10 Game Changing Strategies to Crush Marketing in 2019 with Neil Patel and Eric Siu

Check, check. There we go.

There's echo.

I need to mute. How do you mute this?

There you go.

Okay, great. All right, is that it?

Can you guys hear me now?

Here, I got it, I got it.

Can you guys hear me now? Okay, someone else said echo. Are we still echoing, guys? Give me a give me a thumbs up whenever if it's still working.

Still echoing? Still?

I think that's what they just. I think it should be fine now.

Okay, it's working now, someone said. No, but it's good. They said good.

Yeah.

All right, all right guys, so Neil's gonna be up in a couple minutes, then we're gonna go live. But start seeding your questions in here, guys. Let's not attack each other in the room. Let's make sure we're respectful with each other because we're not big enough to have any haters yet. So, okay, cool.

Thank you. It's just a delay. Got it.

What's our delay on it?

Uh, it sounds like about 15 seconds.

Okay.

So then when you're just right now when we're rolling, you're only in this mic. You're not in that mic.

Okay, and this is for marking school?

Correct.

Cool. So these mics, guys, are for marking school. We're gonna be looking your way because the mics are that way for the live broadcast. This is actually Neil right here. He just asked almost 3 minutes what floor. He should be up any second. I'm actually gonna go Manav says you got to hire some Indians for your tech. But guys, start leaving your questions in here. Let me know where you guys are coming from. Again, this is a 2-hour session. Go get a drink of water, get some fish, some fish, get some goldfish. I've been eating goldfish. Go get some snacks, whatever it is exactly. And look, you don't have to watch the whole way through. We're gonna, we're gonna, this is the first time experiment doing this. It's gonna be great. And I'm gonna make sure— I'm gonna go make sure that— or actually, someone else can make sure that Neil has something to drink too, like water or something. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah.

All right. Cool. Well, while we wait for him, there is— let's see what I want to talk about. There is this book that I really recommend you guys all read. It's called— what is it called? It's right here. Here's the book. It's called Leadership and Self-Deception. Check it out. It's, uh, I'm gonna make it required reading for almost everyone on the team. It is a significant advantage to read it because it's basically a power-up. Oh, you got goldfish. It's very good. Um, these guys are very delicious. Um, so I don't know if I should make a food channel on eating, but guys, this book, going back to this, I— it took me about 3 to 4 hours to read. And the book is called Getting Out of the Box. It tells you how to deal with kind of your business relationships, your interpersonal relationships. It's just good across the board. So I think it's a must-read for me. Every year there's like a really important book that I read and this is probably the most important book I've read in the last 12 months or so. Before that it was like The Coaching Habit, there's another one called Outliers, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, The Goal, which is what I make a couple people read on the team. That's actually what Jeff Bezos makes his leadership team read. But yeah, this like has shifted kind of drastically how I think about things. So check it out. Syed says he's watching from Canada and will watch all the way through. Curious to know, Manav, obviously you're coming from India. Where else are you guys coming from while we wait for Mr. Patel to come through? I'll put this over here.

Let's see.

What's the delay on? 30 seconds, you said? 15 to 30 seconds.

30 seconds. Yeah, I mean 15, probably 15.

Yeah. Manav said, this book is on my list for a long time. Manav, just read it. It's only gonna take you 3 to 4 hours to read. It's worth it. It actually sat on my bookshelf for a couple years. So what happened was, I was watching YouTube. So when I eat, I watch YouTube because I can watch a video for 5 to 10 minutes or a TED Talk. TED Talks are good too. I guess I eat too fast. So I was watching a quick interview with Stewart Butterfield from Slack. He's the CEO and founder of Slack, one of the co-founders. And then he was just saying like reading that book has been a game changer for him. And like he just, you know, the way he thinks about business and the way he thinks about people after reading that. It's just such a shift. And the way the book is written is great too because it's like a fictional story, but you get to learn from the story. Like in Entrepreneurs Organization or Young Presidents Organization, YPO, they talk about the Gestalt Protocol, which is sharing experience and not exactly saying, hey, you should go do this. And that way you can't really— if you give advice to someone, the problem with that is if they take your advice and they go the wrong way, it's your fault, right? And if they They take your advice and they don't do anything, what happens is you end up resenting them, right? Because you gave the advice. So you're better off just sharing a story. And that book, the entire way through, I was fully engaged. You know, I had a couple 1-hour flights and the flights just went like that. And yeah, really enjoyed it. I would recommend getting the book. There's a couple charts in there that are really important to read. And yeah, you know, this is one of those where I'd say audiobook is probably not the right fit. So There's like stick figures in there, like how you deal with people in certain situations and then there's a certain thing that they do where they flip it at the very end where it's like mind-blowing. It's like, holy crap, you know, how did that happen? So, recommend checking that out. Now I'm gonna double-check again on Neil to see where he is. Your security dude sucks. That means he's having trouble getting up. And whenever somebody sucks, that means it's usually— That's not true. Security dude sucks. Are you up?

Uh, he was laughing, so I guess the delay doesn't delay.

He's checked in, 11:15, so he's on— he's on his way up now, guys. Um, I guess we can start kicking this onto YouTube, huh?

Or Instagram. Oh yeah.

So do not disturb. Going live on Instagram. Let's do this. All right. I'm just gonna do it here.

You're looking at the water cup.

Oh, you want to tweak it?

Yeah. There he is. There he is.

That's not gonna tighten it.

Just. He's here. Yeah.

Welcome.

Hey. Yeah.

Neil meet Noah.

Noah Neil.

We already met.

Oh yeah, brother. I remember many times. I don't remember. You remember better than I do. We're already live. They said the bald-headed god has arrived.

I don't know if that's true.

Yeah, bald-headed god has arrived. All right, so yeah, so I got some topics in here already.

Awesome. Is the the IG the?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Huh? IG. Is it matter if it's sideways or that?

I don't know. Does it? I think it might need to be— you might be right.

'Cause it looks like every— I mean, I don't know.

You wanna swap it?

Just— Nobody's complaining.

I need your Wi-Fi.

Oh, it's single capital— hey guys, here's my Wi-Fi. It's a single capital S. Which one? 2.4 or 5G? Go 5 GHz. Single 3630.

No capital?

Capital S. Single 3630. And we're talking into that mic. But I guess we should talk into it this way.

For the podcast, those are your mics. We're just like kind of in between when you're talking to the, the live feed, that's the mic.

Alright.

Yeah.

Alright, you ping me the link on Skype.

Here it comes. Dude, I don't log on Skype that much.

I know.

I only log on to like talk to you, that's it.

I use Skype so much.

Here, I'm coming on.

I'll find it.

I'll just scroll.

Here. Boom. I found it.

We have to take a picture outside afterwards with the Japanese girl. It's her last day, and then she has a puzzle with your face and my face on it, so we have to take a picture.

Why is it her last day?

Because she's going back to Japan.

Internship?

Yeah, internship that converted to full-time. Uh, are we ready?

Yeah.

So it says, why embedding YouTube videos on your site may now be counterproductive. You know why, right?

Nah.

Okay, so when you embed it now, there's automatic related video and it draws you off your site. It draws you to the YouTube platform.

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, you can turn that off.

You can't turn it off anymore. It has to be either your channel now or it's, um, it's like rel=0. If you put rel=0, then it's only going to show like your related videos on your site. If not, it's going to show some other stuff and it's going to drag you off your site. Yeah. Want to do it?

What's a better title?

Why—

how embedding YouTube videos can hurt your traffic.

Does that hurt your traffic? Yeah.

Less people watching your shit.

Less page views. Less page views.

Okay, ready?

Yeah. Alright.

Do we need the headphones or no?

Uh, yeah, you wanna have the headphones.

Where's my headphone?

I take it— Uh, right here. Right here. Oh.

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Can I just move this?

Yeah, just move that. You want to— you kind of got to get right into it with that.

You got to be like right in front of it.

And then how— like, just let me know how you, how you feel about the levels in your ear too, and then I'll—

Am I able to move this thing down?

Yep, just, uh, just pull it. Just pull it hard. You sure?

Yeah.

I don't want to break it.

No, it's not gonna break. Is that better?

Yeah, that's comfortable.

I want to do that.

Yeah, I'm like, I don't know why you want to go all the way forward.

Alright, ready?

I can only hear on one side, is that okay?

Yeah, one should be you and the other should be him. Okay, cool.

Is that done?

Countdown? Yeah, so, um, but the volume is okay in both of your ears?

Yep.

Okay.

Uh, mine's high, can you lower it?

Yeah.

Mine too, actually.

How's that?

Testing, testing. Test, test.

A little lower.

Yeah, a little lower on mine too.

Test, test, test.

Test, test, test.

Test, test.

A little lower.

A little lower.

Test, test. Test, test. Test.

A little lower. A little lower.

Test.

A lot lower. Test, test, test, test, test.

Yeah. Test. A little lower for me.

Test. Oh yeah, good.

That's good? All right.

All right, good enough.

All right.

3, 2, 1 for you.

We'll fine-tune. All right, so we're rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about why embedding YouTube videos can actually hurt your traffic. So this is something Neil and I just discovered recently. And?

And what ends up happening now is when you embed a YouTube video, there were hacks before where you could turn off them showing other related videos at the end of the video. But now you have no choice. So when you embed a video, you're either going to drive more traffic to other videos or you'll drive traffic to your own channel. And how can you drive traffic to your own channel if people decide to use that option, Eric?

Yeah, so what you can do— actually, we're actually live on YouTube right now. We're testing, kind of doing this at the same time. But Raj actually said if you add rel=0, he claims no videos after the play. My understanding is that it will include videos from your channel. So that's something to look at. But the way it used to work before is that YouTube— I mean, look at it this way. YouTube is owned by Google. What is Google's business? They're an advertising business. So at the end of the day, they want people on their platform watching more ads. So they're incentivizing your embeds now to go back onto their platform, right? So you think about it, like over the years Google, they're adding more and more ads, right? You know, they're taking more real estate on the search engine result pages. So you got to think about that, like what are they incentivized to do and how are they gonna act, right? And that now they're acting in their own interest. So you got to figure out how you can protect yourself and not lose that traffic to, you know, lose that attention to people going to other sites. Because what usually would happen is you do an embed and And people are gonna go maybe watch another blog post or video on your site. Now that traffic is actually going away, so they're almost, you know, they're finding ways to siphon that traffic away.

Yeah, what I used to do is when people were on my site and after they're done watching videos, I would just keep them on my website. And you could end up sending them to watch more YouTube videos, but I prefer just keeping them on my website, not continually watching more YouTube videos due to the fact that I wanted them to convert into a lead or a customer or whatever you want to end up calling them. But yeah, now it's getting tougher and tougher with all these rules and things that these guys are trying to do. And it makes sense why, because as Eric mentioned, they're an advertising network. They want people to keep staying on their channel. Every social network does, so that way they can make more revenue from ads.

Yeah, and Neil and I, I don't think we're necessarily saying stop embedding, because it still helps from a watch time perspective for your channel, right?

Yeah, so what it does is it increases your external view count, and the more views that you drive to YouTube, the better off you are. But they're now pretty careful on how they count view counts. So one hack I use to really jack up my view counts is right when I release a video on my own website, I'll send a push notification to drive people to my own video on my own website that's embedded, which jacks up my view counts. I've also tested using, you know, push notifications and driving directly to YouTube, and what I found is they don't count as many views compared to when I just drive them to my own website. But yeah, it's getting tougher and tougher to game YouTube because YouTube marketing is becoming more competitive over time. But if you want to do well, whether you embed videos on your site or you don't, the key is how can you get as many people just going to that video in the first 24 hours. That's the key. If you don't have that, you won't do well.

Alright guys, so that's it for today, but go to marketing school Marketing School. Yeah, actually, that works.

Yeah, marketingschool.io.

marketingschool.io/dtla, as in downtown LA. We have our application up. We're doing the live event. We're capping it at 500 people. Right now, Neil and I are actually talking. We're interviewing with people to make sure— look, it's gonna be an amazing event, but we have to make sure, look, it can't be too many people, especially it's our first event. Also, at the same time, I'm gonna read you— but by the way, us reading these reviews has actually helped us with the review count, so Timole23 says, powerful marketing tips and entertaining delivery. It's a 5-star review. Neil and Eric, thanks for the fantastic balance of up-to-date tactical marketing tips and entertaining content. By implementing many of your SEO content strategies, slash content strategies, I've grown my company's traffic and leads 10x in 2018.

Yay!

That's amazing.

That's awesome.

Cool guys, so that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow. It's pretty nice to see that.

You're gonna have to create a /dtla.

We have that, don't we? No.

What is it?

There is nothing, it goes to a dead page.

Oh, it's singlegrain.com/dtla.

Just, just click the set up a 301 redirect.

Yeah.

Here, let me just do this.

Yeah, let me ping someone. You can use that, amarketing-school.io.

There you go.

Yeah, you can now at least keep mentioning it and it'll redirect.

All right, ready for the next one?

I'm just changing my input.

While we wait, hello Sachin, hello Manav. Manav says, do you think affiliate marketing is the best way to start learning digital marketing? Yes, or you can work for Neil for free.

Cool.

No, I don't hire people for free.

Oh, okay.

Hey, I think affiliate is because you don't have to build your own product, you can market someone else's product. No, can we just— because I don't want you to like have to keep worrying about it. Yeah. Just keep it in the middle.

It doesn't quite get any of you that way.

Oh, it doesn't?

No.

Damn.

Well, I'll just put it here and I can go.

Okay.

It's cool, you can just get Eric in it.

Alright, we are good, ready to go.

Ready? You want a 3, 2, 1?

Yes. So, rolling, and 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about how to effectively collect more emails in 2019. So I guess I can kick things off first. Why don't we start with pop-up software? There's a lot of different email pop-up software out there. Personally, the reason why I'm thinking of this right now Is 'cause look, there's Bounce Exchange which charges you a couple thousand bucks. It's done-for-you service, right?

Didn't you used to use them? I used to use them. It's more than a couple thousand.

How much were you paying for them?

Their minimum is—

mine was free. I think their minimum though is $10,000 a month. I could be off, but it's somewhere around $100,000+.

Yeah, but what was the benefit of you— I mean, it was free obviously, but the benefit of you using it was?

They did all the optimization and conversion stuff for me.

Got it. Okay.

So there's actually something else similar to Bounce Exchange right now. It's a very— it's a done-for-you service, which means they'll hook up— they'll find out what your offers are and they'll design it for you. They'll design the pop-ups for you and they'll manage it, right? And you know, you'll set— you say, hey, I want an email conversion rate of this amount. And this business is called Exit Intelligence. So it's exitintelligence.com. And it's a more cost-effective way. It's not $10,000 a month, but it's at least—

I think it starts at like $1,500 to $3,000 a month.

But yeah, it's something that we're experimenting with right now. We're not affiliated with them, but I wanted to call that out first.

How's the results so far?

Just started, so it's too early. Like literally, like we have like a couple days ago.

Oh cool. You can try a lot of stuff. So what worked mainly to collect emails doesn't work as well now. You'll find that exit popups and exit intent software doesn't work as well as it used to. Still works, just not as well as it used to. Content upgrades don't work as well as it used to. Brian Dean's been experimenting with something new. He blocks out the content unless you put in your name and email if you want to read it.

I used to do that.

Yeah, that works well. I used to even block it out and make you share the content. That worked well too. You can also do quizzes. I found quizzes to work really well because you can collect leads at the same time. Lead quizzes. LeadQuizzes is another solution that you can end up using. I don't know if it's leadquizzes.net or .com.

.com.

You guys can figure that out. But in general, if you want to collect emails, you got to figure out a better mousetrap. And I don't know what the better mousetrap is because it's going to range per business. But what I mean by that is exit pop-ups, content upgrades, quizzes— none of them work as well as they used to. You got to truly find something that's unique. Like my version of it now is gonna be you create a free tool, give it to people, if people wanna use it, they gotta register and you're collecting email addresses that way. But that's how you're gonna effectively collect emails in 2019. It's gonna have to be some like calculator or tool or something that's so added value that people are used to paying for, they'll gladly give you their email address.

Yeah, and by the way, like you don't necessarily need to go build a tool, right? Just 'cause, you know, Neil has Ubersuggest and these other things doesn't mean you're not relatable. It means— I think there's a site called Under 1K or whatever. You can actually buy sites. Like, developers make a lot of tools and then they end up throwing them away.

Or you just go buy scripts. Scripts are even cheaper, like $10, $20, and you can get a script.

It's not hard to build a WordPress plugin too. It can be a basic tool.

I wouldn't even build anything. I would just use a script and start off that way.

There's so many people who've already built stuff for like literally $10, $15.

You can get a script that already has a premade tool for whatever industry you're in and leverage that for email collection.

I mean, the other thing I'll say too is, you know, you know Frank Kern, right? Frank Kern's a marketer. I mean, he was all about the email before, and I've actually been observing kind of what he's doing on YouTube, and he's going live every single day, and he drives people to frankkernbook.com, and people opt in there. And then what happens is he not only collects the email addresses, right, he's building like an audience from scratch. He says if you were starting from scratch, you would just go live. And he's actually driving revenue from those lives too. I think he was going live every day and over a 30-day period did like $350K.

Sounds like Frank.

Yeah. Anything else to add?

No, that's it. And yeah, that's a good point. Derek Halpern, when he had a podcast back in the day, from the podcast he would tell people to go, that's not too bad of a conversion. I don't think it'll convert the same anymore. YouTube is another way, Facebook Live, Instagram Live, they're all unique ways to collect more.

Thanks, Dee Dee, by the way. It's 1kprojects.com. They dropped the link in there.

Or .io, you mean?

No, .com. He corrected it.

Oh, okay.

So yeah. Okay, by the way, before we go, we don't have the link up yet, but singlegrain.com/dtla, that's for the application for marketing school. And go check it out. I mean, we're— look, we're gonna cap it at 500 people, so right now that's why we have an application up. And before we go, I'm gonna read another review. So we really appreciate your reviews.

And keep in mind, our application isn't to filter people out. It's to make sure that people who apply actually attend more than anything else.

Do you wanna read this review?

Go for it.

This one.

You go for it. Alright.

So Austin Basketball Trainer says, simply outstanding. He wrote this. 5-star review, he says, my go-to resource for up-to-date digital marketing advice I can use. This is gold. Chris Corbett— I mean, we'll give you a shout out because you put your site in there too, www.basketballtrainer.com. It's a good domain. That's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.

Next one.

Ready to go? Just to make sure we're— are we getting these in? I just wanna— for the podcast stuff.

The timer and stuff?

No, I mean, are we— is the audio good? Because I used to screw up all the time with that.

That's why I'm like triple checking everything.

Okay, cool.

So it looks like—

Remember?

Oh yeah, dude, that was so painful.

You know, there were times after where I forgot to and we just like omitted the episode.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's saying— okay.

I just get so pissed.

I'm like, man.

And like, they would be good episodes too.

Yeah, so that's why I'm like triple-checking things right now.

But it's all good so far?

Uh, let me just double-check because it looks like—

All right, so hold on.

Yeah, I want to make sure each one is good.

James Isaacs, you can give a review. Just type in Marketing School iTunes and you can give a review. That's good. That's or you can review on Google Play or you can review on Spotify too. I think you can review on Spotify. Our Spotify is growing.

You see that? No.

It grew like 50% last month.

Really?

Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

I've just been getting on Instagram.

That's been fun.

I saw that. I saw that. We should. That's why I made an episode here. Neil Patel's Instagram strategy for 2019. Is there?

Yeah.

Ah, I haven't seen it.

Yeah.

Whoever's doing it for you is pretty pretty solid.

How'd you know it wasn't me?

For sure it's not you. For sure it's not you.

Again, I use it. My my counts. I'm like at seven thousand three hundred. I was like, oh, maybe I should actually try using Instagram because yeah, dude, you're growing by like two hundred a day.

Really? Yeah, dude. I look at your Instagram more than you look at your Instagram.

I just logged in and asked me for my security code because I don't log in.

I like texted me. Wow. All right.

Are we ready?

Yeah.

Can we bring this down a little bit? It's super helpful to listen. It's just it's hurting my ear.

Oh yeah, yeah.

That's why you took it off because it hurts.

Yeah. I'm like, get this, man. I'm just gonna keep it on.

Let me know if that's better.

I just brought all the monitors down. Hello?

Hello? Hello?

Hello? Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

Now it's like not that helpful.

Hello, hello, hello.

I just took it off. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Hello. I can't even hear myself now.

Uh, try— okay, so you're on channel 2 there.

Check. I got it, I got it. Um, it's too loud. Bring it down, bring it down, bring it down, bring it down. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up.

Check, check.

Hello, hello, hello. Check.

Check down.

It's good.

That's good. Good, I think.

Hello, hello, Neil.

I got you all the way down.

I'll try.

So you're at the lowest level right now, Neil.

Hello, hello, hello.

I can't even hear.

Check.

I can hear you.

Check.

Is it hurting? Yeah, it's hurting.

Yeah, my ears are sensitive though. I get vertigo from this.

All right, well, we'll we can we can leave that off for now and then just.

I'll play it.

I'll play it.

I'll leave mine on. Susan says, is Instagram relevant for business users? I mean, look, if Neil's doing it, I guess I'm live on Instagram right now, so I guess it is helpful. It's just that we suck at it, but we'll get better. All right, ready?

