Pod Insights Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips The YouTube Algorithm Update No One Is Talking About About this episode Neil and Eric break down why YouTube is cracking down on sensational headlines after a filtered video with a 9% CTR stalled in traffic. They share hard-earned lessons from early clickbait marketing days, why traffic alone does not equal revenue, and the real growth lever most founders ignore. From hiring mistakes to interviewing tactics and AI copy detection, this episode reveals why elite talent beats flashy marketing every time. Key Takeaways: YouTube is punishing clickbait titles. Traffic does not equal revenue. Hiring A players changes everything. Chapters: (00:00) YouTube Title Filtered (00:36) Clickbait Marketing Lessons (01:49) Boardroom Hiring Advice (03:54) How We Interview Marketers (07:21) Hiring Mistakes and Lessons (09:26) Money vs Passion
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Neil, so this is the first time my YouTube got filtered. It really didn't like one of my titles, but I had a video come out on Monday. I'm like,
0:42 Speaker 00 dude, the click-through rate's 9%, and it's not getting any traffic. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? So the title was, can Open Claw and Claude Code actually replace humans, right? And it really, because there's an algorithm update that happened, I think, this month where YouTube hates sensationalist headlines. And I'm like, what's going on? 9% click-through rate? And then I'm like, oh, I got filtered. So, just a flag for everyone, if you're doing YouTube, they're really cracking down on the sensationalist headlines and the packaging now.
1:09 Speaker 01 Speaking of sensational headlines, another big marketing lesson that I learned back in the day is I used to be really active on social media. And when I say social media, back then it was very different. For marketers, it was mainly like Dig, and Reddit. There was StumbleUpon that was driving a lot of traffic to websites that was created by Garrett Camp, who's one of the Uber.
1:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, then he founded Uber.
1:30 Speaker 01 Uh huh. And there was also Delicious. I believe Yahoo ended up buying Delicious for 30 million or something.
1:37 Speaker 00 They went nowhere.
1:38 Speaker 01 Uh huh. So, when you look at those type of websites, and they were driving a lot of traffic to webmasters,
1:46 Speaker 01 those kind of websites did really well with sensational headlines. And in marketing, they would call it, uh, what was it? Clickbait? Right? A lot of it was like clickbait back then. And what I ended up finding out is the clickbait is really great to get eyeballs. And sensational headlines is really great to get eyeballs and attention. But it very rarely does it ever convert to revenue. And as a marketer, I remember I used to believe that the most important thing that I could do was drive traffic. And I was sitting in a board meeting with investor back in the day. His name is Phil Black. Phil Black worked at Summit Partners, which is a massive
2:33 Speaker 01 private equity venture fund. I don't know how much money they manage. Call it thirty, forty billion. I'm guessing it's somewhere around there. I can actually Google it. Summit Partners, AUM, forty-six billion. Oh, it was close. And he also worked at Deutsche Bank, went to Stanford, probably went to Stanford first. And then eventually he created his own venture fund called True Ventures with, I believe, a guy named John Callahan. And had massive success throughout his whole career. And I remember in a board meeting, Phil's like, who's working on what? So, you know, my co-founder Heathen, my brother-in-law was CEO. I was working on marketing. We had a guy named Ben Sardello working on sales. And I remember him telling me something that was interesting, right?
3:18 Speaker 01 Because he was just giving us feedback because every quarter you would have board meetings or every other month. And you would think like, as a marketer, your job is to get more leads and more traffic. And I remember him telling me one thing. He's just like, your number one job, no matter what role you're in, because he's seen a lot of companies, is just hire the best people. If you just hire those people, it doesn't matter if we're in an AI revolution, if we're in a manufacturing revolution, agriculture, it doesn't matter. He's like, your number one job is to hire the best people. If you hire the best people who are really good at solving your problems and they're smart. Sometimes they could be young. Sometimes they could be gray-haired people who have done it before within your space.
