Embark on a journey through the digital marketing landscape as I dissect the metrics that mattered most in my business last year, setting the stage for what lies ahead. Discover the unexpected twists of social media traffic, with LinkedIn overtaking Facebook and Twitter falling behind, and why search remains king.
Transformation is at the heart of success, and this episode is a testament to that. I'll share how my YouTube channel's subscriber count skyrocketed, thanks to a potent mix of content creation and smart promotion. But there's more: the rise in email traffic, the consistent income from my roles as a fractional CMO and speaker, and the 400% surge in affiliate marketing revenue all paint a picture of a multifaceted growth strategy.
Lastly, I'll break down the conversion magic—how despite the ebb and flow of social media traffic, YouTube emerged as a powerhouse for conversions. Delving into the health of my newsletter and the stability of my digital mastermind community, you'll get a front-row seat to the thought process behind my diverse income streams. And with expanded teaching gigs at UCLA Extension, the blueprint for educational influence in digital marketing becomes clearer. So tune in, as this episode is not just a reflection but a blueprint for your own digital marketing success in 2024 and beyond.
AI TOOL OF THE WEEK: Brand24
STAT OF THE WEEK: 79% of Internet users have a YouTube account
Learn More:
Embark on a journey through the digital marketing landscape as I dissect the metrics that mattered most in my business last year, setting the stage for what lies ahead. Discover the unexpected twists of social media traffic, with LinkedIn overtaking Facebook and Twitter falling behind, and why search remains king.
Transformation is at the heart of success, and this episode is a testament to that. I'll share how my YouTube channel's subscriber count skyrocketed, thanks to a potent mix of content creation and smart promotion. But there's more: the rise in email traffic, the consistent income from my roles as a fractional CMO and speaker, and the 400% surge in affiliate marketing revenue all paint a picture of a multifaceted growth strategy.
Lastly, I'll break down the conversion magic—how despite the ebb and flow of social media traffic, YouTube emerged as a powerhouse for conversions. Delving into the health of my newsletter and the stability of my digital mastermind community, you'll get a front-row seat to the thought process behind my diverse income streams. And with expanded teaching gigs at UCLA Extension, the blueprint for educational influence in digital marketing becomes clearer. So tune in, as this episode is not just a reflection but a blueprint for your own digital marketing success in 2024 and beyond.
AI TOOL OF THE WEEK: Brand24
STAT OF THE WEEK: 79% of Internet users have a YouTube account
Learn More:
It's the end of the year Well, it's actually the beginning of a new year but how did your business do last year? I want to introduce you the way that I measure how I did and all the insights of, well, what's going on in social media, what's going on with SEO, what's going on with how it relates to revenue and email conversions and YouTube subscribers, and everything. I want to cover all that in this episode to give you a glimpse as to how I plan my 2024. But also, I think you're going to learn something that maybe you can do to pivot your own strategy for the new year. So you'll have to listen in to this next episode of the Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.
Speaker 2:Digital social media content, influencer marketing, vlogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing, woo, there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer. Hey everybody, neil Schaefer here your digital marketing coach.
Speaker 1:Welcome to episode number 350. This is originally going to be my end of the year episode. I'm here with a glass of wine, just me and you. Ideally, this would have been closer to New Year's Eve, but that's okay. I have spent the time to compile my stats, to do my analysis, and I'm really excited. Every year, this has become a tradition to provide you with all the juicy information of how I did, in hopes that it serves you in improving your business and what you can get out of digital social media marketing in 2024. But before we get there, it's first of all time for our statistic of the week.
Speaker 1:This week is about YouTube and I know recently I gave you a video marketing statistic but 79% of the internet has a YouTube account. 79% of user adoption makes YouTube essential for video marketing. That is really an incredible number, and some people might not even consider YouTube social media. I want you to consider it social media and I want you to really take it seriously, like I did in 2022. I spent a lot of time on it, but I will tell you really really interestingly enough, that it ended up converting for me. In fact, of all the different social media platforms, the one that had the greatest conversion was YouTube. Even though I got more than 10x more traffic from Facebook, I got more than two times more conversions from YouTube. Everyone's on it. It's a high quality audience. The YouTube algorithm is fine tuned to really find your audience. This is another reminder to get serious about YouTube.