Yeah. So—

3, 2, 1, hit.

Okay, and we're rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about if it's worth starting a digital agency. So I think this is a fun topic because Neil actually started with ACS, which is Advantage Consulting Services.

Yeah, a long time ago. It doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah. You want to go?

Do you want to— how about I let you go first?

Sure. I think— okay, so here's my take on the agency, and Neil and I have— Yeah, I think there might be different points of view, but I think, you know, I've had a lot of people on the Growth Everywhere podcast, and a lot of them started software companies and they parlayed their agency into the software company, right? And I think that's smart. Like, you parlay— you take the people that you have and then parlay into a software company and then focus on the software company. I think focus is important. Now, the other side of things, and this is something that both of us are looking at, my theory is, look, You know, when you, when you have an agency, it's a good business and it can help cash flow other projects. You don't necessarily need to shut the agency down. You can hire people that have done agency before that know how to scale agency and let them run the company. So that's the starting point.

Well, if you look at you right now, I see more ads on Instagram and YouTube teaching people how to set up an agency than Ads for your agency.

Yeah.

How's it going overall?

It's going well. So the reason we're doing that is because you can take— because a lot of people are looking to start an agency, so yes, it's worth starting an agency. But, you know, the course that we have, the offering that we have called the Agency Accelerator, that the revenue scale for that faster than like an agency would, right? Because agency, it's— you have, you know, with every new client you add, the service gets worse.

Are you revealing how far you are in revenue on that yet or not?

2 to 1 return on ad spend. 2 to 1, that's good. That's all I need to know. Yeah, but we're optimizing that, right? So, but my thing is this, like, you can take the agency, you can grow it, you don't necessarily need to shut it down. You can hire a CEO to run it, and then you can go off and work on other things. Or you can go the other way, because Neil had an agency before, and then he went down the software route, didn't have an agency, and now he decided to get back into agency. So the question to you is, Neil, why is it worth it to start an agency?

So I started an agency for a totally different reason this time. We just get so many leads that we have no choice and we're leaving a lot of money on the table. So we're just like, yeah, what are we going to do with the traffic? How are we going to monetize it? We went with the agency route. We enjoy it. It's fun for us. We get to work with a lot of amazing companies. It also helps me keep on my toes with online marketing because I'm always learning more and more from each each and every single industry. But, you know, the real reason I started it again was just because I have so many leads. Now, if I were in your guys' shoes, an agency doesn't scale that well. And most people have it wrong in which they think starting an agency is going to make them a ton of money. When you're a solo person or you have 2 or 3 people max, that is typically when most people make the most profit. from their agency. The moment they build out their team, their margins and everything just starts tanking. So if you're going to do it and you want to use it for cash flow and money, then what you should consider doing is keeping it very lean. Don't hire 10, 20 people. Keep it really tiny. Cash flow— like, I remember there were so many people that were in the agency world when I was starting off, like Brent Sartoris. And I remember the guy based out of Florida, really popular social media guy. He was more out there years ago. He started staying more behind the scenes now. And when he was more out there, like, you're talking about solo shop, guy could do like a million bucks a year and probably $600 grand a year in profit. And the numbers have changed the moment you end up hiring a lot of people. Your margins will just sink down. Like, my rent and your rent, we're here in Eric's office right now.

This is like $12 grand a month.

Yeah.

Yours is what?

You don't wanna even know.

He's up— he's changed offices 4 times in the last year.

Yeah, we just expanded our Utah office in our second month.

Oh, and he has a second office now.

And our first office in Utah was 4,000 square feet. We started it January, I think, 7th or 8th, and today we just expanded it. I think we take— we're taking up 9,000 now.

Congrats! So, hey, look—

Not really.

Congrats!

It hurts Neil's piggy bank, but congrats, right? Actually, I mean, I was talking to some guy that's actually in the Agency Accelerator program, and he keeps his team really lean. There's only 2 people in the US. The rest—

He's doing it right.

Yeah, and he's over $1 million right now. And I'm like, yeah, he's doing it great. Is there anything else you want to add?

Keep it lean. Like, it is hard to scale an agency past $5 million. Very few people do it. It's very rare that you see people do it. Over 10 million. You look at people like, um, not Distilled, what's the—

Seer?

Seer, yeah, the church.

How did I read your mind?

Yeah, because Will Reynolds does blog posts on like his revenue and his numbers. And they're under 20 for sure based on the last blog post I saw. They're over 10 is what it seems like. They're somewhere in between there, but like look how long he's been doing it.

You know what's interesting? So I think you spoke about Distilled and Seer. I think the both of them, they've been around for a while. And once you reach the 10 mark, they kinda like hold at 10.

It's hard, but look at how long they've been doing it to get to 10. It's not easy to grow an agency. If you look at most of the big agencies like the iCrossings, the iProspects, the WPPs, the Dentsus, the Publicis, all these guys, they don't generate revenue the same way that most of us generate revenue. They're from RFPs and large corporations, and they may be like, we have $400 million a year in revenue. Oh, and by the way, all these come from 60 clients.

Yep.

It's a totally different model than what you're gonna get into when you start an agency, and for that reason, I would just recommend a lean company with no more than 2, 3 people, and that's it.

Yeah, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Agency Accelerator Program. So if you wanna check out the video on how to grow your agency, go to singlegrain.com/live to check it out.

Do you have the same videos on there, the hamster wheel?

I like that video. No, that's actually, that's actually non-agency. The hamster wheel one is for For agency services, and that actually works. I'll tell you about it later.

The hamster wheel one is—

no. No, that's not agency related. Dude, I've watched so many of your— Okay, the hamster wheel one's not agency.

Yeah, because you're talking about there, you're like, are you tired? Are you having a hard time continually getting clients and stuff like that?

No, that's customers. That's the Evergreen Traffic Machine. It's a different offer.

Which is another course?

Yes, but that funnels into the agency.

Oh, cool. How's that working out?

2 to 1? That's 1 to 1. 1 to 1.

Yeah. It's hard to scale them.

Yes.

Instagram ads are the hardest.

Mm-hmm. Cool. That's it for today, but guys, go to singlegrain.com/dtla to join, apply for attending the Marketing School Live event that's gonna happen. We're aiming, we haven't set a date yet, but it's gonna be probably in Q2. So enter that in. We're gonna cap it at 500 people. It's gonna be in downtown LA. It's gonna be great. And Neil, do you want to try reading one?

You go for it.

Okay. So, LNT2K13 says, level up your marketing game. So they gave us a 5-star rating. Thank you. It could be a her too.

Thank you.

Eric and Neil have become a staple of my morning commute. After listening to Marketing School and implementing what I learned, I've been able to take my marketing game to the next level. Mondays are best because I can binge 3 episodes back to back. 3 is a really interesting number. Thank you so much. That's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.

Do you know why they say 3?

Why?

Because Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

Oh.

Oh yeah. Alright guys. So let me see while we wait for the next one. Hi Neil, hope you're well. I was telling before you came in, when you come into the picture everyone says you. So nobody says Eric anymore? No!

You guys aren't gonna— this is your YouTube channel. Eric's amazing.

Rosh said, the highest I got was 15, back to 5, much easier. That's the rent level. That's really good, Rosh. Yeah, screw paying rent. Rashad asks, Neil, hope you're well. Could you recommend a way to market a restaurant chain? Didn't you have a restaurant before?

No, never. If you have a restaurant chain, you got to start using the basic channels like the Yelps and all the review sites and also do a lot of local SEO. Moz has a local solution. I would do it for each of your locations and it's a great way to get more foot traffic. I would also start partnering up with like Postmates, Uber Eats, all those places because they can drive quite a bit of revenue for you and run promotions on those sites. And you'll start doing really well.

Cool. Ready? Yep.

Wait.

And—

okay, so we are rolling.

Ready?

Yep. And 3, 2, 1.

Whoa, wait. Are you checking all of them? Is it going well?

Yeah, we're good now.

All of them have been good?

All of them's good. Yeah, I had some— there was Mixing the computer one in before, so I had to cut that out. So now we are clean and crisp and clear.

Cool. 3, 2, 1?

3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

I'm Eric Siu. And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about why you should throw a conference and how you can do it for free. So Neil and I are gonna speak about the context of our Marketing School Live event, which is now gonna happen.

Yeah, you can go to singlegrain.com/dtla to apply. We're not trying to prescreen anyone, we just want to make sure that everyone attends, because it is costing us money to have everyone attend.

Yeah, and one of our mutual friends told us, I mean, he's thrown a couple events in Arizona, which we've actually both spoken at, NextCon. So Nextiva is the company, check it out, they have great phones, great phone service.

I use them, do you use them?

I actually, I've been meaning to contact him because I forgot, so thank you for reminding me. Who do you use? I don't use anything right now. We use CallRail, it goes to an iPhone.

Wow.

But we're about to get Nextiva. But anyway, we're not affiliated, by the way. So, you know, he was telling us, he's like, look, we've done conferences, and it's like, what you guys should do so you don't have to pay crazy amounts of dollars out of your pocket, 'cause look, feeding 500 people, getting the event, getting an event organizer, like, Neil and I, that's not our zone of genius. That's not what we're good at, right? And we're very cognizant of that. I think the older we get, the more we realize that we suck at things. And we should just let other people do it. So he said, look, sponsorships is gonna go a long way for you. Even if you got like, you know, 5 booths or 10 booths or whatever, they're paying you, you know, anywhere $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 or so. That's gonna cover a lot of costs, but that's not it. You can also do other things like VIP events too. I don't know what you're thinking, but if you want to talk about it.

Yeah, so there's many ways, and Eric and I, when we're thinking about this, worst case we'll just eat the cost. And we're just like, we don't know how much we're gonna eat. Our guess was $50,000, $60,000 for a 1-day event. And our mutual friend, as Eric mentioned, was telling us like, hey, why don't you get some sponsors and stuff? We're like, oh yeah, if we can actually break even and not lose money out of our own pocket, that'd be nice. Because a $60,000 event would end up costing Eric and I $30,000 each, which is a good amount of money. It's a free car.

Yep.

Technically not a free car, but it is a car that we would have to pay for. But yeah, you can end up doing things like VIP dinners, which I've never thought about. You can do things like sponsorships, you can do booths. What else could you end up doing?

There's other stuff too. Like, people want it— like, when I was at SaaStr last week, they're like, oh, you know, people are sponsoring like the happy hour, people are sponsoring— like, there's all this stuff you can sponsor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's just so many unique ways you can do it, and you don't want to get too crazy at first because you don't want people to think that You're just in it for the money and you shouldn't try to do it, but in general, when you're throwing an event, ticket sales should be profit, sponsorships should end up covering the cost of the event. Now with the way Eric and I are doing it, there is no ticket sales, so we'll either lose money or sponsorships will help us break even.

