#1: Where to Learn Marketing

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu. Hi everyone, and welcome to the very first episode of the Marketing School Podcast. My name is Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna be talking about where you can go learn marketing. But first and foremost, because this is the very first episode, we should go ahead and introduce ourselves. Neil, who the heck are you?

I'm a blogger, serial entrepreneur. I've created a few software companies, Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, Kissmetrics, and I blog at neilpatel.com as well as quicksprout.com. My overall goal is to just educate entrepreneurs and marketers and teach them how to grow their website traffic as well as how to generate more sales And my name is Eric Siu, and I have an agency called Single Grain.

This is where we help Fortune 500 companies to technology startups grow their revenues online using digital marketing. And I also have a podcast called Growth Everywhere, and this is where I interview a lot of different entrepreneurs and we talk about growth. And my ultimate goal is just to pay it forward. And you look at guys such as Neil, he's paying it forward all the time. And this is what this podcast is all about. It's paying it forward. It's giving you the education you need with without having to go to college to learn this stuff. So why don't we kick things off, talk about where we can go learn marketing. Neil, if you were starting from scratch today, where would you go?

Funny enough, you just mentioned college. I wouldn't go to college. That's the last place I would go to learn online marketing. Reason being, all their textbooks are out of date. B, the professors who teach you this stuff have never really done it themselves. And the way I know this is I get so many emails every single week from colleges saying, hey, can we teach your materials? And I've talked to a few of these professors on the phone. They're like, yeah, I went to college. I have a degree in marketing, business, et cetera. I was like, cool. What kind of marketing have you done online? What kind of companies have you helped? And you know what they usually always say? Oh, well, I haven't really worked for any companies or done anything like that. I've been a teacher or professor my whole life. And that's all fine and dandy. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. My mom was a teacher as well, but they do not have practical in-field experience. So if I was gonna go learn marketing today, especially online marketing, I would go and read articles on blogs like Backlinko, Moz, Search Engine Land. You can check out Single Grain, which is Eric's blog. You can check out Neil Patel or Quick Sprout, which is my blogs. I would go read a few articles and take those articles and implement what you learned onto your own website. If you don't have a website, go to wordpress.com or wordpress.org, get hosting. It's not expensive. There's even a lot of free hosting solutions out there. Go buy a domain name for $6, $7, write content, create a website, use templates. So if you don't have much experience, no worries. You don't have to have a coding bone in your body. Once a website is up, then go and take what you've read, take the actionable steps from that article and implement it on your website. If you don't do that, you'll never really learn marketing. And every single good online marketer that I have met They first got started by practicing stuff on their own website.

That's absolutely true, and I'm just gonna share a story here. And before I even share that story, you know, venture capitalist Mark Suster, he has a blog post that's titled, You're Either Gonna Have to Learn Before You Earn. And I think that's the exact scenario here, especially when you're first starting out. Me coming out of college, you know, I went to school in San Diego, and I utilize none of those skills nowadays. Totally useless, you know. As a matter of fact, the first job I got coming out of college was a dead-end job doing data entry. And my friend introduced me to internet marketing. And that's when I started learning everything, I started digesting everything, and that's when you have the opportunity to, really all the information is out there, you just have to be good at finding things and you have to be persistent. And when I first started learning this stuff, I bought a, you know, when I was, I would go to music festivals and, you know, I was really interested in how those, you know, how those light shows turned out when you go to those big EDM music festivals. So I made a site called Light Show Videos, I learned how to set up a blog, I learned how to set up hosting, I learned how to set up or learn how to start, you know, doing things with SEO. And before you know it, you know, I started getting rankings, I started getting organic traffic, I started ranking number 1 for the keyword light show videos, which I thought was a major feat at the time. But, you know, these small wins all start to add up over time. And as I continue to learn more and more, actually, you know, Neil's being humble here, actually ended up on his blog, Quick Sprout, which is one of the most well-known online marketing blogs out there. And there's a lot of stuff I didn't understand. A lot of concepts were foreign to me, and I came across this post on link blending, and I was like, what the heck is link blending? What is this guy talking about? I've never heard of this before. So that concept in itself got me to start emailing Neil, and I just kept emailing him over and over. So this is the thing, right? If you want a mentor, if you want somebody to learn from, like, like you think these people aren't going to respond to you, but at the end of the day, they're just people, right? If you're persistent, they're going to notice you over time. And I got Neil to start responding, and Finally, I kept pestering him and he was just like, you know, dude, let's just get on the phone. And we got on the phone, we talked about it, and I started learning more and more. And you know, you just keep, you know, I noticed something, you know, when I first started getting my first internet marketing job, you know, you keep your foot on the pedal and you're gonna start to move past all the other people that are around you and it's gonna go quickly. You just have to be very, very focused on learning. And don't even think about the money, just think about what you're learning and then try to become a well-rounded marketer. Like maybe go into one discipline first, but expand into other disciplines which we'll talk about down the road. But Neil, what else would you like to add to this?

