How Jay Berkowitz Built 1 Million YouTube Views Without Paid Ads

Hector Hello and welcome to another episode of the How to Scale a Business podcast. My name is Hector Santi Esteban and I am your host for today. I'm joined by a very special guest, Mr. Jay Berkowitz. He is someone who is the founder of the Ten Golden Rules, someone who has really put out a ton of great content on scaling, growing a business, and we'll get into all sorts of stuff today. So, Jay, welcome to the show. Jay Hector. Thanks for having me. This is great. Hector What I love about having people like you is that you've done it for yourself. You've grown a business, but then you've also had the chance to work with a lot of clients and helping them to go through a lot of the same challenges that our listeners are going through. So I'd love for you to share some of the sort of the highlights and the key stops along the way in your in your career, and then a little bit about what you're doing with your clients now. Jay Yeah. Well, I guess the career is I got great training working for great companies. I started working in ad agencies. My first client was McDonald's restaurant and skip a couple of jobs. Then I became a director of marketing for McDonald's and had a forty million dollar ad budget. And we did, you know, TV commercials and billboards and radio and Happy Meals. And you learned really great marketing from a ton of great marketers. And I also worked for Coca-Cola as a director of marketing. And then I saw the internet company and I coming. I took a job with sprint as a director of marketing, and my job was to get people their first emails and get companies their first websites. And then I moved to Florida to a startup.com called idiots. Com and if you think back to two thousand and two, Google was in beta, Mark Zuckerberg was in high school, and we were doing sixty million dollars worth of online diet sales at this online diet company. And I got a tremendous amount of experience doing real internet marketing before most of the world had experienced anything like it. You know, most people were discovering Google, you know, as a search engine, and we were spending forty million dollars running banner ads on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN to bring one hundred thousand people a day to this website. So I got tremendous, tremendous experience ahead of the market, really ahead of the entire business world. And I wrote a presentation and a book called The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing. And that became my company name and my blog and my podcast and my webinar still to this day. Hector Yeah, it's amazing when I tell people that I've been doing podcasts for almost a decade, they're kind of shocked because, you know, a decade ago, most people hadn't didn't know what a podcast was. And when I run into someone who has been, you know, sort of in the internet space since the beginning, I'm always curious to ask, is there anything that you think is is different and is there anything that's still the same, you know, from when you were getting into this industry? Jay Well, the Ten Golden Rules is probably a good place to start. You know, and a few of the basic strategies that I presented as the rules or the Ten Commandments of the internet. You know, the first one is there are no rules. And that was a little bit tongue in cheek. But really what we were explaining was I came from traditional marketing, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, sprint, and we used to run by sort of a set of operating principles or rules like, you know, if you ran a TV commercial and thirty five percent of the audience saw it five times or more, you know, and that was three hundred and fifty groups, that would be enough to, to create awareness. And we kind of operated by these rules and it sort of kind of worked. And so we used those operating principles. If you if you had a billboard, you could only have five words and they had to be this big, you know, for people to see it going fifty miles an hour. And those were rules were operating principles. But when we got into internet marketing and even direct marketing, you could validate with numbers and measurement. And so really the the genesis of there are no rules is that we operated with results We didn't operate on theories or rules or principles and we could, you know, at idiots, it was unbelievable. We'd have one hundred thousand people a day coming to the website, and I could a B test. So fifty percent of the people would see the standard website that was kind of blue and green, fifty percent could see a website. We did a new website that was pink in color because ninety two percent of our audience was female. And guess Which one won. Hector The pink one? Jay The blue website. However, there is tremendous learning because on this new pink funnel we created, it captured more email addresses. So we didn't get more sales, but we got more people opting in to get our newsletter. So we did a new version of the blue site. So we did an A, B test. Then we did an A, B test with a new version of blue Site with the the same email capture from the pink variant, and we had a new winner. So we learned And that with data we can make business decisions that can move the business forward. Hector Yeah, I imagine the speed of these decisions is just getting quicker and quicker, right? Because in order to test it before the internet, you had to do all these things. the time that was required. It just seems to be compressed. And I would imagine that with AI and automation and all that sort of stuff, those things are getting compressed even more where business owners, I don't know if required, is the right word, but they're at least enabled to make these decisions quicker, which I think is ultimately going to be better for their business. Jay Yes and no. You know, I would be very cautious in making decisions quickly because you still need statistical significance. And I think far too many people make decisions very, very quickly. And we made that mistake sometimes at idiots. But we, came to a conclusion we needed a thousand purchases on either the A or the B side to make a decision. So that was a lot of visits to the website to be precise. So we would generally let our tests run about a week. A lot of times people pull the trigger far too quickly. Hector Yeah. Are there any other rules that we went in the first one, which is, you know, there are no rules. So I think that gives us a good, a good idea of what's to come. But are there any other ones that you think stand out for someone who is maybe looking at at digital marketing or internet marketing from the outside and thinking that's something that is not for us or not, you know, how might they, uh, start to come closer to being able to utilize some of these things? Jay One of the rules that might have died and a lot of people predicted is death is subscription models survive. And for many years people have predicted the death of email. But email is still very powerful. So if you get a large subscriber list and that could be emails, it could be physical mails, it could be Facebook subscribers. Twitter. so if you get subscribers to an email newsletter to a to physical. You get physical addresses. You get lots of social media followers that can be incredibly powerful. So building your followers, building your subscribers. Golden rule subscribers model is very, very important. Hector it's something that I think especially when people look at today, they look at social media, Instagram, TikTok, you know, YouTube is becoming this thing. And underneath all of that email has still been this constant, right? This ability to reach people. And so some of these, these newer, shinier objects are perhaps, exactly that, but some of the time tested principles sort of remain the same. Jay Yeah, one thousand percent. So, um, you know, building your lists whether the format is super powerful YouTube subscribers is awesome. Like, we've had over a million views on our ten Golden Rules YouTube channel. And that's been so valuable for our business because every week I have people coming to me and saying, Jay, I watched your webinar on the six parts of Google or the ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing, and and you get it. And I'd like to hire you because our agency doesn't get it. So that's been super great for us. Hector Yeah. The also the ability that I think what's what people don't realize is the amount of trust and relationships that can be built when you leverage these things. You know, we work with a lot of companies that they they built their business sort of belly to belly. And it's this really interesting term that, I don't know, it's I always think it's kind of funny thinking of two, you know, people like touching bellies, but that's but that's sort of what they had to do. They had to shake hands. They had to be, you know, in person with people or on calls with people and sort of what you're saying is that you're able to scale that impact, scale that relationship, and there are people that are out there consuming your content, going further down your pipeline without you actually needing to be there. Jay Yeah. I mean, we can get really far with digital, but, you know, belly to belly is still great. Matter of fact, one of our best vehicles is trade shows, and we work most mostly with law firms. We do internet marketing and growth strategies for law firms. And when I can speak and we can have a trade show booth at one of the legal community events, it's incredibly powerful for our firm. Hector Yeah, it seems like a lawyer specifically. I've had a number of great conversations with lawyers, and one of them stood out to me. They said, I'd rather spend, ten thousand dollars on a podcast than I would on a on a billboard or a bench ad. And for me, I was just like I had not previously thought of lawyers as someone who would be in sort of the content game, but but it seems like the relationship that they need, the relationship that's being created through this different marketing, it doesn't matter how it's happening. Uh, it's just that they're building trust and they're building a relationship, you know, with this business. Jay Yeah, definitely. In some of the practice areas, uh, that could be super powerful. Um, I still believe, like a lot of our clients are consumer facing like personal injury lawyers, family lawyers, estate lawyers. Google is still the king and the Queen and the court jester as far as I'm concerned. But a podcast could be a great vehicle to supplement. Once you got Google, you know the six parts of Google I talked about covered off. Hector Yeah. One of your your rules is the four P's. And I, uh, I remember learning this in my college marketing class, and this was about the extent of what stuck with me from that degree. But, uh, I also remember thinking, oh, this is something that it's changing. It's evolving, and I'm coming around and going, I don't know, even with technology, even with AI and everything, it's still fundamental to marketing a business. And so I'm curious to to nuance the question, how has that if you want to explain a little bit about the four P's and then how does someone apply that in a twenty twenty five. Sort of. Jay Yeah. Great question. The four P's are product, place, price and promotion. And the golden rule was remember the four P's. And so product like a lot of times we want to think about the internet as a product. And like Google has all these products and they have product managers. So like there's a product manager for search a product manager for YouTube, product manager for the new AI overviews. So you want to think about your website and your internet marketing program the same way, you know, when am I bringing out my a new section of my website? Who's the Innovation and research and Development manager for my internet marketing? what new products can I feature on my website? So the first P is product, the second is place. And you know, we used to joke that, location was the most important part of marketing, and it still is in retail, but on the internet, I would argue that the most important location is coming up for a search for your business in your city, or like for our clients. It's personal injury lawyer near me. And so you've got to be optimized for search and in particular those Google map search results. Because a lot of people want to do business with someone, they can reach out and touch someone nearby. And of course, if it's a shoe repair or a pizza place. But even if it's a law firm and they may never even go into the law firm, they may sign up online, they may call them, they may sign up a DocuSign. They may never meet the lawyer in person. But the reality is place, location and optimizing your local search is super valuable. The next one is price, and typically we expect a lower price on the internet than we do online. And price is really, you know, discombobulated, uh, retail. And you can even go into a retail store, Take a picture of a product with the Amazon app. See how much it is on Amazon. It's probably less right there in the store. You could ship it to yourself at home. You don't have to carry it home. And so price has has certainly been a killer for retail. And and then the final one is promotion. And so you know promoting yourself building your brand. You know, promotion is still mission critical for websites and online products as it is for real world products. Hector Yeah, I think there was a, idea that for a while, you know, people could avoid, you know, having a website. And then that came around and they go, well, everyone needs a website. And then social media sort of had that evolution and it starting to happen that the, you know, there's a need to to create something to reach out and touch your prospects. Because if you are not, it's likely that your competitors are. And with AI and just the the ease of which people can create that messaging, whether it's videos or images or whatever it is. it seems like businesses that aren't utilizing that opportunity to connect with their, their community, um, are losing out to newer, newer startups or people with less experience. And it just seems like your your emphasis on being in the right place and being noticed is never going to really go away. Jay Yeah, well, we talked about it earlier, and I think YouTube is the greatest new old product that there is because YouTube seems to have hit a whole new level. and I think what I call it is they sort of tick tock their algorithm. So on tick tock, you typically see videos about subjects you're interested in based on previous TikTok videos you've watched, and YouTube's been very successful in replicating that. So now I mostly see videos about marketing, internet marketing, business, the Winnipeg Jets, hockey club, tennis training videos, you know, live rock music, all the videos that I watch before they show me more videos in the genres that I'm interested in and the categories I'm interested in. So I think YouTube has had a huge renaissance. And people, you know, people kind of take YouTube for granted. Well, YouTube by far and away is the second biggest website in the world. I think Google has, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty million views a day, YouTube is like forty two million and Facebook's nine million. So by a wide margin, Google and YouTube are the big dogs, and YouTube is way more important in terms of business opportunity than Facebook, TikTok and even ChatGPT, which is growing. It's in fifth place, uh, far and far, far behind YouTube. So if you want a good business strategy for today, develop YouTube videos. And I always say just answer questions. So whatever it is, if you're a plumber, if you're an internet marketer, if you're an attorney, answer the kind of questions that people would be asking on Google and YouTube and put it in the form of a question. So like we always say to our attorneys to do, do a video and we coach them through this. One of the questions we're getting asked all the time is, what do I do if I get hit by an Uber? Who's going to pay for my medical and my car repairs? And then they go on to explain that answer. So if you answer questions on YouTube and then use that video on your blog and then use it on all your social media, it's very cost effective and you're setting yourself up for success in the new AI search. Both ChatGPT and even more importantly, the Google AI overviews. Google is showing an AI result at the top of every search, and essentially these are question and answer, right? You ask a question, the AI overview answers the question, and then they show the websites they used to compile the answer, and they show lots and lots of videos. So I'd say answering questions, answering questions on YouTube, answering questions on your website is the new SEO or answer engine optimization, which is an evolution from search engine optimization. Hector It's a it's a great sort of segue. I mean, the eighth rule is use the right tactic. And I think you just mentioned some great things which we're recording this in November of twenty twenty five. a lot of that, you know, the, the, the strategy of that is going to be evergreen and timeless, but we might look up in six months or three months or however many months and the, the platforms or the tactics might change. are there any other right tactics for, for this moment, or are there any things that you are, bullish on with regards to reaching new people? Jay I mean, I think I just hit the two biggest like one is set yourself up for success with AI, and the AI search we talked about is the biggest thing happening in my world, and video is probably the most significant tactic. But, you know, I would say getting into AI in your business is probably the next most important thing. And you know, if you haven't touched the basics like using ChatGPT, um, just to ask and answer questions and anything you do from, you know, writing a job description, um, to, creating a business plan to writing an article. I was asked to write an article for a legal publication, and I simply copied and pasted the transcript of one of my webinars. And, and I gave a really good prompt. And a really good prompt is the format of c r I t um, and this is Jeff Woods wrote a great book called the AI Driven Leader, and he talks about CRP. Hector I'd say go back and listen to the episode with Jeff. Yeah, he's, he's. Jay I. Hector I'd call him a better friend than he probably thinks of me, but he's definitely a mentor of mine. Um, and Next. Jay Role, interview and task. So Jeff Coach is right. A great prompt, the context. I want you to write an article for this legal magazine for Jay Berkowitz, founder of ten Golden Rules Rule. You know, you're you're a great business writer and you're very good at summarizing content from other sources. Interview. Ask me three clarifying questions, one at a time. Before completing your task task. Write an eight hundred word article based on the download of the webinar I provided. Boom! It's going to be ninety ninety five percent correct. I get those articles done in ten minutes. It used to take me four hours. Hector Yeah, I love it. I've just started playing around. We do a lot of content, a lot of media, and so even the ability to edit videos through, through text has been really a game changer for me because I come from the world where you had to manually do it, but now you can, in the same way that you can ask it to write a newsletter. Or I recently created a sales page, uh, you know, through AI prompts. and it took a lot of massaging, but it was something that we could do a lot quicker and that I was capable of doing without a, you know, a designer or, you know, an advanced video editor. And so the tools are evolving. Jay Yeah. So that's great, great advice. You know, get into the basics, which is, you know, just just do it. You know, pick a couple products like a ChatGPT or a video editor or Google Gemini is great at creating images today. And I created a funny image of my dog, um, going to the fridge. And I put that up on my zoom meeting just to say, hey, I'll be right back. So, you know, it's it's unbelievable. With one simple prompt, you can get exactly what you want in terms of a graphic visual. Hector One of the other ones that we didn't really cover, which I thought would be interesting, is, uh, creating a unique value proposition. You know, a lot of especially with lawyers or we kind of work with service providers that otherwise see themselves as as. Commodities. And so being unique or creating what you call a uvp. I think is really critical for businesses of those sorts. Probably any business. But talk to me a little bit about your perspective and how you can take businesses like a lawyer or personal injury lawyer and, and create that that uvp for them. Jay Well, golden rule number three is create a uvp or a unique value proposition. And some people confuse that with, you know, like a unique selling proposition. A unique selling proposition is what makes your company unique or different from other companies. But the concept of the Uvp was something on your website that would create a higher conversion rate. a lot of great evp's through the years are free consultations or, you know, even we we did some analysis on the ten Golden Rules website. And I thought, you know, most people would come and look up, you know, our services or our products or how to do SEO or get information about Jay Berkowitz. But most people just wanted to see the ten Golden rules. So we made a download of the ten Golden Rules, available free on the website, and you could purchase the book The Ten Golden Rules on the website. So a uvp is something free that's going to get people engaged at a higher level when they come to your website. Hector Yeah, so so critical. Um, this has been a really fascinating conversation. There's a few of the rules left that we haven't, uh, that we haven't touched on. I think one of them is if you build it, they won't just come. Which I think is a great one, because I've seen so many people do that, especially in the podcasting space. Talk to me about that one. And why you decided that that was a rule? Jay Well, the basic principle there is you can't just put up a website without doing some marketing, without doing some SEO to get people to the website. So if you build it, they won't just come. And that's true for your website and for your business. You know, you're going to have to have some kind of methodology to get, you know, sales and marketing to generate traffic to your website and then convert that traffic into business. We've even developed a couple proprietary conversion strategies. We have a proprietary AI bot that we wrote that's based on five of the world's greatest intake trainers. And now every phone call our law firms get, we provide coaching to their intake teams on what they did right, what they could have done better, how they could have closed and converted a sale better. On that website, we built another proprietary technology that is called TGR Boomerang. TGR, short for ten Golden Rules. Like the Australian toy the Boomerang. You throw it out and it comes back. So when people come to your website and they fill out a form, um, a lot of people don't check their email twice a day. Well, those forms, those leads degrade in about five minutes. So TGR Boomerang grabs the name and information, immediately, texts it to the intake team, or it can even put it into a dialer so you can call those people right back. Another way it grabs information is if people call your, your, um, your, your phone number and they hear the Google recording, they a lot of people hang up about ten percent. We grabbed the phone number again, text it to the intake team. They can call that person right back. So there's a lot of new technology that is part of sales, part of conversion, part of operations. Hector This is great. I think we're going to have to go back and have the listeners listen to this a couple of times to digest all this stuff. if people are feeling overwhelmed or they're feeling like, like they don't know necessarily where to start, how do you sort of help guide them through that? If they're looking at this and seeing a large mountain to climb? Jay Well, the best never rest is test, test, test. Um, and that's really about, you know, you you've got to work hard at this stuff. It's not easy, but lead the trends was, um, a rule that I wrote based on, um, really new things coming out. And you really have about six months if it's going to be a winner, you've got about six months to take advantage of it before everybody else in the marketplace. All your competitors are doing it. So when the local service ads first became available for plumbers and locksmiths and garage door repair, once Google had three advertisers verified by Google, they appeared right at the very top of Google, and it was a click to call and you only pay per lead. Then, three years ago, this came along for for attorneys, and we got our attorneys approved right away in their marketplace. And so they were at the very top of Google. They only paid for a phone call. It was a fantastic program. And you know, we got one of our lawyers was the fifth lawyer approved in New York. Very soon, you know, a couple months later there was fifty lawyers. And today there's probably fifty thousand lawyers vying for those top positions. So what I do is I have my own personal rule of three. So when I hear about something the first time, I take note of it, I hear about it. Maybe on a podcast, I'm like, hey, I got to check this out. And then if I hear about it on a third time, then to me, that's real enough that I better figure this out for my clients or for myself. So a lot of products I'll test on my like. I created the first blog for ten Golden Rules, the first podcast, the first YouTube videos, and then we rolled those for our clients. The local service ads aren't available for marketing companies. So as soon as they were available for our attorneys, we figured out how to get them screened or approved in this Google program. Used to take about two months and then we could start running the ads. And then the next step was figuring out, okay, how do we optimize this program? Because it's a brand new, unique algorithm that's different than SEO, different than pay per click. And we were able to figure out what we called our secret algorithm to get our lawyers to the very top of the local service ads. Hector Yeah, it's a testing and trying and then sort of going all in, you know, when when you see it, which I think is huge. I've got two more questions for you. The first J, is if people want to get more involved with you, find out about the agency or the ten golden rules. Where's the best place for people to go? Jay Yeah, well, ten Golden rules. Com or J Berkowitz on any of the social media I generally beat. There's a couple of really prominent J. Berkowitz's, but luckily enough I beat them to the punch, um, on LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever new social media come along. And probably one of the best places, if you like this kind of learning training, education is on our YouTube channel. We have over a million views on the ten Golden Rules YouTube channel, and we have tons of content about SEO. Um, even things like the iOS or the operating system we use, personal development, personal branding, rainmaking, how to build your business. So there's tons of great content on the ten Golden Rules YouTube channel as well. Hector We'll link all those up in the show notes for you guys, as always. And, uh, we kind of touched on it, but I'll throw it to you. I asked this question to all of our guests and give you the last word. But in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business? Jay Well, I think the secret to scaling a business is to run it like a business. You know, particularly if you're, you know, if you're past that startup stage, you pass that freelance stage, you know, now you've got to start operating like a business. Um, I recommend a book called E-myth. And E-myth is the entrepreneur's myth. It's not the electronic myth, and it's like a thirty five year old book, but it talks about developing systems for your business. Um, so for everything we do, whether it's, um, you know, creating a website or doing keyword research or optimizing a Google Maps Google business profile, we develop a checklist and a loom video and a training module for our employees. And then if we figure out a better way to do it, we update the SOP or the standard operating procedures. So running your business like a business. We also use the iOS operating system, the entrepreneurial operating system. And so we have a system. We have L10 meetings. We have rocks. We have quarterly planning meetings. We have a leadership team. And so we operate like a real business. And when you get past like eight or ten people, you can't supervise more than seven people, I think they say. So at that next level, you've got to really become a business with a leadership team and leadership operating principles that everybody knows the rules and everybody can follow along.