Speaker 1:If you want some help with your YouTube strategy for 2024, please reach out. The Digital First Mastermind community is currently full, but you never know when we have an opening, so go to neilshaffercom. You can sign up to be on the waiting list or reach out to me, neil, at neilshaffercom. Let's chat. We'd love to help you.
Speaker 1:Now it's time for our AI tool of the week. Today, I want to introduce you to a tool that was around before the emergence of AI, but has really enveloped AI technology to make it an even better tool, and that tool is the social listening tool called Brand24. Now, a social listening tool is something that, for a lot of smaller businesses, I actually wouldn't recommend. It's only when you really have a robust social media presence and all the wheels are in motion that we can now dig into social listening to get even more from our digital marketing activities. So, while it's not for everybody. If you want to know what's being said about your company, if you want to try to find influencers that are already talking about your company, fans that are already talking about your company they're one of the 97% of people who don't tweet the username when they talk about you on Twitter, right?
Speaker 1:So there's all these hidden conversations about businesses, and there's also a lot of competitive intelligence we can do when we use these tools. My tool of choice is Brand24. And Brand24 is really interesting. They have also added a lot of artificial intelligence to their technology. For instance, they support 108 languages, so if there is a mention in a foreign language, their AI-powered language detection will help track mentions that matter. They also use AI to understand the context of discussion. They will distill numerous brand mentions into an actionable and easily digestible word cloud and, using AI, they are able to offer advanced sentiment analysis. In other words, was it positive, was it negative? You will now know, and it'll be very, very easy to manage and analyze. If you want to get a free 14-day trial, go to neilshaffercom Brand24, that's B-R-A-N-D 2-4. And, if you are curious, their plans on a monthly schedule start at $99 a month. Social listening tools are usually very, very expensive. I think for smaller businesses, this is actually a really, really reasonable price to pay to get access to advanced AI technology. Once again, start a free 14-day trial. Go to neilshaffercom Brand24. Alrighty, now it's time for the fun.
Speaker 1:So I do not do these income reports that some famous bloggers did. I don't know how many still do, I think a lot of bloggers. At some point they stopped doing them. I never really did those income reports I think you know everyone's income is going to be a little bit different but I started doing. I think last year was the first year I did these, but I hope to continue every year. But I do this annual analysis of how I did so that you have a benchmark, you have something to compare it to and I think in my explaining these stats and then what I do with them, it's going to give you a better understanding of how you can analyze your performance and how you can actually make your analysis actionable for the coming year or, in this case, for the current year of 2024. So I have this on a spreadsheet and I should mention that this is also going to be part of my new book.
Speaker 1:The book is getting closer to the point where it gets to a copy edit, in which case we'll call that in production and a few weeks after that we'll have some advanced reader copies that I'll be sending out to influencers and other authors and CEOs that I know. So we're definitely getting closer. In parallel, I think you'd like to know I'm actually in the process of finding someone to create a workbook that's right, a literal workbook to help you using pencil and paper, work through my teaching, so that you can internalize them and really leverage them for your business. So I'm really excited about how this is all coming together. I think on a weekly basis, you're going to hear updates about the book, so I'm probably going to have the spreadsheets that I use that I'm explaining here as sort of bonus materials for those that pre-order the book. If that is you and you want to make sure you find out immediately when the book is available, go to neilshaffercomslashevents and you'll be able to sign up for my list there. I'm actually creating a separate mailing list, or I should say, newsletter landing page, like you would see on Substack or these other technologies, to make it easier for you to sign up to my newsletter and find out what I talk about, what past newsletters look like. But for the time being, go to neilshaffercomslashevents Now.
