world initially I was like okay how big can this be this seems like a mattress company it's not it can't be that big right when

I spoke to him his vision's there it's relentless Focus as well he said this the the Sleep Products that we're building eventually they're going to have the ability to MRI you and check if you have any issues with your body and make recommendations I'm like oh then you can when you make these recommendations you can collect an affiliate cut on these as well he's like yeah that that's that's maybe where we might go and he's constantly shipping he's constantly looking for ideas he's learning all the

time as well so a lot comes from the founder the founder has this invisible Hammer where they can just make things happen and so you want a Founder that's a a machine when it comes to learning very open-minded founder founder founder um you know very focused founder as well and someone that just works on it all the time and that's totally him that's all he thinks about and now I'm like okay this is not just GNA be a multi-billion dollar company it can probably be a

multi it could probably be a trillion dollar plus company um over a longtime Horizon right so I hope that's the case but that's a good example of that very insightful I hope uh that's kind of what I think I am but uh that's for someone else to judge but um very good insights and I try to look at other Founders when they give me other pict decks to share to investors and I'm looking for the same thing I'm like I can't refer you unless I believe

in you too right and then the other thing John too is you have to believe in the founder because you're betting on the jockey but also do you do you believe in the space right so I I'm really into longevity health I'm into the blockchain as well and so I'm into those things I'm gonna bet on it and um I'm I'm okay looking at this as I'm probably GNA lose 99% of my bets and hopefully that 1% makes up for everything because John I I have

a buddy and and maybe you do too but you know he put like a $25,000 check into this this one company and it became like uh became $80 million for him right so those are the types of home runs that you're looking for I wish one day uh last question is what do you see as the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence yeah I I'll give you um maybe this is a side answer I was talking about this with my actually so

we're building a new product internally and I said look you know with with AI I I'll do AI plus affiliate so right now the the problem with affiliate so let's say we're talking about a couple different products right now on this podcast we're not going to go out of our way to make at least for me I'm not going to go out of my way to make all these affiliate links now imagine if you have an AI out there that will automatically say hey John I

will go out there and uh make these affiliate links for you automatically okay and maybe we'll take a five 10 perent cut on every sale every affiliate sale that you get and it just scales out right like someone needs to build that solution and um that's going to be really interesting because people just don't have the time to make these things it's to manual I agree we're actually working on something similar where we're not sure if we want to become an affiliate network but we think

we want to become like something like a tracking technology where it's the analytics but it's also the adte so what we're looking to do is take the design the programming and the data away from Affiliates so imagine you can say well give me a list of products in this market and give me the entire list of them give me the comparison tables and just powered by data so it's compliant and does everything and the idea is that it should be powered by your own data well

what's converting better over time so yeah so it sounds like it might be a closed model you can have an open model too but all the data that you're going to have down the road I mean these are all patterns and you can figure out what you want to do with that too so that's exciting yeah the AI Playbook is almost infinite and that's why I like talking with AI advisers going what should we do and they all say the same thing they're like do not

share your data with anyone it's it's like don't partner with the AI company yet it's uh be patient totally Eric how can will get a hold of you I think most people know but we'll include all the links in the show notes yeah you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram it's ericos as in Sugar IU so Eric OU and you can go to YouTube just search for leveling up with Eric Sue or you can search for marketing school there and those are the best ways

to to find uh all the stuff that we do awesome thank you so much for doing this thanks for having having me thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners