This might be one of my biggest marketing mistakes yet, and I want to share it because there’s an important lesson in it. For a long time, most of our traffic came inbound through SEO. We were getting 10's of thousands of organic clicks, and I also had an understanding of exactly which pages were driving qualified leads and which were simply generating traffic. Then, a little over a year ago, I noticed a major shift in the search results. AI Overviews were taking traffic away from top-of-funnel content, and within a few months, our organic traffic dropped by roughly 30%. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I told myself that a lot of our content wasn’t very good anyway. Some of it attracted the wrong audience, and SEO was changing, so I needed to focus on other acquisition channels. There was some truth to that story. But because part of it was true, I stopped questioning the rest of it. Fast-forward a year, and our organic traffic had fallen by around 70%. I was busy, so I still didn’t take the time to properly investigate it. I continued believing the same story: AI was taking the traffic. The content wasn’t great. SEO was becoming less valuable. It was time to move on. I finally decided to dig into the data because, despite the decline, we were starting to gain more visibility inside LLMs, and traditional search was still capable of creating value. What I found was difficult to admit. Yes, AI changed the search landscape. But I had also made some major technical SEO mistakes over the past year, particularly during our website migration away from WordPress. Had I caught and corrected those mistakes earlier, our organic traffic probably wouldn’t have taken nearly as large of a hit. The good news is that I’ve identified the problems and started working through plan to fix them. But the honest truth is that I screwed up. I created a story in my head, found enough evidence to support it, and then kept believing it... even while the data was trying to tell me something different.

Try this before you hit publish on your next campaign or landing page. (Or when dealing with a huge decision) Go to sleep. 💤💤💤 Literally just stick the idea in the back of your mind and just sleep. Example: I spent a couple of days working on a new home page…. But went to sleep before hitting publish. I purposely wanted to keep an open loop just in case a better idea came to me. I woke up with a little voice saying… “you have a visual platform, but you’re not showing visuals enough”… And that voice was right. That voice sent sent me down a rabbit hole that resulted in a fresh idea that I haven’t tried before. It might suck, but it’s better than what we had before. The mind has a funny way of working on things in the background. I call these 'mental background tasks'... There’s a whole book about it. psycho cybernetics… worth a read.

For anyone running lead gen on GHL (either forms and funnels) here's a good example of the lift that you can see just by switching to LeadCapture

A few years back, watching a user scale from 1K leads/mo to 88K leads/mo in a very short time taught me something I didn't fully appreciate before. Growth doesn't mean problems go away. Problems multiply... and sometimes become harder. For example, when you're getting off the ground, the problems are the obvious ones. Conversion. Creative. Getting anyone to fill out the form at all. As you scale a completely different set takes over: 1) Ops. The manual steps that were fine at 1K/mo become a full-time job at 80K. 2) Lead quality. A few bad leads is noise early on. At volume, it's real money and real buyer/client relationships on the line. 3) Abuse. The bigger you get, the more of a target you become. Bots, junk, bad actors show up and hammer your pages. 4) Speed. At scale, every bit of latency from API responses to doing the actual work compounds across tens of thousands of leads. But with all that said... here's the part I've come to believe: These are the good problems. They're the ones you actually want, because you only get them if things are working. If you're wrestling with abuse and infrastructure and quality at volume, it means you made it past the point where most people stall out. BUT ... this is a big BUT.... They only stay good problems if your foundation can hold them. The best part of being on the other side of stories like this: everything these users hit at scale, we learned from and built back into what we're building at LeadCapture. So if you're building out a lead gen campaign... even if you're early on... I'd ask yourself one thing: When the good problems show up, is what I built ready to carry them? Because they're coming. That's the goal.