Yeah, so actually, I mean, those of you that are interested in the VIP thing, we're only gonna probably cap it at 15 to 20 people or so, and that's gonna be a dinner with Neil and I, and there might be a little, you know, something else that we haven't settled on. But, you know, actually, our buddy Yaniv from Nextiva was saying, look, if you do $1,500 a ticket or $2,000 a ticket for like a dinner and maybe like a little mastermind session, like people will do it. And like Neil and I have never done it, right? So it seems—

Yeah, I'm just like, yeah, will it work?

It seems kind of outlandish to us, but it seems to make sense.

I'm banking that I'm out for $30 grand for this event, maybe $40 max. I'm like, cool, I'm okay with that.

But by the way, I mean, Neil and I actually have been talking to sponsors, right? And I've actually met with a couple. And they're actually very down to do it. I was like, I was kind of taken aback by how down they were about like, yeah, we'll do it. And they just sent us a prospectus and like, sure, let's talk about it, right? So we're definitely making progress there. Hey guys, if you want to sponsor, if you guys want a VIP ticket, reach out to one of us, you know?

Reach out to Eric.

Yeah, reach out to me. You can DM me on Instagram @ericosiu.

I'm like, if you DM me, I won't see it.

Yeah, because he's not trying to be rude. He just doesn't respond. Cool. Do we have anything else you want to add, boss?

No, well, the main thing that, you know, we'll find out how this event ends up going for us. We're doing it for fun. But I would really consider throwing one if I was a company, like if you were in your shoes, whatever you may be, because you're going to meet some of your best customers through conferences. Now, Eric and I had no intentions to monetize this. We still don't want to, and we don't care about the monetization. We didn't even care for customers from the event. Our whole sole purpose for the event was, hey, why not meet the community who's listening to our podcast? And at the same time, you guys helped us get to a million listens, so let's all celebrate together. And there was no other purpose behind it other than to just meet everyone. But I believe you guys should do it not to meet your potential customers, but more so to get customers, and I think it would be a very effective solution for you.

Yeah, you guys are going much— like, you're taking us from, like, listening to us Online to like an offline relationship. Plus you're gonna meet other people there. Like in the application, which I'm gonna tell you about in a second, people are saying like, what do you guys wanna do? Some people are saying, okay, yeah, some people are like, we wanna meet Neil and Eric, we're very grateful for that. But also other people are like, I wanna mingle with the other attendees too. And then there's like certain things they wanna learn. So they're getting really specific. So guys, go to singlegrain.com/dtla for the application for the event because we're capping it at 500 people. And before we go—

And DTLA stands for Downtown LA.

There you go.

Or downtown Los Angeles, technically.

So, Odizzy02 says, by far the best marketing podcast out there. 5 stars. Thank you so much for that. This is a daily necessity. You're damn right it's a daily necessity. Consistent, short, powerful content that drives the message right home. Very insightful. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much, Odizzy. Guys, if you want to leave a review anytime, whether it's 4 stars, 5 stars, 1 star, whatever it is, we actually appreciate it because Neil and I have very thick So that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow. Let's see, Neil, you were talking to Sarav Jain for hosting you in India. How did it go?

It went well. I love India, you know, and we were talking about expanding my business into India. I do think it's a bit too early or premature to go into the Indian market for me. Because we have so much going on right now, we need to tackle Europe next. But what we're doing is translating all of our content into Hinglish, so Hindi/English. And we're building up on our Indian audience because I think the market will be ready in 3 to 5 years.

Cool.

Ready? Wine, done.

How to rank one page for thousands of keywords.

Love it. Ready? Okay, we are rolling. And 3—

Are you guys eating goldfishes?

Hey, you want some?

No. 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how to rank one page for thousands of keywords. Did you guys know you can do that?

Well, do you have one page that ranks for thousands of keywords?

Yeah, I do. So we— here, I'll give you one example. We have one, I believe, on video engagement. And when you check Ahrefs, or you can even check SEMrush too, when you check your own website, you'll see pages that rank for— could be 50 keywords, 100 keywords, could be a couple thousand keywords. So the question is, how do you actually go out there and do that? And actually, if you look at Neil's Ahrefs, he's got a handful of pages that rank for a couple thousand keywords.

So the way I did it— you want to go into how you do it or—

Sure, I can start.

Go for it.

Yeah. So, okay, look. A couple years ago on Quick Sprout, I mean, remember we were talking about this and I showed you the graph on SERP IQ? And you're just— basically Neil wrote this post a very long time ago before most people started talking about it, how when you write a longer form piece of content, what happens is Google's going to pick it up for a bunch of long tail keywords and a page is going to rank for more keywords. But if you only write like a 300-word blog post or a 500-word post, everyone else is doing that right now. So how do you compete? Because there's only over 4 million blog posts being being produced every single day. So how do you— how can you possibly compete with that? Well, if you look at neilpatel.com, I'll use him as an example. All his posts are longer form, but like we're talking 3,000 to 4,000 words or so. If you want to take it one step further, you can do something called the— the concept's called Power Pages, which came from Brian Dean. And a Power Page is a page where you can say, hey, look, if it was doing okay, maybe it was originally 1,000 or 2,000 words. If you upgrade it to about 10,000 words or 20,000 words, and maybe you space it out, there's different chapters in there, it's easy to get around. That is a power page. And a guy I know that does a lot of those, his name is Bill Widmer. You can find him, it's W-I-D-M-E-R. He does power pages on the whole basis of Brian Dean, our mutual friends, his—

What's his site? Or what's his industry?

Bill Widmer? He just writes power pages for people. I just like found him and he just does power pages. Oh, that's all he does as a service? Yeah, power pages as a service. PPAS. Yeah. There you go.

So we've done so many experiments on getting more traffic from your existing content. Now, if you want to rank for thousands of keywords, more importantly, you want to make sure whatever keywords you're ranking for drive traffic. Now, we've tried everything from revamping mediocre pages that rank for a certain decent amount of keywords and trying to get them to rank for thousands. We've also done taking pages that rank for a lot of keywords and also get a lot of traffic and try to get them even more traffic and rank for even more terms. What you'll find is this strategy is a big hit or miss. So if you just take a lot of your mediocre pages or a lot of your content, you're doing it at scale, yes, in theory the concept works out and you should rank for more pages or more terms, but how much more traffic you'll get, eh, it really varies. And the last thing you want to do is spend hundreds if not $1,000 revamping a page and barely getting any more traffic, even if that means you're ranking for more keywords. So the best approach that we found is you take your most popular pages, you go into Google Search Console, and you see the main keywords that are driving all the traffic to those pages. The main keywords, not the secondary ones that are only driving you 2 or 3 clicks. I'm talking about the main ones. You take all those terms, you put them in any keyword tool, like Ubersuggest, and it'll tell you all the long tail variations of that term. Go back in, redo that article with all the long tail phrases, and then when you redo the article, you just don't integrate the long tail phrase, but you're adjusting the content to be around it as well. That's going to be your biggest bang for your buck, and that's how you rank for more keywords and get the most traffic from the page as you're modifying it. I do not recommend doing it for middle-of-the-road pages. I would start off with your most popular pages because that's typically where you'll see the biggest impact.

Yeah. So on my end, I actually have a friend, he took his traffic up from about 100,000 visits a month to about over a million visits a month, which is pretty good. And, you know, what he started doing was— actually, Neil was kind of touching upon it a little earlier— he was hiring people to write basic content, right? So we're talking 800 words to 1,500 words or so. So this person would write one piece every single day for— you got 30 pieces per month, right? And over the next 60 to 90 days, he would go back into his analytics and look at which ones actually work. So he basically would be planting a couple seeds, and then maybe only one or two might work out. The one or two that start ranking for stuff, those are the ones that you actually take Neil's strategy, use Ubersuggest, and you decide to expand on those. Take it from You know, 1,000 words or so, take it to 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 10,000 words or so, and then those start to kind of sprout up and really become something amazing. And that's how he really started to compound his traffic.

Yeah. So, that's pretty much from my end. Do you have anything else on your end?

No, that's it. Use Ubersuggest for it. It's a great tool. Look, it's free. Neil's always adding new stuff to it.

And then make sure you check out seagrain.com/dtla. To register to go to our event, it's free. You just gotta fill out some basic information.

Yep, and by the way, before we go, Jennifer619, that must be from San Diego, great immediate tips, 5-star review. She says, I love being able to listen to these while I'm getting ready in the morning for work. Great job and to the point. So whether you're listening to us in the shower, you're getting ready, you're working out, Marketing School is great for you. Share it with your loved ones, share it with your dog, share it with everyone. That's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Great. Cool.

All right, this one's on you.

Oh yay! Do you guys need more tea and water? Anything? I'm good.

Water would be great.

Oh yeah, let's pause.

Let's pause.

I told Yue to bring some in.

Oh, you messaged someone. Your office is really nice.

Thank you. Have you seen your office?

No. Nope.

This is really nice. I don't think our office looks this good.

Even the view.

Yeah.

What's up with the Mario and Pokémon?

The room's called Mario.

I like the view. The view is gorgeous.

I'll give you a tour. Uh, she's gone.

Oh.

She's not here.

Oh, they went to lunch, huh?

Yeah, they went to lunch.

Here. Okay, well, we gotta get her in the morning.

I'll get it for you.

I like the office.

Yeah, so the phone booths are actually They'll be right back. Were you talking to her to get her a little bit more? I was like, because she's gone.

It's cool, I don't know. Thanks.

My talking was setting up Studios the Network.

Wait.

Oh, what happened?

You flipped it.

Flipped it back, so it's supposed to be.

All right, ready?

What are we on?

Neil's Instagram strategy for 2019.

Oh, okay.

How's the baby coming along?

Good, dude.

I was in the hospital for like so many days last week.

For what? Baby issues.

I spent 3 nights at the hospital. I had heart problems, so then I spent 2 days with my dad.

Damn. He's fine. He's probably still working.

Huh?

You're probably still working. No, that—

my dad, no.

The doctors messed up. Oh.

They screwed up. I was so pissed. I gave the nurse my earful. Like, I gave her an earful.

I'm like, what are you doing?

Yeah, because she almost stopped his heart and I caught it and I'm like, you just walked away.

And I'm like, what the heck?

Jeez. You guys ready?

Ready.

Rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are gonna talk about Neil Patel's Instagram strategy for 2019. So let me preface this. I put this in here because I started realizing recently, I was like, look at Neil's account. It's like, oh my god, it's growing like 200 to 300 followers a day. And all of a sudden there's all this activity happening, right? You got like, there's like a picture of him speaking, there's like a quote, and there's like videos. And like, this actually looks really good. And it also goes to his stories too. So I was like, What is going on here? Neil's actually taking Instagram seriously. Because remember, a couple months ago, we're both kind of saying, we just suck at Instagram, we don't really do it. But the fact of the matter is, we're both paying more attention to it now. And Neil's got some— what's his strategy? I'm curious to know.