Speaker 1:2023 was a very, very interesting year. For those that know, I pretty much doubled my search engine traffic. So let's start with the web. Where do you get business Search? There's social, then email, and this is the SES framework that I've covered on this podcast. That's going to become an integral part of my next book, but it really starts for most companies with search. So when I look at my website traffic, last year I pretty much doubled, or I should say in 2022, I pretty much doubled the traffic that I got from 2021. That's the basis of a course that I'm creating in parallel with writing books, but that's a whole other story. So how did I do in 2023?
Speaker 1:Well, 2023, I'm not going to say I peaked, but if you heard my recent episode on the helpful content update, for whatever reason, google decided that my site was not as helpful as maybe some other sites and I have pivoted and I'm starting to see things stabilize a little and I'm sort of confident that. You know it's not a personal ding. It's an algorithm that's deciding, that's making preferences of one over another. But I think there is a way to reverse, engineer that and try to find out what you can do better. And if you've been to my site recently, you may notice that the performance has increased. The table of contents is now hard coded in the left sidebar. Or if you go to a mobile and you see my website on a mobile device, there's actually a floating table contents button at the bottom that will allow you to navigate anywhere you want to go on my site. I have completely stopped popups from my mobile page as well. I'm currently just reconstructing the entire customer journey when it comes to email. I'm going to get to that in a second, but you know I am taking steps. There's still a few other things I want to do, but for me it's still full steam ahead Because, guess what?
Speaker 1:You know, even though I took a hit, my search engine traffic in 2023 still increased by about 30% compared to 2022.
Speaker 1:And that was more than double before.
Speaker 1:I am thankful for every visitor that comes from a search engine and, whether it goes up or down, it's still a huge number and, in fact, while search engine traffic represented 92% of my traffic in 2022, it represents 91.5% this year, and I think that with this Google helpful content update those sites that got dinged they're starting to say hey, how do I diversify my traffic so well, maybe I need to do more elsewhere, but I'll talk about that in a second.
Speaker 1:But what really encouraged me about the traffic increase and my traffic as a whole, I should say, increased by 28.4% compared to 2022 is that the direct traffic that I got increased, meaning people directly entered Neal Schaffercom and came to my website, or they entered a URL that they found on the dark web or their you know, what have you. But I've always thought, when I do the analytics, that the direct traffic you get is a sign of brand awareness. The more direct traffic you get, the more brand awareness you have, and I think that that also goes into the search engine rankings, and I, you know I say this as part of my reverse engineering efforts. I'm really happy that my direct traffic actually went up by 70% in 2023. That means I'm getting known by more people and, in fact, the percentage of direct traffic as a total of all of my traffic went up from 5.4% in 2022 to 7.2% in 2023.
Speaker 2:So that was very very encouraging.
Speaker 1:Now my third most traffic, and I only have five categories here. My third most traffic was social media, and you've heard me talk about this time and time again. In 2021, social media made up 3% of all of my web traffic. In 2022, that was 1.4%, and in 2023, it's continued the trend down to 0.6%. Now, in 2022, compared to 2021, traffic from social media went down 5%. It took a huge drop in 2023, going down 47%. Okay, I have always told you you cannot use social media to build traffic. The odds are against you and it's only going further down. Now, what can you do? There definitely are things you can do, but I want to now look at social media. Well, let me get to social media in a second. Okay, let me get to the other two categories and then we'll look at social media and then I'm going to look at conversions and define for you what those are. So, when we look at social media once again, really, really interesting the order has slightly changed. So, twitter, pinterest, facebook, linkedin was the order of traffic in terms of you know, from best to worst that I got in 2022. Well, linkedin has now replaced Facebook. In fact, I've heard a lot of people say we've just completely given up on Facebook, but nevertheless, that is what's happened. But you know, twitter used to represent 42% of my social media traffic. It is down to 28%. I took a 65% decrease in traffic from Twitter in 2023.