3:59 Speaker 01 Sometimes it could be people who are just really creative and scrappy and they're engineers and they can solve problems in very different verticals, like Elon Musk, right? He's like, your number one job is just to hire amazing talent. And he's like, if you look at all the companies I've invested in over his career, and he's invested in a lot, he's quite a bit older than I am. And, but he still looks young. He was just like, the companies that do the best are the ones who just crush hiring. And I never forgot that lesson. And right now, I'm interviewing people in marketing right now for NP Digital to do our marketing internally. And when we look at that role, I have very specific questions for them. And if people don't have good responses, I just X them out right away.
4:44 Speaker 00 Ask the questions, ask the questions.
4:47 Speaker 01 So questions would be, you know, let's say you work for a random company, whatever it may be you do in marketing. I say, okay, have you seen our business? Yes. Have we given you a lot of stats and data? The answer should be yes, because we give them information. I was like, okay, we generate a lot of revenue from webinars. What would be the webinars that you would end up creating? All right, and what are the topics and why? Now, keep in mind.
5:15 Speaker 00 This is for your internal marketing team, right?
5:17 Speaker 01 This is our internal marketing team. These are people I'm interviewing. These aren't things that they have to give me on the spot. We actually gave them homework. So they're presenting the webinar topics that they would do to us. They're presenting how they would modify our Facebook ads to make them perform better. Right, and they're actually showcasing everything to us. And they'll ask them questions about AI, do they use it? You know, I can, because I can tell a lot of times when they use AI or not, especially on the copywriting. I've gotten actually really good at figuring out who's using AI to write their copy.
5:50 Speaker 01 And it's very similar on how AI writes copy. A lot of it is, as Ramit Sethi used to say, bomb-tastic. Do you remember him talking about that term?
6:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, but to be specific, I mean, some examples would be like, you know, Neil, it's not this, it's this. Like, you see that a lot, and the M dashes.
6:09 Speaker 01 Yes, tons of M dashes. And they go, AI creates a lot of polarizing content. So the example is like, if everyone's investing in AI, it'll be like.
6:25 Speaker 01 You better not invest in AI unless you do this, right? And you know, so I get to ask people those questions like what they're using AI for or whatnot. Some people are honest and people like, I didn't use AI for anything. Then you see a lot of M dashes, you're like, yes. I remember I interviewed one person's like, I didn't use AI for anything. And they're citing examples of webinar topics to include specific people. I'm like, oh, you know, so and so, and you can tell they don't know them and no one in marketing would know them. And then you Google them and there there's the person who wrote a forward article, which you know AI loves pulling from. So I'll get specific on that or I'll get specific on questions like, if you start, what would you do in the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?
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7:42 Speaker 01 If someone says in the first week, I'm going to make all these changes, right? One, they they better be 100% sure they should make those changes. But usually, if someone has been doing marketing for a long time, they're not making a lot of changes in the first week. The reality is, is if you're coming into a new role in an established business, you're getting to know and understand the culture, the people, all that kind of stuff, what's been done, what has worked, what hasn't worked. You're looking out for all the data, hopefully using AI to understand all of it and compute it at much faster so the onboarding is quicker. And then you're going to make more informed decisions versus going out the gate and making changes from day one without knowing what's been tested, what hasn't been tested.
8:28 Speaker 01 But yeah, you know, what I learned from Phil Black and it has been true is hiring, and it took me a long time. I would say I genuinely understood the concept because he taught me that. Maybe fourteen, fifteen years ago, I probably truly understood it eight years ago or somewhere around there. And that was when I created MP Digital.
8:52 Speaker 00 I think it's eight years ago. Let me tell you why. So I was gonna ask you the question, when did you take that on? Cause I've known you for fifteen years or so, right? And I know before the way you hired was pretty like whatever. But I would say maybe eight years ago, when you first started MP Digital, cause when you first started, the first hire you made to be your CEO, I was like, that's not the right hire. And then you, I think after that, once Mike was, was, was, and you were focused on it, I think you guys locked it down like really quickly.
9:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're talking about the mustache man.
9:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. I was like, you did not think through that one.
9:24 Speaker 01 No. So Eric, me and my co-founder Mike were at a conference and there were some other friends that are at that conference. I think it was a growth conference in San Francisco.
9:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was, it was the sales conference, which is rest in peace. It was his growth hackers conference or growth marketing conference.
9:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's a good guy. I miss him. So when you look at that event, there was a guy, we call him the mustache man because he had a really amazing, cool stash. And Mike and I were like, yeah, you can do the agent stuff. And he's really smart, the way he talks. And I don't know how long he lasted, Eric. I don't know if you remember, maybe a month with us? I think we fired him pretty fast. Two weeks. Yeah. So, but we got really picky at hiring. And yeah, we very quickly learned that you need the right people. It doesn't matter how many leads you have or how good at sales you are. But if you just have the wrong team, you're not gonna do well.
10:22 Speaker 01 And we see that in every division. Like, I don't care if it's marketing, I don't care if it's sales, I don't care if it's operations. I don't care if it's someone doing AI initiative stuff for you. If you don't hire the right people, you really are screwed.
10:34 Speaker 00 Yeah. You know what's interesting? I'll share another lesson and then I have some things tied to kind of what we're talking about. I have some charts to show. But there's a period of time, I don't think we've really talked about this on the podcast, where it was actually gonna be Neil, Mike and myself partnering up for MP Digital. And I think we would have done well together, we would have worked well together. But I don't regret how things are set up now cause you get to do things your way and I get to do things my way. Um, I think Mike would have largely just gone with with whatever. Um, but I think I think we're both largely happy. Like, I am very happy with how things have turned out, and I trust that you're happy too. So.
11:07 Speaker 01 I am, and I remember Mike and I pitching Eric and Eric just straight up being like he wanted to do his own thing. And I respect that.
11:14 Speaker 00 Well, I said yes until I said no, so.
11:16 Speaker 01 Yes, yeah, or he uh he didn't say yes, he said he needs to think about it. And then uh eventually he decided that he wanted to do his own thing, which I respect. I've had people offer me amazing jobs and roles. Um, and I know Eric too, because I remember Eric interviewed with Ray Dalio's team. You didn't take it, you weren't interested. You pass it over to me, I interviewed with them, and I said I wasn't interested either. This was before Ray Dalio created his book. Um, Principles, right? Or before he was launching, he wanted in-house launch. It paid well, so I think it was a million bucks.
11:48 Speaker 00 Bridgewater Group, Bridgewater Group, yeah.
11:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is like, it was like a million plus dollars, a million, two million, somewhere around there back in the day. Um, but going back at it, it's just like, it doesn't matter if someone is willing to pay you a lot. I had someone offer me a six million dollar job offer. Um, you know, I was telling Eric about it as well back in the day. It's like, none of us really wanted to work for someone. And it doesn't matter if you can make more money or less money. If you're truly not happy and passionate about what you're doing, like, life is short. You know, cut back on your expenses. Don't buy all the stuff that you may want or dream about. You'll be happier just doing what you love every day than owning that fancy watch or car or house. That loses its glam after a week.
12:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's uh, so you've gotten six, you've you've gotten bigger offers than that, and you've you, but but we don't need to talk about that. And then I've you, I think you actually passed one over to me where it's like a ten million dollar signing bonus or something like that. Um, so it isn't about the money. And by the way, in this situation. Um, I think you you and Mike were asking me to be CEO, and we would have been partners here in this situation. But I think, you know, I, there's still a lot of, especially on the focus side, there's a lot for me to learn there. So I'm happy with how things turned out, and there's a lot that you guys learned too. And we will see you, we'll see you next week. Goodbye.
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