So big shout out to Carlos on my team who logged into my Instagram account and started posting stuff.

So it started with Carlos.

He's like, man, he's like, why don't we build up your Instagram? I'm like, eh, we already have so many social profiles and Stop. We don't need any extra leads or anything like right now. And he's just like, let me just do it. So he started logging in, and the whole purpose of the Instagram strategy was at first to drive traffic to YouTube, and we still do it. So we leverage Instagram to drive traffic mainly to our YouTube videos because YouTube does really well for us. And we've tried out everything, like doing simple images like Double tap, you know, double tap if you're gonna hit your goals in 2019.

And a bunch of people commented actually.

Yeah, I was like, oh cool, this works. Yeah, so that kind of stuff does really well. And the whole key to doing really well on Instagram is micro content. So you just take really small snippets and you just pop them on Instagram. You don't worry what you think is gonna do well or if people are gonna like it, and you just Throw it all out there. Think of it as like just spaghetti throwing against the wall and whatever sticks, that's what you do more of. Now we haven't generated any revenue or leads from Instagram yet as far as what we know, but we more so do it to stay in touch with people. And it's funny because I'm thinking about logging into Instagram more. I already started to do that, but I'm thinking about using Instagram more for the sake of— to me, it's really a personal social network. I don't get that experience with Facebook anymore, and I don't get that experience with LinkedIn or Twitter or any of them, but I do with Instagram.

Well, I was eating. So here's my take on it. I think, I don't, you know, Neil and I have talked about omnichannel approach, the rule of 7. I don't think it's the rule of 7 anymore. I think honestly it's like the rule of like 14 or like 21 or whatever. Instagram is another touchpoint. I think they're over, what, 100 million daily active users? Something like that.

It's huge.

Something ridiculous. Now, so it's like, they have the attention right now. The problem with these social consumer platforms is that you don't know where the attention's gonna go. There might be a new platform that pops up the next day. But right now, Instagram is the hotness. And here's the beauty of what Neil's doing too. He already has an audience. He has his email list. He has a lot of organic traffic going to his site. So when you have that already, when you start something up, It's easy to push your traffic there and grow it, right? And that's like, you know, whether it's growing a podcast or whether it's growing your YouTube channel.

You know, we don't even push any traffic to Instagram.

You don't? And it's growing by itself? Yeah, organically.

Which is crazy.

And so like, okay, your YouTube channel too, let's just use that. Here's the thing, right? The underlying seed is you build your audience first and you can transfer that seed to grow other things that you have, right? So Neil's YouTube channel, what are you at now, 250?

I have no idea.

He's at 225,000 or 250,000.

281,000.

Even higher. And the funny thing is he doesn't even know. And then his Instagram is growing like 200 to 300 a day, right? So it's taking this omnichannel approach. And look, the leverage you have after you create an audience is it allows you to make money and then also hire people that just take it on. Because that's not what Neil's good at, and it's not what I'm good at either.

So Yeah, and Eric's been on Instagram a lot lately. I see you. You know, I actually like your ads.

You do?

Yeah.

I don't see that because I don't open up the ads accounts that much.

No, no, no, on Instagram I see your ads.

Oh yeah.

So what's your Instagram strategy?

My Instagram strategy is just going live, and I think, um, we're gonna talk about this afterwards, but the live like this, I do think we probably need to make our own marketing school LinkedIn because LinkedIn you can go live now too. Should probably make our own Instagram now.

LinkedIn's invite only.

We'll get it though.

Maybe. We'll find out.

Keep talking, I'm eating. Uh-huh.

So in general, like, if you're gonna leverage Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, as Eric mentioned, live is where it's at. And I think the best strategy is you do what Tai Lopez does and you just bust out like 5 phones and you go live on all of them. At the same time.

Yeah, it's huge.

Okay, I mean, even Twitter you can go live.

Yeah, well, Periscope, they own Periscope. Here's the thing, like, if I were starting from scratch today, I would probably just go live because look, especially on Facebook, you can drive ads towards it and you can retarget people. And live, just, you get so much more engagement. I can tell you that by going live on YouTube, and our team can speak to this, our growth rate on our subscribers is accelerating because we're going live. Because look, we're live right now on YouTube, we're getting So many comments. By the way, guys, thank you so much for actually like watching through this. People that are watching from like India right now, it's like 1 or 2 AM. But you build so much goodwill, and then you got to think about incentives, right?

Again—

When you went live, you mentioned you get more subscriber growth. What was the number like? Did you see increase by 10%?

We increased like 30%. The growth rate went up 30-40% in a 30-day period. That's crazy. Yeah. And so here's the thing, right? We go back to incentives again. You look at Google, you look at Facebook, you look at Instagram, what are they all? They're all ad platforms, okay? They want you to stay on their platform longer, and guess what gets a ton of engagement?

Lives.

Lives get them to stay longer, and then that allows you— that allows— that gives you bonus points, and they want to show you more because you're doing that, okay? Anything else you want to add?

No, that's it from my end.

Alright guys, go to singlegrain.com/dtla to apply for our Marketing School live event. It's gonna happen in Q2 2018. 2019. We're capping it at 500 people. Don't worry, it's just to make sure that we're gonna create the most amazing experience. We're getting so much feedback from people, what they want to see, you know, where they're coming from to, how many people they want to bring. We just got to— we want to make sure we handle things from a logistical standpoint. You look like you want to say something, but you're not. So I'm gonna read one review before we go. This is from LK Gal. She says, tasty tidbits to get my hustle on. Nice. So she says, I've been listening for close to a year now, and it's a solid part of my morning ritual before I start planning out my day and dive into the metrics. I appreciate most that they take turns speaking, so the entire episode is really smooth and easy on the ears. We're easy on the ears. Never thought I heard that. Yeah, would hear that. For short and sweet, sweet marketing talks or talk, these are your guys. Thank you so much, LK Gyal. Guys, if you want to leave a review, whether it's good or bad, we appreciate it. That's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow. Hi Eric and Neil, how would I build a big brand/company if I have 2.5 million+ audience combined on YouTube and Instagram apart from collecting email list? What else would you both recommend?

What was the question again?

How would you build a big brand/company if I have 2.5 million audience combined on YouTube and Instagram apart from collecting email list?

Tell them to go to places. You tell them to go to your site and stuff, you'll do fine. That's the key. If you keep them on those channels, you're not going to keep growing. You need to cross-pollinate all your channels together. It's not just emails. You can end up telling them at the end of your videos to go somewhere.

Good? Mm-hmm.

I like doing this at your office.

It's much nicer.

The best part is we don't have to do 20 episodes at once because I can just— this doesn't mess up your meeting flow. This is It's so close to me.

Yup.

How should you— let's answer one more question. Let's see. Rashad says, if we were to start a podcast, how many— how will people get to know some random people just starting a podcast apart from trending topics? Any insights? So we've talked about this, but if you stay consistent with it over time, like nobody knew who I was when I started the Grows Everywhere podcast, and now it's trending upwards. And by the way, it's because I stayed consistent with it.

Subscribe to it. When are you gonna change the name to it, by the way?

Well, answer the question first and then we can go into that. Well, we talked about it. I mean, it sounds like in the next like month or so?

Yeah, we're gonna send the logo out to get designed, and as soon as we get something that we like, yeah, I'm gonna go with it.

Leveling Up is the new channel. But by the way, like, guys, I stayed consistent after the first year, only 9 downloads a day. After the second year, only 30 downloads a day. And eventually, like, it started to take off, but it's because I stayed consistent with it, right? And I keep making iterations, like We were just talking about, you were talking about the agency program, like it was stuck for the longest time and then what you focus on, like you keep going with it, eventually it works itself out. It's like you figure out success, like it just kind of like happens after you put in the hard work and you go through hell.

Is the agency program bigger than the agency yet?

No, but it will be.

It can.

Yeah.

You got some pop chips there, you got it.

It's on that side, nobody can see that side.

I just want to make sure.

I appreciate it.

Yeah.

If you send me your whole funnel, I can tell you how—

I'll send it to you. There's nothing to hide.

No, I don't need to see the numbers. I just need to— you just tell me the conversion. You don't have to tell me how much you're spending or the income.

I can tell you how to fix it. Sure.

Or fine-tune it.

It works already, but—

Ready?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

And let's put the fish down because I can hear it in the— I can hear the crunches in the mic.

The fish?

I'm done.

Okay. All right, cool.

All right, no more fish.

Do you want to change this title? What you should focus on for exponential results? Neil's rewriting the title, so I'm going to eat some more Goldfish.

How many people are live right now?

I don't know. Let me ask Yirui. Oh, she's not there. Let me ask Hannah.

Uh, 38, 47.

That's awesome.

About 47 concurrent right now.

47, that's good. That's great.

Ready?

Yeah. Your subscriber count's growing fast.

That means on YouTube, not as fast as your Instagram account.

I don't even check.

All right, here we go.

Okay, so we are rolling. Audio. And 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how to get exponential results with your content marketing.

So you guys all do content marketing, but you're finding that very few people are sharing it, viewing it, it's not ranking as much. So let's go over some of the strategies that we do. Eric, you and I both have mediocre content. I'm not saying we write mediocre content, but mediocre content when it comes to production.

I would argue we do because, at least for me, because I did a survey to my audience and I said, hey, how disappointed would you be if you no longer got to consume our blog content on Single Grain? Only 28% of people said that. But I did it for the Marketing School survey and 80% of people said they'd be really disappointed. So we're doing something right on this podcast. But you're saying your podcast is mediocre?

Yeah.

But you don't write your blog content.

No.

So, which is fine because it's scalable the way you're doing it. But the biggest thing is you gotta look for the winners. Everyone— see, content marketing in many cases is hit or miss. No matter how much time you spend writing this magnificent piece of art, you know, that content that you're publishing, it may not do well. No matter how much time you spend marketing or promoting it. And I'm a big believer you should focus on the content that's already doing well. In a past episode, we mentioned a simple strategy, and what I want to focus this episode on is you already have content, go look at your amazing content that's performing amazingly well, and let's figure out how to get you exponential results there. Because if that 10% of your content is driving 60-70% of your traffic, We can make that 10% of that content drive 90% of your traffic.

Yep.

And the first thing, and we talked about this in a previous episode, is go to Google Search Console, look at your most popular posts, look at the keywords that are driving most of the traffic, and then from there you should end up taking those keywords, put them into Ubersuggest, take all the long-tail variations that it spits out, rewrite your content, make it 4, 5, 10 times longer, With those keywords and you'll get much more traffic. It really is that simple. And another strategy that I want Eric to talk about that I know you guys should all be leveraging is split testing your title tags for the posts that do really well. So Eric, what's your process on that?