Speaker 1:A few things going on here. I have focused on Twitter and I still continue to focus on Twitter, but it's just the numbers. They're just not as many people using the app. It is a fact, and I know I see some fake news on Twitter like, hey, twitter second to Facebook and all this stuff, but I can tell you from experience it is just not there. Now. I have also decreased the volume of my tweeting in hopes of increasing my algorithm and including more engagement type posts, or when you read my book, you'll see them labeled as Platform authentic content, but you'll have to wait to read the book to get to that.
Speaker 1:But Twitter is really what accounted for a big amount of that loss. I'm gonna get to that in a second. Sorry about that. I kept fast-forwarding. So the other two areas where I get traffic are email and others, so email Continues to be number five out of five. I did see a 10% increase in traffic for my email, which is good, considering my email list really didn't grow. I'm gonna get to that in a second and then the others, which is referral from different sites. What have you that actually took a hit went down about 30%. Not that worried about it, it is what it is, but it's still more than I get from email. So once again, I'm thankful I've had some referrals that would go into the others that actually generated a lot of conversions, and I'm gonna go into that in a second.
Speaker 1:So it's 91.5 percent search and that's why, for my website, it's all about the content, it's about the blog, it's about the SEO, it's about the user experience and it's about creating customer journeys and funnels leading off that, and that's why it's SES. It's search, then email, then social. Now email still gets me more, or I should say social media still gets me more traffic than email, and we can go into. You know how that works, but I would still say from a priority perspective, for a variety of reasons, that email comes before social, and the order of Things is one of these critical things that I'm gonna be talking about in my new book. So I don't want to give too much away Before I have my launch team, which you may want to join when the time comes. And yet those advanced reader copies available.
Speaker 1:So now let's dig into the social I mentioned. Twitter took a big hit right In fact, on every social network my traffic went down. The only Areas where there was some positive was LinkedIn only went down by 12%. So I'm happy about that and I've definitely been a lot more consistent on LinkedIn and playing around with with different formats that. The other one, interesting enough, was Instagram, where I really haven't done much. But I think Instagram is just. There's so many people there. If you were to strategize and I don't really strategize Instagram from my business, but if I was going to, there's probably a lot more traffic that I can get there. But if you were curious, you know LinkedIn can still deliver traffic and you know Facebook went down. Pinterest went down by the same amount as Facebook, but you know Pinterest still represents and I'd say Twitter, pinterest, linkedin they each still represent a quarter of my traffic from social media. So that's why I still invest my time in those three and I invest my time a lot less in Facebook. I invest my time in YouTube for different reasons which I'm going to go into.
Speaker 1:Instagram, for me, is really stained social, as is Facebook. It's more like my human platforms, if you follow me there. So that's the sheer traffic. But traffic by itself is nothing unless it converts. I Do not really sell product on my website. I have a mastermind I Planned to directly sell product on my website in 2024. So when I talk about conversions, these are people that are subscribing to my email list. I want to be clear as to what that means. I get you know business from speaking from you know teaching at UCLA, extension and record. So I'm going to go into the revenue side in a second.
Speaker 1:But the conversions, once again really interesting. You know, search still generates. In fact, in 2022, search generated 69% of my conversions and in 2023 it still generates 69% of my conversions. Another reason why I invest so much in it it's not just lots of traffic, it's people that are converting. Direct traffic. The percentage went up from 14 to 15 percent in 2023. Once again, happy about that social media. I actually got the same number of conversions from social media that I did in 2022 interesting, huh, even though the traffic went way down. So that goes to show you there's still quality conversions to get my email Conversions pretty steady 9% and conversions from others a steady 3.5%. But because my traffic went up so much, the conversions although they're the same percent is. My conversions ended up going going up 60% and Whether it was search, direct email or others, it was a pretty consistent 60% increase, which obviously I'm really happy about. That is one of the KPIs I look at. So Traffic goes up 30%, conversions go up 60%. That's looking really good.