You actually brought up an interesting point. When you wanted to first learn about online marketing, you emailed me and you're picking my brain. Funny enough, I got my start the same way. There was a guy named Patrick Gavin. He used to own a company called TextLink Ads. I don't know if they're still around. He ended up selling it though. And we used to trade secrets all the time. I would call him every other day. His company at the time was called Position One. I'm like, hey Patrick, what's the newest way to get rankings on Google? Or have you tried this tactic or this other tactic over here? And he'd be like, oh Neil, I tried it out and this is what happened with my rankings. Oh, and at that time, funny enough, we were discussing how high PageRank links from sites like CNN, Forbes, et cetera, would skyrocket your rankings. So we were trading secrets and we were discussing how we can get more of those links, et cetera. But if I didn't pick his brain and he didn't pick my brain, none of us or both of us wouldn't be where we are today. So it's not just about creating your own website and implementing what you're learning online, but you also want to connect with other people within this space and start trading knowledge. So Eric started off asking me a lot of stuff and he started picking my brain about everything I knew about marketing. Back then, Eric wasn't teaching me much at all. But if you fast forward now, we've known each other for what, 5, 6? 5, 6 years, yeah. Exactly, it's been a while. Nowadays I'm teaching him about marketing and he's also teaching me about marketing. He'll be like, hey Neil, did you check out this article by, uh, ViperChill you were talking about the other day? The sites that dominate Google's rankings and what you can learn from it. I was like, oh cool, interesting article. So now he's teaching me concepts and I'm teaching him concepts as well. So the key is don't just practice what you're learning on your own website, but also go to industry events, email people, go to networking events, whatever it may be, And start trading knowledge in person or over the phone or Skype or whatever it may be.

That's a really good point and that brings me into— I was reading Quora the other day. Again, you're constantly learning, right? So I was reading Quora and there's this one saying, you know, if you give somebody an apple and they give you an apple, well, you get the same thing basically. But if you give that person an idea and they give you an idea, you have 2. So that's the power of ideas, that's the power of learning and speaking to other people. Now, I want to close this first episode off by talking about how we both learn marketing now. Like for me personally, what I do in the morning. I have an app on my phone, it's called Nuzzle, and it will tell me what the people that I follow on Twitter are sharing. So if 7 people are sharing something, it's going to pop to the top of my feed, and I follow a lot of different internet marketers. So I can see what's trending and then I can save it to Pocket later and I can read it later. And if I'm lazy, I can have Pocket dictate it for me so I don't have to read it. And then, you know, constantly reading other blogs. You know, I really like Quick Sprout, I like Neil Patel. These are Neil's blogs. And I do like reading other sites such as OKDork, which is Noah Kagan's website. Search Engine Land is good. Marketing Land is good as well. And there's a lot of good ones out there. Kissmetrics is really good too. And what else do I do? Well, I also go to Twitter and I make lists. So I use Tweetbot and I make lists of best SEOs. I make lists of venture capitalists that I like to follow. So things that I'm interested in and, you know, I follow those. And last but not least, for now, there's certainly a lot of different ways to go about this, but I use Feedly as well. So I follow a lot of my favorite online marketing blogs. Oh, Jon Loomer is another great one. That's j-o-n-l-o-o-m-e-r.com. He teaches a lot of great stuff around Facebook ads. Facebook ads is getting bigger and bigger. It's a really powerful channel, so check that one out. But Neil, I'm going to hand it over to you.

The way I keep up to date with all the marketing stuff and ways I can keep learning, I just read blogs. Similar to Eric, I don't use any news feeds or anything like that. I just type in the URL box Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land. Marketing Land, et cetera, Moz, and I just read their latest articles. A lot of these sites produce so much content, it's too hard to read them all. So I go based on social shares, the ones that have the most Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn shares, et cetera. Those are the articles that I typically read. I also specifically only read detailed articles or guides. So if something has like a Search Engine Land, I think it was today or yesterday, talked about how Google accidentally sent out reconsideration requests, or not reconsideration requests, re-verification requests for Google Search Console. I'll ignore those type of posts. I'm not saying they're bad, I just don't care for them because they don't teach me much about marketing. But if someone like Brian Dean did a blog post on Backlinko that breaks down how I increased my search engine traffic by 15% in the last 30 days, I'm going to read that. Why? Because you can tell just by the headline that it's an actionable post, You can learn something from it, take all that knowledge, implement it on your website, and hopefully you'll see similar results.

That's the key thing, I think, talking about actionable posts. You don't wanna waste your time reading something that's, you know, a couple thousand words and have nothing to show for it. So we wanna go into a no-theory zone and avoid that stuff. And last but not least, because we're doing a podcast right now, you know, one of the biggest hacks is listening to podcasts. Listening to them on 2x, you know, especially when you go to the gym in the morning, it's such a cheat code because podcasts are free. Which is kind of the reason why we're doing this right now. It's to give this information out. So if you're driving, if you're walking, if you're working out, whatever it is exactly, you're going to get that one actionable idea and it's going to change your business and everything you do in the future. So we're going to close this episode out, but we'd love to hear your feedback, new ideas that you think we should be talking about, new topics. We'd love to see you perhaps do a rating review and also subscribe to this podcast because that's going to help us get to the top. So let us know again, and we will see you in the next episode. See you later. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.