Yeah, so Neil was actually just talking about the 80/20 rule, right? The Pareto principle. It's 20% of— usually 20% of the inputs will create 80% of the outputs, right? And usually that's what we find when you look at your Google Analytics. Whether I look at Neil's or I look at mine, it's like it is these, these kind of gold pieces that will produce the lion's share of results, right? So what you can do to make the most of it is you can Google— go into Google Search Console, or you can use my tool which is called ClickFlow. And you can basically— you can split test your headlines, right? Your headlines or your meta description. So what do I mean by that? What am I even trying to do here? So let's put it this way. Let's say Neil has a post on Neil's gardening tips. Okay, so Neil's Gardening Tips, and then the, the Neil's Gardening Tips maybe has— it doesn't perform that well, but maybe if I said Neil's Gardening Tips Updated for 2019 and Beyond, that might be a little more enticing to click on. What you're doing here is you're split testing or A/B testing your title and your meta description to see which one gets a higher click-through rate. Because if I can increase the click-through rate by 30%, meaning let's say I could drive 300 more clicks just by changing the title, That's so little effort for just changing something, testing it, and you just pick out your top 10 or 20% of posts. Do that, you're going to get more traffic that way. So you can use ClickFlow or you can use Google Search Console for that.

Yeah, and the other thing you should do is look at every site that you've linked out to, go and ask them for a tweet or a share. Like simply just email them. A lot of them will do it because they're like, oh, you already mentioned me. Yeah, sure, why wouldn't I share this out? Like, that is the simplest way to get more traffic, and the more people that see you from the social web, the more shares you're gonna get from the social web. And on top of that, hopefully some of those people will link back to you.

Yeah. The final thing I'll add from my side is, we talked about Power Pages a couple episodes ago, but I wanna talk about content pillars. And Neil actually has a really good example of this. If you Google online marketing or affiliate marketing, he actually ranks number 1 for both of those. He's got some pillar pages. What I mean by that is, literally, This guy spent $30,000 plus, okay, designed a really nice guide. It's not just one chapter, it's 14 to 15 chapters. So online marketing, you go to it, it's like one landing page, it's like the overview page, right? And then there's like 14, 15 chapters in there. And then, you know, that overview page, maybe it's 4,000 to 5,000 words. Now when you click on the chapter itself, it's another 4,000 to 5,000 words. It's also really nicely designed. Now the benefit of that is you're basically signaling the search engines it's not just one page, it's a complete resource. They're all internally linking to each other, and then a lot of links are going to the overview page, and the link equity is passing over into the other chapters. And now he ranks number 1 for freaking online marketing. Like, come on, how many people can say that?

You want to hear something crazy?

What?

So I used to spend $30,000 on those guides, $20,000 to $30,000, somewhere in that range.

Yeah.

Now I won't spend anywhere near there.

Well, you're spending somewhere else now.

No, it's not, not even that. The content's worth it. I found that the moment you start creating content that's over like 11,000, 12,000 words, there's huge diminishing returns. And when I created all those chapters and I had all this fancy design, you and I both know this better than anyone else, you gotta keep updating your content. It's a pain in the butt to update content.

When it's designed like that? Yeah.

So it's like Eric has it right, but do a simpler version of it. Try to cap them around like 11,000, 12,000 words and Yep, anything else you wanna add? That's it! Make sure you check out seaportgrain.com/dtla and fill out the application so you can attend our free in-person event in downtown LA.

Alright, so reading one more review here. This is from Kel Toad. He says, quick hit advice, 6 to 7 minutes of solid actionable info on most casts. Why not all casts? But that's okay. She says, a must-listen for ecommerce marketers, which is really interesting, but we'll leave that for another time. Thank you so much, Kel Toad. And guys, feel free to leave a review, whether it's good or bad. Neil and I both appreciate it because the bad stuff makes us better, the really good stuff makes us happy, so either or, it's fine.

Alright.

On to the next one. I think we did 7 so far? Mm-hmm. We got a ways to go. Yeah.

I think we can get through 15.

Yeah. Manav says, Eric, did you read Neil's book Hustle? How was it? Neil's book Hustle was great. I have it at home. It's sitting on my bookshelf. So yeah, check it out. I actually saw it in bookstores before too.

Okay, and you guys good?

What's the next one? What's this Duck Soup feature?

So they have integration with Zapier now, so whenever you visit like a profile, it can automatically push like the info into your CRM. Or when you visit, when you make a change in your CRM or whatever, when you update the profile, it can automatically go visit their account.

So it's like a, it's a Doesn't Duxu break terms of service though?

Still works.

Yeah, go for it.

Somehow I got Siri.

Yeah, I'll change the title.

It's because you're, you're, you're on the thing. You're smushing it. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to go vertical. Boom.

Syed asks, well, I guess we can— the future of email marketing and YouTube. I guess we can make that like a, right, a topic.

Future email marketing, not so much. Future YouTube, maybe.

There we go. Cool. Okay, so I got a good one.

Okay. Ready?

Let me know when you're ready.

Ready.

Ready?

Yep.

And 3, 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today I'm gonna talk about, or we're gonna talk about, how this one simple tool will power up your sales. What is the tool, Neil?

Duck Soup.

Alright, so Duck Soup, we've talked about before on this podcast. So Duck Soup is a LinkedIn tool that will help you visit profiles, it will help you automatically message people. It's questionable whether it breaks the terms of service from LinkedIn or not. And so there's a couple different ways to do it. I'll kind of outline the features again. So you can visit people's profiles based on what you spec out. So if I want to visit marketers in Los Angeles that have worked for Neil Patel Digital, I can do that. And it will visit each and every one of their accounts. That's one thing, okay? Second thing is when it visits them, it'll actually give you their info, right? It'll actually give you their personal email address, so that's a little questionable. And it'll also allow you to tag and message these people too.

Yeah, and in other words, it's just helping keep you top of mind, but it probably breaks some terms of service and maybe even privacy policies?

Yeah, so, you know, use at your own risk. But hey, if you're one of those people that maybe, you know, you're in a country that doesn't care, like Ukraine, then you might use it.

Yeah, you like— and if you're in Europe, I don't know if it affects GDPR or anything like that. I don't think it does, but—

Unless you're messaging, you're emailing them.

Yeah, unless you're emailing, but if you do through messaging or contact forms or anything like that, I think you're fine because You don't have their email address, you're just going through the platform.

Right, right.

So, but in general, when it comes to marketing and sales, they're going to work hand in hand. And whether you use Duck Soup or any of the tools out there, the big thing that most people forget when they're trying to generate revenue— because I know marketing and sales, everyone looks at it as 2 different departments. The purpose of marketing is to help generate more sales. And what you'll find is right now it's so easy to create businesses, it's so easy to pop up products and services is you're going to have dozens and dozens of competitors, if not hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands. So what should you do? Well, you got to stay top of mind. You got to keep in contact with people. People need to continually see you. They need to be seeing your messaging out there. Whether it's visiting their profile and, you know, them seeing that you visited their profile or messaging them automatically or whether it's continually pushing out more and more new content, if you're not staying top of mind, you are going to lose them.

Yeah, so I do want to talk about, there's a new feature that just came out with Duck Soup. They call it Duck Soup Turbo now. And there's a Zapier integration, so it integrates with your workflow. And so Zapier, for those of you that don't know, it allows your apps to talk to each other. So the beauty of this is, if you use Duck Soup to visit someone's profile, you can automatically add them to your CRM. So let's say you're using HubSpot, let's say you are using Salesforce, for example, you can add them into your CRM, right? So you're kind of automating some of those tasks. Now the other side of things is if you decide to update someone's contact within your CRM, you can automatically have Duck Soup go and visit that person's profile. So that's another sales touchpoint and it makes it easier for your people, especially your sales team, to not have to think so much about, oh, I did this, now I need to go visit them, right? Because the more manual an action is, especially for humans, the more we screw up, right? So the more you can automate it, the more you can automate it, like Humans aren't that reliable, machines are, so that's why I rely a little more on Duck Soup here.

Yeah, and once you start adding people into your CRM and you're communicating with them, you need to have personalized messages. If your messaging isn't personalized, you're not gonna convert these people into customers.

Yeah, and by the way, with Duck Soup you can personalize it. You can, you know, put in little variables, short snippets.

But not even that. I'm talking about personalization where you're taking the time and effort to go through their site, learn who they are, doing the custom pitch, that is always gonna convert better than just going and writing generic stuff and hopefully that someone closes into a customer.

Cool. So that is it for today. But guys, go to singlegrain.com/dtla for our Marketing School Live application. Look, we're getting a lot of great feedback there. We're capping it at 500 people. It's gonna be great. Aiming for Q2. And by the way, I got one more review to read to you guys. This is from Dan Xia. So, I don't know if that's the right way to pronounce it, but Dan Shaw, and he says, great actionable advice, 5 stars. I just found your podcast and I have some catching up to do. Most importantly, going to implement why you cover that resonates with me. I guess what you cover.

Okay.

Is there anything I can do beyond rate, review, subscribe to help you hit your 1 million downloads? Well, thank you so much, Dan. We hit the 1 million, but now we gotta go for 2 million.

That's right.

On to the next tool. So guys, feel free to rate, review, subscribe to this podcast. Apply for the Marketing School Live event. It's going to be great, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Great. Save.

This is all I've eaten today.

This is all I've eaten today.

Really? Are you fasting?

No.

I do intermittent fasting. I usually don't eat till 12 to—

Oh, that's what I mean.

12 to 6.

You know what I do? This is a 16-hour window, right? So I only eat at 5 to 6 PM, which means I can eat at 9 or 10 AM.

Hmm. Mm-hmm. It works.

I do an 18-hour window of not eating.

I mean, I'm just lazy.

I like—

you can just say intermittent fasting. I'm just lazy.

Alright, ready? What's this one?

Thank you, Lydia, for answering that question. We both believe email marketing has a future. Ready?

Yeah, okay.

Begin.

Rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about what percentage of your revenue should you allocate to marketing. So look, there's always people talking about budgets, like how much should we put into marketing, what percentage should it be. And you know what the funny thing is? We've actually done an episode on this before about how we think budgets are— Useless.

Yes. And it's not just us. Even the big Fortune 1000 companies. It's funny, I was talking to a Fortune 1000 company the other day and we were discussing marketing budgets and you know what they told me? They're like, well, here's our budget, but as long as you can stick within this profit margin or this ratio, we'll spend as much as we can. And that is the case with almost every single business, that's how it should be. Not every business may believe in that, but that's what it should be. Because if you can spend $2 or you can spend $1 and make $2 or $3 and it's profitable, why wouldn't you spend $100 grand and keep at that same ratio assuming it still works? And if that works, why wouldn't you want to scale up to $1 million or $2 million or $5 million a month? You want to spend as much as you can as long as it's profitable because that means your business is growing faster and faster. Budget should be determined based off the profitability of that channel.