Speaker 1:In social media, this is where it gets really really interesting. So if I go back to 2022 and I look at the order of what are the sites that are generating the most conversions back in 2022 LinkedIn number one, pinterest number two, twitter number three, facebook number four, youtube number five, instagram number six. So Instagram hasn't changed. I don't generate conversions from Instagram and at some point I should probably do a more formal link tree and, you know, promote those assets once in a while. I do plan to do more short form content and that'll give me the ability to Do that, but that's not really what it's for. So this year, linkedin is still number one and Twitter now has become number two. So huge decrease in Traffic but actually increasing conversions. Conversions on Twitter went up 50%. The big one is YouTube. Youtube is now the third largest. My conversions went up by almost 300% and they dropped on Pinterest and Facebook. So for me, for traffic, it's Twitter, pinterest, linkedin. For conversions, it's LinkedIn, twitter and YouTube. In fact, really, really interesting. I do not get that much traffic from YouTube, but the conversion rate that I get from YouTube is absolutely crazy. In fact, let me do a little, let me do a little calculation here on my phone, because I think this is gonna surprise you, as it did me 16% of the people that come from YouTube on my website end up subscribing to my newsletter. That is amazing, right? So you know, every social network is different and YouTube is very special because it's also a search engine. So maybe that should be part of search. I still consider part of social media, but nevertheless, that's another reason why, in addition to LinkedIn, twitter and Pinterest, I try to invest more in YouTube.
Speaker 1:So what are the other things that I look at on my spreadsheet? Well, I look at the email. Now I could look at open rates. I was getting as high on some of the weekly newsletters as like 50% open rates in 2023. So my number of subscribers and I do monthly, I do regular prunes if people don't engage in six months. I have a system where I weed them out unless they're interested in staying. So the actual number of subscribers went down by 2.4%. In 2022, it had gone up by 5%. You know, I'm OK with it because I know I'm reaching these people because of those open rates and the click rates. Do I have great plans for email? Absolutely. I mean, I have dedicated chapters on like lead magnets in my next book and I'm going to be drinking my own medicine for sure.
Speaker 1:I then look at what are my other marketing channels where I'm investing time. Well, this podcast right Now. In 2022, the total number of downloads went up by 45%. Very happy about that. I was also very consistent. 2023, not so much gone up by 2%. Is there more than I could do? Yes, that's why I'm trying to experiment with segments and trying to do some other things, and I really want to be selective as to who my guests are as well. So I also look at the number of episodes I published. Last year it was 57, or I should say 2022. 2023 was only 48. My goal was 50, to do 50 a year. So this year I'm going to have to do 52. And hopefully, episode number 400 will be how I did in 2023, which hopefully you'll hear me talk about at the very, very end of the year.
Speaker 1:Finally, because YouTube is like a quasi search engine, quasi social, I look at that separately. So my number of subscribers you know, I only had a little bit over 1000 subscribers at the end of 2022. And I sort of publicly said I'm going for 10,000 by the end of 2023. I did not get there, but I have more than 7,000 subscribers and I'm really happy about that. My watch time also went up by 767% and in 2022, I only made nine videos. In 2023. I've made 92 videos, not including shorts.
Speaker 1:Part of the way I did that is a dedicated chapter on content repurposing Once again got to be in the new book, but I also did. Of all these platforms, the only one where I did any paid activity was YouTube and with YouTube, you can analyze, if you spend a little money, what are the videos that actually bring in a lot of new subscribers. So you get watch time and you get new subscribers. You know that was really, really good for me to help grow, because I wanted to accelerate the discoverability of my content in the YouTube search engine. Right now, this year, I do not plan to do any paid YouTube efforts. I stopped doing it at the end of last year, but, I'll be honest, that definitely helped, but I thought it was a very, very smart way of investing a little bit to help boost those numbers and help boost the watch time and, at the end of the day, it boosted conversions as well. So that is the spreadsheet that I have, looking at all the different metrics in terms of performance.
