170: Jay Berkowitz Explains the Ten Golden Rules on the How to Scale a Business Podcast with Hector Santiesteban

When I run into someone who has been in the

internet space since the beginning, I'm always curious to

ask, is there anything that you think is different, and is there

anything that's still the same from when you were getting into

this industry?

Well, the 10 golden rules is probably a good

place to start. You know, in a few of the basic strategies that

I presented as the rules, or the 10 Commandments of the internet.

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. If you ran a TV commercial, and 35% of the

audience saw it five times or more, and that was 350 GRPs that

would be enough 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. You had a billboard,

you could only have five words, and they had to be this big for

people to see it going 50 miles an hour, and those were our

rules or operating principles. But when we got into internet

marketing and even direct marketing, you could validate

with numbers and measurement. And so really, the genesis of

there are no rules is that we operated with results. We didn't

operate on theories or rules or principles.

Hello and welcome to another episode of

the how to scale business podcast. My name is Hector

Santia stebbon, and I am your host for today. I'm joined by a

very special guest, Mr. Jay Berkowitz. He is someone who is

a founder of the 10 golden rules, someone who's 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.

Hector, thanks for having me. This is great.

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 career, and then a little bit about what you're

doing with your clients

now, 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 jobs, and I became a director of marketing for

McDonald's, and had a $40 million ad budget, and we did 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 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 Ed diets.com

and if you think back to 2002 Google was in beta, Mark

Zuckerberg was in high school, and we were doing $60 million

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 most people were discovering Google as a search

engine, and we were spending $40 million running banner ads on

AOL, Yahoo and MSN to bring 100,000 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 10 golden rules of

online marketing, and that became my company name and my

blog and my podcast and my webinar. Still to this day,

it's amazing. When I tell people that

I've been doing podcasts for almost a decade, they're kind of

shocked, because a decade ago, most people hadn't didn't know

what a podcast was. And when I run into someone who has been in

the internet space since the beginning, I'm always curious to

ask, is there anything that you think is different, and is there

anything that's still the same from when you were getting into

this industry?

Well, the 10 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 10 Commandments of the internet.

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. If you ran a TV commercial and 35% of the

audience saw it five times or more, and that was 350 GRPs,

that would be enough 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 had a

billboard, you could only have five words, and they had to be

this big for people to see it going 50 miles an hour. And

those were our rules or operating principles. But when

we got into Internet. Marketing, and even direct marketing, you

could validate with numbers and measurement. And so really, the

genesis of there are no rules is that we operated with results.

We didn't operate on theories or rules or principles. And at E

diets, it was unbelievable. We'd have 100,000 people a day coming

to the website, and I could AB test so 50% of the people would

see the standard website that was kind of blue and green. 50%

could see a website we did a new website that was pink, pink in

color, because 92% of our audience was female, and guess

which? Which one won

the pink one, the blue website.

However, there was tremendous learning, because

on this new pink funnel we'd 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 AB test, then we did an AC test with a

new version of blue site with the same email capture from the

pink variant, and we had a new winner.

So we learned that with data, we could make business decisions

that could move the business forward.

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 the business.

Yes and no, 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 that he

diets, but we came to a conclusion we needed 1000

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.

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's gives us a good 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 it may be looking 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 start to come closer to being able to utilize some of

these things.

One of the rules that might have died, and a lot

of people predicted its 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 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, the subscribers

model is very, very important.

Yeah, it's something that I think,

especially when people look at today, they look at social

media, Instagram, Tiktok, 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 newer, shinier objects are perhaps exactly that, but some

of the time tested principles sort of remain the same.

Yeah, 1,000% so building your list, whatever the

format, is super powerful YouTube subscribers is awesome.

Like, we've had over a million views on our 10 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 10 golden

rules of online marketing, 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.

Yeah, also the ability that I think what

people don't realize is the amount of trust and

relationships that can be built when you leverage these things.

We work with a lot of companies that 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 people like touching bellies, but that's

sort of what they had to do. They had to shake hands, they

had to be in person. People are 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. Yeah.

I mean, we can get really far with digital, but

belly to belly is still great. Matter of fact, one of our best

vehicles is trade shows, and we work mostly with law firms. Is

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.

Yeah, it seems like lawyers 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

$10,000 on a podcast than I would 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

it seems like the relationship that that they need, the

relationship that's being created through this different

marketing, it doesn't matter how it's happening. It's just that

they're building trust and they're building a relationship

with this business.

Yeah, definitely in some of the practice areas

that could be super powerful. I still believe, like a lot of our

clients, are consumer facing, 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.

Yeah, one of your rules is the four P's.

And I remember learning this in my college marketing class, and

this was about the extent of what stuck with me from that

degree, 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 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 2025, sort of, yeah,

great

question. The four Ps are product place price

and promotion. And the golden rule was, remember the four Ps?

And 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. There's a product manager for search,

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. 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 we used to joke that

location, location, 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 a 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 discombobulated 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 certainly

been a killer for retail. And then the final one is promotion.

Promoting yourself, building your brand. Promotion is still

mission critical for websites and online products as it is for

real world products.

Yeah, I think there was a idea that for

a while, you know, people could avoid 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's

starting to happen that there's a need 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 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 community are losing out to newer, you know, newer newer

startups or people with less experience, and it just seems

like your emphasis on being in the right place and being

noticed is never going to really go away.