And what if they're breaking even on it? Should they continue spending on it? Because one would argue that it's free advertising.

See, if you're breaking even on the ad spend, I would say no. And the reason being is you have other costs within your business such as labor, employees, office space, whatever you want to end up tacking on there. But if you're breaking even including all of those things, sure, because hopefully you can figure out ways to monetize that person in the backend through lifetime value. Even if you're losing money on the frontend, if you have the cash to Yeah, you can lose money on the front end, there's nothing wrong with that as well. That's how big companies like Agora ends up generating hundreds and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars because they're willing to lose money on the front end due to the fact that they know the lifetime value of their customer.

Yeah guys, and look, if you have to, absolutely have to, have to, have to, let's say you're reporting to someone and they're like, we need a percentage, it's like what these guys are saying is like If you have to have a percentage, I mean, the typical, when you Google it, it's like you put 15% of your marketing spend is a percentage of the revenue, right?

Yeah, I don't know what that number is, but let's say it's 15%, 10%, or 20%. In general, you can start off small too. It could even be like 4% or 5%. And I would even start off smaller with $1,000 or a few hundred dollars. And as long as you can keep spending And making it profitable, why not scale up? That's what I would do if you're a really small business. If you're a business that's more established, you can get into the hundreds of thousands, even in the millions, and assuming it works, keep scaling it up.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately what you're looking for— I was actually listening to the CEO of Shopify on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and what you're looking for is a ratio at the end of the day. You have an Excel formula for your business, here's what the ratio is, and you just pour money on that ratio. That's what basically Neil's referring to right now. You don't want to cap yourself out. If you have a formula that's working for you, it's like, if I'm doing this right now, I'm gonna get this back. I put in $1,000, I get $5,000 back. Why would you not do that all day? You want to max that out as much as you can. And that's, that's how, that's how business works. That's how you scale it, right? So once you get a ratio going, you try to max it out. Now the problem is, if you look at like a services-based business, like an agency for example, Neil and I have talked about this, but the more customers you add, The service unfortunately will start to get worse, right? Unless you like do something where you only cap out a certain amount of clients. Now if you have a product, the difference now is you don't need to worry about adding more people to make the service worse.

It's gonna—

the quality is gonna get better and better over time because you're adding more people to make the product better, okay? So that's something to consider. But again, to focus on it, focus on a ratio. Get a ratio right.

Cool.

I have nothing else from my end. Make sure you guys go to singlegrain.com/dtla to attend our free in-person event. We look forward to seeing you guys there.

All right, one more thing before we go. We got a review from Wynan12. This person says, the go-to podcast for short and sweet marketing strategies and tactics. Been listening to Marketing School for over a year and 100% will be listening to it for many years, many more years to come. This podcast provides you with the most up-to-date marketing strategies so that you can succeed across the board. Love this podcast and I hope everybody listens We hope everybody listens to it too, and we will see you all tomorrow.

Alright.

You doing good over there?

Yep, all set.

Alright, ready?

Yeah.

Okay.

All the episodes are coming through perfectly clear?

Yeah.

That's good.

Just those first 2 were mixed. I gotta check them at the end and see if I can isolate.

Oh, so we have to redo the first 2?

I have to look at them and listen to them afterwards. I'll let you know. There's a chance that this audio got mixed in with the—

Oh, your audio?

The computer audio got mixed in with the What do you mean computer audio? From this machine. So I was like—

Oh, as we're recording, so it's us twice?

Yeah, I'll listen to it at the end and see if it's garbage or if it's usable, but right now it's the way it's supposed to be.

Sounds good.

Alright, everybody good?

Yeah.

Alright, we are rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about how to master omnichannel marketing in 2019. So let's review what omnichannel marketing is. So we've done this a couple times, and I think this is the theme. This is like, there's always like 2 to 3 things like people talk about, and I think the thing that we agree on the most is like this whole approach about omnichannel marketing. It's, you gotta be—

It's not what most people talk about, it's what we talk about because we believe in it the most. Most people don't care to discuss about it.

Yes, that's what I meant. It's the thing that we believe in. It's like our creed.

That's what I mean. Yeah, it's not popular, but it should be popular.

I mean, who— okay, so let's talk about omnichannel marketing. Maybe you can give a couple examples, and then we'll talk about how to master it for this year and beyond. So omnichannel marketing, we talked about the rule of 7 before, right? Like, people have to see your brand 7 times before they take an action. Now, we actually might believe that that's a little more now because attention spans are getting worse and worse. Because when I watch Netflix, I actually take out my phone and I start watching YouTube. Okay? So omnichannel approach, if you look at it, it's taking— it's making use of all the channels available, right? So it's— you look at Neil, he's using Instagram now. His YouTube following is growing. He started with a blog first, but now he has— he's got a Facebook following, right? He's got YouTube. He's got Instagram. He's got— what else? What else do you have? Email list.

Email lists, push notifications, emails.

We got this podcast too.

Yeah, a bit of everything. Even in-person events.

Yeah, which we're now doing. We never thought we'd do an in-person event. Yeah, but yeah, so that's, that's the definition of being omnichannel. Now the question is, you can get all over the place with this, especially when you're small, you don't have many resources, and you can get overwhelmed. But like, once you start getting resources, we think this is the way to go.

Yeah, and if you're trying to master it in 2019, what I recommend doing is starting off with similar channels. So SEO content marketing and social media marketing go really well together. And starting off with text-based content goes really well there. If you're starting off with video-based content, I would tackle Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook all at once because they can all leverage the same type of content. So look at the type of content that you're creating, whether it's audio, video, or text-based. Look at all the channels that'll accept it, and that's where you should start and leverage all of them at the same time for the ones that prefer the type of content you're creating.

Yeah, so we have something on our end called the content sprouting method. And the content sprouting method, we're just trying to keep it simple, right? Like you're growing a piece of content, right? So let me give you an example. So let's say Neil has a webinar that he's done. The webinar might be an hour or so. That webinar can actually convert into 5 separate videos. Separate blog posts, right? Long-form blog posts. Now those 5 blog posts can actually convert into maybe 2 or 3 additional videos each. So then you got like 15 additional videos, you got 5 blog posts, and you got the webinar. That is the seed piece of content, okay? So you usually will have a seed piece of content which might be the webinar, and then you could sprout it into different pieces of content. So it might be, again, a blog post can convert into a webinar, could convert to a video, can convert to an audio, for example, like a podcast. And so when you do that, you're making the most of the one piece you have, the seed, you're sprouting it, and then you're promoting it, so you're pollinating it, right? That's the easy way to think of it. And to Neil's point, let's say you're doing a video, you can easily convert that into different formats on different social channels. Like if we do a live, we might go live on Twitch, we might go live on YouTube, we might go live on Instagram, we might go live on LinkedIn too, or Facebook, right? There's like, that's 5, instead of hitting just one, now we can hit 5 at the same time. And that goes much further than just doing one piece of content. And then we can take this content and convert it into podcasts too. And whatever does well, we can convert it into a long-form piece of content. There's so many different ways to skin a cat here.

Yeah, and if you just follow it, you start leveraging the omnichannel approach, you'll start seeing much better results in 2019. Keep in mind, most of these channels allow you to re-pixel— not most, but a lot of them allow you to remarket the audience. So if you have a huge audience on Facebook or you're starting to do well on YouTube, you can start pixeling these people, remarketing to them, and it'll help your paid ads perform better as well because people are warmed up to your brand, whether it's personal or corporate.

Cool.

Anything else you want to add? Nope.

Make sure you check out siuamoregrain.com/dtla. It's where to go to attend our in-person event that's free in downtown Los Angeles.

All right, before we go, I have another review for you, and this one might be a repeat, so I'm gonna go look for some negative ones. Actually, these are the most recent ones. So Edward Velinsky, I think I've read this one before. Genuine, honest, and straight to the point. So we're gonna give you another shout out. So love this podcast, just as the slogan says, actionable tips. I tried some tactics and really saw positive results. Edward, by the way, if you got those positive results from me, just DM me on Instagram, Eric O'Su. We'd love to share those results with people. If you're looking to learn online marketing, This is what you should listen to. Thank you for that. Guys, please leave a review, rate, subscribe. Did you share the link yet for DTLA?

Uh, no.

Oh, okay. By the way, go to singlegrade.com/dtla for the Black Box Mobile Live.

Oh yeah, I love that.

Oh, okay. Alright, cool. Well, hey, that's it for today. See you guys tomorrow.

I spaced out.

I'm like, maybe we should stop reading the testimonials because we ran out.

Yeah.

And have— ask him to leave more testimonials?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, we can read them on like the other, like Stitcher and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is Stitcher even popular?

No.

But hey, you know. Does Spotify have them?

I don't know if we can read the reviews from Spotify.

Where's the reviews?

Ah, see?

32.

4.9, look at that. 2 years ago.

This isn't gonna work.

No, no, look. A month ago, boom! From Web Scout. Now I can do that. Alright, ready, oh?

Ready, ready, ready.

Alright, let's go.

Rolling in 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about 7 social media predictions that will come true in 2013. So I guess I'll go first. I think live is going to be even bigger than it was, than ever was, because look, you got LinkedIn coming into the game now, Instagram Lives. Look, we're actually even live right now on this podcast. We know for a fact that because these platforms are incentivizing people to stay on the platforms, that live is one of the best ways to keep people staying on the platform so people can watch more ads. That's how these companies make money.

I also believe in 2019 that this will come through is you're going to see social networks pushing for video more. Right now you can get more engagement if you put video on some social networks, but what you're going to find is all the social networks will start pushing towards social media. So when you upload images, upload text, it won't do as well as videos, literally on all the networks.

All right, number 3 from my end, it's Better monetization. So if you actually read this, this is from Andreessen Horowitz, but they did a study on the different advertising model between the United States and China, and we actually talked about this on a podcast. But let's put it in perspective here, and maybe Neil and I will reevaluate our life after this. But the podcast market in 2018, maybe in 2017 or so, in the United States was about $314 million, okay, which is not really that much money compared to the grand scale of the grand scheme of things. Now, if you look at China, their podcast marketing is over $3 billion. In fact, you got teachers that are making $8 million a year on their podcast. Another one's making $5 million a year. You got a simple, like, course podcast that does over $1 million a year, and we make zero from this podcast.

Technically, we lose money.

Yeah, technically we lose money, and we put a lot of our blood, sweat, and tears into it. So hey, you know, not complaining here. We love— yeah, everyone's here. So yeah. This is fun.

