19 Actionable Tips to Grow Your Revenues in 2019 (2 Hours of Marketing Advice!)

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about if you even need to blog anymore. So Neil, what are your thoughts? You still spend money on blogging, I still spend money on blogging, and you still blog actually, so—

Yeah, I don't spend money on blogging, I just blog.

It's free for me. You were spending money on blogging.

That was a long time ago.

How long ago?

Uh, year, year and a half.

Wow, time flies.

Yeah.

So I spend no money on blogging. I blog once a week myself. Funny enough, I'll write similar topics to also what we do podcasts about, or if you notice some of the podcast titles are similar to my blog titles because I know there's different audiences and I already know which ones hit, so I want to make sure we get the most amount of listening because they're trapped.

There you go, making the most of your content.

Yes, but the reason I still blog is Some people prefer video content, some people prefer audio content, some people prefer text-based content. You can't please everyone with one format. For that reason, I do think it's worth blogging. In addition to that, blogs still generate more traffic from Google search than anything else versus video content, audio content. Blogs continually will get you more long-tail, long-term traffic than any other format. Video over time is increasing. Podcasting, when you release something, you'll get good traffic for the first 30 days. Technically, the first few days to week is the best. Trickles down after 30 days, and it really does slow down after a few months. Podcasting doesn't get you that continual long-tail traffic like you would get with a blog post, and it doesn't get you that evergreen traffic as well.

Yeah, so my thoughts around this are When you blog, same thing goes for podcasting or video, right? The traffic compounds. But the interesting thing about when you blog, you have a lot more control about what you can— you can add keywords to a page and it can get even more traffic. So that's coming from an SEO perspective. And then also at the same time, you can start to change the titles and see if you get more traffic from it too, right? You can do that same thing for YouTube SEO. But when it comes to podcasting, it's still very nascent. So you aren't allowed to— you can't optimized as effectively, right? So I like to be able to do that. And also blogging to me is awesome because again, when you're driving traffic to a website, people are finding you organically, you're gonna be able to put your retargeting pixel on there and then you can retarget them too. So you have a lot more flexibility. You can collect email addresses too. There's just a lot that you can do from blogging. And when you blog, when you, when you're building a website, you're building authority because you're starting to attract links. And then that's gonna allow your lower funnel, kind of middle to lower funnel traffic pages, they're gonna start to get more traffic because your site has a higher domain Yeah, so in general, for all of you guys who are wondering, hey, should you blog?

The answer is yes. Now, this doesn't mean that you should end up going and creating 1,000 blog posts. There's a lot of companies and sites that did this. A good example of this is Dr. Axe. They used to get way more traffic than they currently do. They've been slapped by some Google stuff, or at least from what it looks like. What you'll find is if you just regurgitate all the other existing content that everyone else has written about, A blog won't be that effective, but if you write new fresh stuff that other people haven't talked about, you will do well. That doesn't mean you can't regurgitate, you just need good domain authority, you need to build up your presence of your site, get the backlinks rolling in, and then when you regurgitate information, that kind of stuff will eventually rank on Google and you'll get traffic. But in the short run, if you're going to blog, write new stuff and start off with just once a week.

Yeah, this is why you see other websites like— I actually met a guy that used to work at Ziff Davis. And he said, you know, what they started to do was they just started— they had so much domain authority that they just started publishing whatever and started making affiliate pages, and that started driving a ton of revenue for them, right? Because once you have that type of volume, right, once Google sees your site as a quality website, guess what? You have a lot more flexibility with what you can do. So I think it just starts to compound better than the other channels right now. Not to say the other channels won't catch up, but that's why I think it's still relevant. Anything else you want to add?

Nope, that's it for mine.

Alright, so I'm gonna read a review before we go. Benjamin Johnston says, the best way to stay up to date. 5 stars. Listening to this podcast for over a year and it has become the best way to start my morning. Starting fresh out of college as the only digital marketing person at my company, the lessons I've learned on this podcast have enabled me to consistently hit $100 to $1 ROAS, return on ad spend.

Wow.

I definitely wouldn't have been able to produce results so quickly without the awesome lessons from Eric and Neil. Keep it up, guys. Thank you so much, Benjamin. By the way, everyone, we're doing that live event in downtown LA. It's gonna happen in June. Neil and I are gonna try to finalize the date today, hopefully. Singlegrain.com/dtla for the application, and we will see you tomorrow. Someone, Mark, just said the mic is actually on the main camera, not on our personal mics for the live. Oh, got it, got it, got it. Cool.

Cool.

Johnson Emmanuel says, Neil, can I have that banana please?

Yes.

You gotta go that way.

Yes.

All right, next one.

Ready?

Let's do it.

Let me just check the levels here.

Can I have that banana?

Sweet, sounds good.

All right, ready?