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 tick tock

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, live rocket rock music,

all the videos that I watched 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's had a huge

Renaissance, and people take YouTube for granted. Well,

YouTube, by far and away, is the second biggest website in the

world. I think Google has somewhere in the neighborhood of

70 or 80 million views a day. YouTube's like 42 million, and

Facebook's 9 million. So by a wide margin, Google and YouTube

are the big dogs, and YouTube's way more important in terms of

business opportunity than Facebook, Tiktok and even chat

GPT, which is growing, it's in fifth place, far and far, 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 a 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 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 chat, GPT 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 use 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 AEO,

or answer engine optimization, which is an evolution from

Search Engine Optimization.

It's a great sort of segue. I mean, one

of your the eighth rule is use the right tactic. And I think

you just mentioned some great things, which we're recording

this November of 2025 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 platforms of the

tactics might change. Are there any other right tactics for this

moment? Are there any things that you are bullish on with

regards to reaching new people.

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 I

would say getting into AI in your business is probably the

next most important thing, and if you haven't touched the

basics, like using chat GPT just to ask and answer questions and

anything you do, from writing a job description 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 I gave a really

good prompt. And a really good prompt is the format of crit.

And this is Jeff woods. Wrote a great book called The AI driven

leader, and he talks about

what's that I'd say go back and listen to

the episode with Jeff. Yeah, he's a he's I call him a better

friend than he probably thinks of me, but he's a mentor of

mine.

So context, role, interview and task. So Jeff

coaches write a great prompt the context. I want you to write an

article for this legal magazine, for Jay Berkowitz, founder of 10

golden rules roll. 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 800 word

article based on the download of the webinar I provided. Boom,

it's going to be 90 95% correct. I get those articles done in 10

minutes. Used to take me four hours.

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 make. 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 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 designer or

an advanced video editor. And so the tools are evolving. Yeah.

So that's great. Great advice get into the

basics, which is, just, do it, pick a couple products, like a

chat GPT or a video editor or Google. Gemini is great at

creating images today, and I created a funny image of my dog

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 unbelievable.

With one simple prompt, you can get exactly what you want in

terms of a graphic visual.

One of the other ones that we didn't really

cover, which I thought would be interesting, is creating a

unique value proposition A lot of especially with lawyers or we

kind of work with service providers that otherwise see

themselves as commodities. And so being unique or creating a

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, a personal injury lawyer, and

create that UVP for them.

Well, Golden Rule number three is create a UVP or

a unique value proposition, and some people confuse that with 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. So for

most personal injury lawyers, they're going to take your case

completely for free. So the phone call is like, Hey, give us

a call. We're going to take your case completely for free.

Nothing beats that, right? Because the way personal injury

lawyers get paid is they generally get 33% on the back

end of your case. But a lot of great uvps Through the years are

free consultations, or we did some analysis on the 10 golden

rules website. And I thought most people would come and look

up our services or our products or how to do SEO, or get

information about Jay Berkowitz, but most people just wanted to

see the 10 golden rules. So we made a download of the 10 golden

rules available free on the website, and you could purchase

the book The 10 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.

Yeah, so critical. This has been a really

fascinating conversation. There's a few of the rules left

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 they

decided that that was

rule. 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, but you're going to have to have some kind of

methodology to get 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 10 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, a lot of people don't check their email, like 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 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 phone number

and they hear the Google recording, a lot of people hang

up, about 10%

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.

This is great. I think we're gonna have

to go back and have the listeners listen to this a

couple of times to digest all this stuff. I've got, I guess,

three questions. The last golden rule, though, I think is great

to sort of finish up on here, and that is something to evolve,

of never giving up, if I'm not mistaken, right, nine, nine is

the best. Never rest, and 10 is the trends. So as we're sort of

people are trying. To figure out there's so much these days,

right? And I think that's part of the problem with trying to

piece and parse through all of these tools and tech is, what's

a trend, what's attack, what's worth doing. And so 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 amount in the climb.

Well, the best never rest is test, test, test.

And that's really about you've got to work hard at this stuff.

It's not easy, but lead the trends was a rule that I wrote

based on really new things coming out. And 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 some of the examples a new thing

that came out about three years ago for legal and about five or

six years ago in home services, and that's the Google Local

Service ads. 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 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 we got one of our lawyers. Was the

fifth lawyer approved in New York. Very soon, a couple months

later, there was 50 lawyers, and today, there's probably 50,000

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. If 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, I created the first blog for 10 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 is

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.

Yeah, it's testing and trying and then sort

of going all in 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 10

golden rules, where's the best place for

people to go? Yeah, well, 10 Golden rules.com,

or Jay Berkowitz and on any of the social media there's a

couple really prominent Jay Berkowitz is. But luckily

enough, I beat them to the punch 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 10 golden rules YouTube channel, and we have

tons of content about SEO, even things like the EOS 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 10 golden rules YouTube channel as

well.

We'll link all those up in the show notes

for you guys as always, and 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, Jay, what is

the secret to scaling a business?

Well, I think the secret to scaling a business is

to run it like a business, particularly if you're past that

startup stage. You're past that freelance stage, but now you've

got to start operating like a business. My recommend a book

called E Myth. And E Myth is the entrepreneurs myth. It's not the

electronic myth, and it's like a 35 year old book, but it talks

about developing systems for your business. So for everything

we do, whether it's 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 EOS

operating system, Entrepreneurial Operating

System. And so we have a system. We have l 10 meetings, we have

rocks, we have quarterly planning meetings, we have a

leadership team. And so we operate like a real business.

When you get past like eight or 10 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.