Okay, so another prediction that will happen in 2019 is you're going to see comments increase virality more than any other form of engagement on these social platforms. There's too many tools, there's too many people that just like, heart, retweet, whatever you want to end up calling it. What these social networks are going to start looking for is comments, and not just if the comment is simple like a yes or a no, but how detailed and thoughtful thorough is the comment, because that'll end up telling them, hey, this post, this video, whatever it may be, should end up going viral because it has the most amount of engagement. Remember, it takes people more time to leave a comment than anything else. All these social platforms want real engagement. They want to keep people on their social platform for as long as possible because that's how they make more money.

And actually, on that point, I mean, when I look at how marketers are taking advantage of LinkedIn now or even on Facebook, it's always people like, Hey, you know, I found this to work really, really, really, really well. You know, this new marketing tactic, and it becomes a cliffhanger. It's like, by the way, if you want this resource, we put together a 20-page guide. Leave a comment if you'd like access, right? So you see a lot of that going on. I think more and more people are gonna, you know, take advantage of that. But also, at the same time, when I look at social, I also consider podcasts to be social. Okay, so this is number 5. Number 5, right? Number 5, yeah. So Spotify just bought Gimlet Media for, I believe, $230 or $320 million, and then they also bought Anchor. So that's a podcasting platform. They're getting very serious into the podcasting game. So now in 2019, it's gonna get a lot more serious, and I think Neil and I are very fortunate that we caught on to the wave before it started to get super saturated. I think it's gonna get more competitive, and you know, It's worthwhile to take a look at it because the attention on these other social platforms are getting less and less, but podcasting is on the upward trend.

The 6th prediction we have is all the social media algorithms will start looking more similar in 2019. Currently you have some like LinkedIn where you push content that goes to your website and you can do well. They're all going to start changing it in which, similar to Facebook, in which if you start driving traffic away from their own platform You won't do as well. Great.

And number 7. So I do want to go back to one of my favorite channels right now, YouTube. So I think a lot more people are going to start coming onto YouTube more because the barrier to entry is getting less and less, right? It's not going to cost you too much money. I mean, you can take out your phone now, you can start shooting. And I actually see people doing that. They're going live every single day. And we talked about this a couple episodes ago, a guy named Frank Kern, great marketer, did over $350,000 just by going live every single day. And it worked out well for him.

So that's it. Make sure you go to siemergreen.com/dtla. We're throwing a free in-person event. Just apply so that way you can reserve your spot.

Alright, and now we got— we ran out of reviews on iTunes, so if you guys want to give us more reviews, it'll be great. And then we'll read these reviews, give you a shout out, maybe if you put your website in there. Maybe not too much of that, but maybe a little bit. But Laura from WebScout says, She says, my fave advanced marketing tips from SEO view. Seriously love how quick and to the point this podcast is. I'll listen to several in a row as I'm getting ready for work or driving in the car. I've got 25%— not 25%— 25+ years of marketing and sales under my belt, and I still learn something new every time I listen. Neil and Eric are the bomb. Thank you, Laura. You're the bomb as well, and we'll see you all tomorrow.

Bye. Great.

How many are we at now?

Is it? You're right.

You're right. Now we're on twelve.

Yeah, so I got a conference call at one, so we're good. Okay. Just cool. All right. FYI.

Good to know.

Okay. Ready?

So do this one, do one more, and then should we check the first 2?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's do that.

Okay. We are rolling. And 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about a new way to get traffic from LinkedIn. What could it possibly be, Neil?

LinkedIn Live. You're familiar with Facebook Live, you're familiar with YouTube Live, you're Familiar with even Twitter and Instagram and all the other networks, but LinkedIn now has live. And if you go live on LinkedIn, they're pushing it harder than anything else because they have to catch up. And when someone has to catch up, what does that mean, Eric?

Well, that means they're going to pull out all the stops to get however much engagement they can.

That's right. So if you want more traffic, I know this sounds simple, really just go live. Your live could be crappy quality, it doesn't have to be anything amazing. You will get more traffic if you just go live.

Yeah, 100%. So look, LinkedIn is a little late to the game, but they're blooming right now after the Microsoft acquisition. I do believe they're getting better. That's my personal opinion. And now I think you're able to actually take LinkedIn data and combine it with Bing too. So there's cool stuff going on there, but they need people to stay on the platform because again, they're an advertising-based platform and they do sell services and products as well. But look at it this way, Instagram has live, Twitch has live. Has live, Twitter has live, Facebook, they all have live, right? So they know numbers-wise that it's the thing that works in terms of keeping people on the platform. So look, it's invite only right now, but it's time to start preparing for it. We don't know the way in terms of getting into the— by the way, if you guys are from LinkedIn right now, Neil and I would both like an invite. But here's the thing, start preparing for it. Start going live right now, even on the other channels. Even if you suck, it doesn't matter, to Neil's point, and it's gonna work out for you in the long term because the It's the first mover's advantage here.

Yeah, seriously, go live. I know this is a short episode, but try to do anything you can to go live on LinkedIn, and you'll notice leaps and bounds increase in your traffic. And there's also tools, not really for LinkedIn yet, but for the other ones where you can go live all at once.

What's that tool called?

Wirecast. Wirecast.

So they're actually one of the first integration platforms. Actually, Noah brought that up.

For LinkedIn?

For LinkedIn. So we can actually simulcast Across the board.

Yeah, so it's like if you're gonna do it, do it on all of them because it just gets you more traffic without any extra work on your end.

Yeah, so look guys, short episode but it's to the point. Guys, pay attention to it, see if you can find a way to get into LinkedIn Live. Go to marketing school— or no, go to siograin.com/dtla to go to the application for our Marketing School Live event happening in downtown LA. It's gonna happen in Q2, we're capping it at 500 people, it's gonna be great. Let us know what you're looking for. Let us know what you're trying to accomplish and we're gonna help you reach your goals. By the way, we're gonna record it as well. And I got one more review for you before we go. This is from Leslie Chong TH, and he said, my favorite podcast for the past 2 years. Great tips, strategies, and info for the digital marketing and marketing stuff.

Or it could be a she. Leslie is a both pronoun.

No, Leslie is a guy because I've seen his— he added me on Facebook.

Ah, okay.

So a must-have podcast. Get it now. You won't regret it. We agree, you won't regret it. See you tomorrow. All right, one more. What's this one? How SEO will change with 2020?

Voice. 50% of searches will be voice.

All right, ready? I love how you guys don't have to like do it, you just know what's coming. That's how it is.

That's great.

Okay, all right, we are rolling. 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about how SEO will change in 2020, and you're not going to like it.

So Eric and I have both blogged on this topic and talked about it, and every time we do, it gets very little traffic because no one cares to hear about it, but it's voice search. And already the stats are pretty crazy in which more and more people are using voice search, and a lot of that's due to mobile devices, Google Home, Alexa. But in 2020, Comscore estimates 50% of searches will be voice-related. Now, here's the shitty part about voice search. A lot of those searches will just give an answer. They'll pull from your website, which means less traffic going to you.

Yes. And as I finish my goldfish, so what can you do in this scenario? So if you think about it, when you're using Alexa or Google Home, they give you one answer. What's the score of this game? How's the traffic? How's the weather? It's a very transactional or transactional response that you're getting. You're getting like, what's this? And then you get a response back, right? So you're getting one result. So at least from a Google perspective, what works? Well, when you rank zero, when you optimize for ranking zero, which we've actually talked about on this podcast, you are able to capture that. When you have the featured snippet, then Google Home will pull from that, and I suspect that Alexa pulls from that too. But they pull that featured snippet. It's like, what does this mean, right? What is the definition of games, right? And they'll get the game, you know, they'll pull a snippet from like a blog post and they'll give you that answer. So optimize for that. You got to start focusing on optimizing for featured snippets and also other kind of snippets you can have appear on the search result pages.

Yeah, and what you should consider doing is also focus on building a brand. See, if you just rely on SEO traffic and people doing a search and going to your site, you're going to miss out on a lot. And one of the big factors in Google's algorithm is brand queries. So if you have a brand, I bet in the long run it'll also help you get more of the rankings and it'll cause them to pull from your site more often. For voice-related search. The reason being is Google, Facebook, every big platform out there right now is battling fake news. They're all big believers that brands are the solution in which brands are less likely to release fake news. So you got to build up a brand. And we had roughly 3 episodes ago an episode on omnichannel approach. And if you want to build up a brand, listen to that one because if you take omnichannel approach approach, it will indirectly help you with SEO, especially as Google moves into voice search.

Yeah, and one thing I talked about a while back, maybe it's over a year now, is if you have a blog— and Neil and I both have blogs— but when you add Amazon Polly to your site, there's a WordPress plugin for it. I don't think it costs too much money to actually use, but Amazon Polly will basically take a blog post that you have, convert it to audio, put a little play button above the post itself, and then that actually increases dwell time on your site, increases By about 15, 20% for us. That actually affects your SEO. So when you do that, because some people don't want to read the entire post, but from a voice perspective, that is kind of changing SEO because you're converting something to voice and it is helping with your SEO.

Yeah, so that's mainly it. You know, we know you guys don't care about voice search. You really need to start paying attention. We know it's 2019, but the reason we have this episode is because if you don't act on it right now, you're going to be screwed in 2020. And it takes time to adjust and climb the rankings. You're not going to see results in 2, 3, 4, 5 months. That's why we did this episode very early on in this year so that way you have time to prepare.

Alright, so that is it for today, but go to singlegrain.com/dtla for our marketing school live application. Again, we're doing it, we're capping it at 500 people, but we need to know what you're looking for so we can present the best experience for you. And I got one more review. Guys, on iTunes we ran out of reviews, so if you want a shout out, Leave a rating, review, subscribe, whether it's good or bad. I'm reading this from Stitcher right now. This is from Sheezy, and this person says, straight to the point learning. Neil and Eric, thank you very much for this show. You guys have been part of our business growth. The content you bring is priceless. The best part of this podcast is you guys go straight to the point with your objectives. No time is wasted about off-topic discussions. Keep up the great work. Thank you so much, and see you all tomorrow.

Fantastic.

All right, so we'll do a check here and then we'll cap it off for today.

Save.

All right, guys on live, thanks so much for staying with us.

Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Yeah, let us know if you guys want to see more of this. You can tweet or DM me on Instagram because Neil doesn't really respond. I suspect he will start responding one day, but DM me @Ericosue.

I will try responding, but. It's hard because between all the social platforms, we get between 1,000 to 2,000 messages a day.

That's tough.

So I do want to respond to everyone, and I do have people who help me respond to everyone. It's just hard to go through all of them.

There you go, guys. That is it for this stream, and I'm going to stop the stream right now. So have a good night for those of you in Asia right now, and—

whoops—

and see you later. And have a good day for the rest of you. Stop streaming.