Speaker 1:How did that translate into actual money? So in 2022, I had nine streams of income and in 2023, it was a goal to create a new stream, which I did. If you go to my website, you might see they're pretty, you know, conspicuous but I do have Google AdSense ads that are embedded in my blog content. It's just an easy way to make a little money. That helps with the overhead. It's nothing. I don't have obnoxious videos or obnoxious ad pop-ups and, to be honest with you, I have yet to have one complaint against them Now. I may take those out at some point, but it's just. I don't want to leave money on the table. It's just easy money, right? So that was a new stream that I did and I am, you know, I'm pretty happy about that.
Speaker 1:The stream that I lost was the cohorts that I was doing with the Maven platform. I thought I was going to continue doing them this year and I thought you know what in 2023, I thought I said you know what, I want to build courses on my platform. I don't think I need to share income and if I want to share income with my courses, I want to do it with affiliates and with partners who are actually helping me make more money. So that was a strategic decision to pull the plug on that. It wasn't much financially speaking, but I did make a little bit of money in 2023, but the whole idea of pulling the plug on the Maven cohort was to release my first course in 2023 and that did not happen. So the budget for the courses ended up becoming the reality for the cohort and that was probably the biggest number that I missed when I look at my budget of what I want to do accomplish in 23 and actually how I did in 2022.
Speaker 1:So, if you're interested in sort of my streams of revenue, if you know how my business works, I am a fractional CMO and I am also a speaker. Being a speaker means that I get paid to speak at conferences, do. Corporate trainings and teaching, although it's a separate revenue stream, is actually sort of affiliated with speaking in general. So it's always been fractional CMO and speaking slash teaching that have generated an overwhelming majority of my revenue and that continues to be the case. But I've been trying to pivot to create more digital revenue. My digital first mastermind community was my first digital product. My cohort was my second and obviously these courses that I'm building for 2024 will become my third. So my community was very stable in 2023, ended up increasing money, even though obviously my courses never panned out and my cohort, although it was very, very small amount, went down.
Speaker 1:But what was really interesting in 2023 was affiliate marketing. So I ended up going and I think I mentioned this in the same podcast episode last year Try to increase with every year by one digit. Increase your income. So if you're creating courses and you only made three digits last year, that's between $100 to $999. Try to make four digits in 2024 or try to go from four to five digits. So I successfully, with affiliate marketing, went from four digit income in 2022 to five digit income in 2023 and ended up increasing by almost 400%. So I've learned a lot about affiliate marketing. It's not strategic for me, but if I'm going to introduce technology to you all, it's like I don't want to leave money on the table and it's something that I think you should all do as well. I mean, you have, like Amazon, influencer programs out there. I mean, affiliate marketing is everywhere. It is a type of influencer marketing. So, because I have a platform, it allows me to do that, and I should say that in addition to that, I have other sources of income as an influencer. We can call these. All sort of like sponsored content Didn't do as well last year as I did in 2022, but the increase in the affiliate income more than made up for that.
Speaker 1:So I think you can say, from a digital product perspective, I went up. From an influencer perspective, I went up my teaching more than doubled. I'm teaching more at UCLA Extension. I started teaching a new personal branding class and pretty much teaching there every quarter, and they are increasing a number of classes. So I'm very, very thankful for that, and my fractional CMO income went up as well by about 40%. So that was very solid.
Speaker 1:The only one that did not go up was speaking, or I should say that one up the least was speaking. Now there are some years where I get more consulting than with speaking. There are other years I get more with speaking than consulting. The reason why I'm really trying to push a new book is books are real strong ways of generating speaker business. It gives you an excuse to reach out to meeting planners, event planners, to apply to speak at conferences and, for me, I really didn't want to speak that much in 2023 until I had something new to promote, whether it was a course or a book, and I didn't have that. That's why you haven't seen me be speaking and I haven't really been applying to speak either. Now I still do have speaking clients. It is still a part of my business, but I've not really been very proactive in it. For those reasons, I expect 2024, with a new book coming out, to be very, very different, and I'm already applying to speak at some conferences. We'll see how that goes over the next few months. I'll keep you all posted. So that is it.
Speaker 1:So 2023 compared to 2022, it was pretty much a stable. I generate six figures, not seven figures, from all this activity. I'm very happy about that and it was a very stable year for me, even though there are differences in how different revenues, different increases and decreases for different products, but that's the way a business is. That's why you need to have more and more products. This is what I push to all the digital entrepreneurs, and my digital first mastermind is you got to create product. Yes, you need audience, and all these social media hacks are great, but if you don't have anything to sell them, it don't make a difference, and I'm really trying to increase the number of products that I have to be able to serve all of you in various formats going forward. So that is really what's pushing me to finish this book. It's pushing me to create courses, to get out there and speak more, and 2024 is just a year that I am extremely excited about. I don't think I've ever been this strategic with what I do now that I've ever been.
Speaker 1:And some of you may say, neil, you're finally coming out with a course in 2024. And I say to you, in Japan, two very famous companies, sony and Panasonic back in the heyday, sony was always coming out with the innovative new technology and often they were misses. They'd invest a lot of money and it didn't sell. Panasonic would look at what's in the market, figure out the core features that it needed was able to manufacture at scale, bring the price down and end up getting number one market share in many of the products that Sony failed at. So I am now able to stand on the shoulder of giants and look at this course creation industry for the last decade and now be able to come in and do it right from the first go, because I can see and learn from all the experiences of others.
Speaker 1:It's like my book. That's my fifth book, man. I mean. I've learned a lot from my previous four books, but when I published my first book back in 2009, there weren't a lot of resources about self publishing out there in the internet. There's tons today. There's book coaches I could hire. There's book courses. I think you get the picture. So you know, being late to start something is nothing bad. It's actually a competitive advantage. Give that some thought. In fact, you know, the biggest competitive advantage is having data right.
Speaker 1:Recently I asked my newsletter list those that are really active. I don't know how many of you got one of these, but I was giving out $20 Amazon gift cards. I'm actually gonna be announcing it tomorrow For those that you know answered my survey about what courses would they like me to teach. What are they interested in learning? And that data is gold, right? If you're not asking your list, if you're not asking your followers what they want from you, how do you know what to deliver? Will it fly, et cetera, et cetera. So I hope that you took something away from everything that I talk about here.
Speaker 1:For every one of these, I have my own plans of how I plan to increase those revenues in 2024. Obviously, for the cohort, I'm pulling the plug, but for the others, I have very distinct. I have a budget right my budget for 2024 compared to 2023. I still think it's going to be a stable year, but if you remember, I said my keyword for 2024 is reset right. Reset the stage, reset the infrastructure for growth. That's what this year is going to be. This year is the reset year to tweak everything that I'm doing for massive growth in 2025 and beyond, and that's why I am honestly and authentically excited about what's to come. Do you share that same excitement with me? I would love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me, neil, at neilshaffercom.
Speaker 1:I always love to hear from my listeners. I am always grateful for everyone that has subscribed to this podcast, if you haven't. I mean this podcast used to be called, in its earliest days, social Business Unplugged. This is sort of the unplugged right, the backstage conversations, the conversations in the hallways of conferences that you want to eavesdrop in. That's what this podcast is all about. I'm not trying to hide anything from you at all. I really want to share with you what I've learned, because I think if we all share what we've learned, we can help so many people and have positive impact in the world. And it starts with me. So hit that subscribe button. If you haven't, if you haven't left a review, you know I'd be honored by that. I don't need to repeat myself. And that's it for another episode of your digital marketing coach podcast. Until next time. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastneilschaefercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschaefercom to tap into the 400 plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.