Ready, ready. And firing. 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 target effectively on LinkedIn. So for me specifically, I'm more so talking about the advertising perspective, so I can go ahead and begin. When you think about targeting on LinkedIn, you have a lot of different options, right? You can target job titles. You can also target specialties, right? Specialties as in kind of their field that they're focused in, right? Or more specifically, job function. And then you can also target around You can also target around kind of seniority too. So those are just 3 different options, and then we'll kind of bounce around. But the first one, it seems to be the easiest, right? When you're targeting job titles, like let's say I'm selling SEO software. Let's say I'm selling Ubersuggest. If Ubersuggest says— that's a bad example. Let's use Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg, Neil charges for money. Let's say he's looking for marketing managers, right? You can target marketing managers on LinkedIn. That's, that's an easy way of going about it. But here's the thing, everyone has really weird titles all the time, so titles might not be the best way. And titles are also the most expensive too because a A lot of people are just kind of defaulting to that, thinking that they know titles. They feel titles are the best way to go about it. Now, the second one that I mentioned, I believe, is around kind of the job function. So job function could be around marketing. That's a lot broader, and then that's going to be cheaper because it's even broader. If you want to open up your audiences, you can do that. Then when you layer it on with something such as seniority, could be C-level, could be director level, then you can kind of, you know, take that broadness from the function and then kind of, you know, layer it on and then, you know, kind of Basically, not layered on, but layered it on and also decreased the audience size so you can get a little more laser targeted on that, but have a little broader audience versus just job titles.

Yeah, so I'll talk about it from the organic perspective. What you'll find is when you're on LinkedIn and you're trying to get— you're trying to target the right people, it's about the content that you produce. Whether you have 5,000 people following you or 30,000, because you're limited on 30,000 connections, then you can have more following you after that. But just connections-wise, it's limited to 30,000. It's about posting content that's related to your business. Everyone thinks about LinkedIn as, hey, I want to target the right people and get the most amount of engagement, get the most views. And they focus on the views and they think getting the most views will get you the right people, and that's not correct. It is all about your content, whether it's video or text-based, or you're just posting status updates, whatever you want to end up calling it. What I found is when I post stuff that goes viral that's more generic, like the top 10 growing brands in the United States or whatever it may be, that'll do really well, but I'm not targeting the right type of people, which would be customers for me. If I post something specific on how to recover your declining Google traffic, it doesn't do as well, but the people who do engage end up converting more into leads. So instead of focusing on views, start thinking about what are the problems that my potential customers and my even current customers are facing, create content around that. That's when you'll start seeing that the right people are gravitating towards you, your business, and you'll start collecting leads and sales.

Yeah, I'll give you a couple more options from the advertising perspective. You got groups, so LinkedIn groups, although I don't really participate in groups, I'm pretty sure Neil doesn't, actually I'm very sure Neil doesn't. So you got groups as an option and you can go in there and you can start targeting up to 200 groups. And then also on the other side, you have retargeting as an option. So just like Google, just like Facebook, you can add a retargeting pixel to your site and then you can kind of layer on other options such as targeting titles or people that have, you know, company sizes over 50 or so, right? You have a lot of different options there. I think the main thing I want to convey is that when it comes to LinkedIn advertising, it's not just about the titles, it's about the other options and layering them on, and that way you can laser target versus just trying to, you know, go wide. Because when you're paying for just title targeting, you're paying a lot more money, and then you're gonna lose your shirt if you don't know what you're doing. Anything else you wanna add?

No, that's it for mine.

Alright, so that is it for today, but I'm going to read a review. Love it, but change your intro. Still 5 stars though. JC201900, I've gotten several good tips from your show. But I cringe every time you talk about your guile in the intro. I think you're trying to— you're just trying to tout your general cleverness or ingenuity, but guile means your techniques are deceptive or deceitful. Yeah, I didn't know that. Guile was a good Street Fighter character though, that's all I know. So thank you for that feedback, and that's it for today, guys. Leave a review, and we are doing that live event in downtown LA. It's going to happen in June. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla for more for information. an application. It's going to be a free event, and we can't wait to see you in person.

Sweet.

Source for the blogging fact, or is that just your experience? That's Neil's experience.

Ready? Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. Yep. Just let me throw one.

Write big text like 1K or 2K types in social media like Instagram is effective or just losing time?

I'm not sure what they mean by write big text.

Yeah, Diego or Diego, can you clarify your question please? Or just write it in a different way.

Thanks, Diego.

Thank you, Chad, for the nice comment. Srinivas says, after listening to the podcast at 1.5x every day, it's weird listening to it live.

You guys ready? Yep.

Ready.

All right, and rolling. 3, 2, 1.

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna give you 7 questions to make sure your Your next marketing hire is a slam dunk. So question number 1 that I like to ask all marketing hires is, how do you get better at marketing? More specifically, what do you read?

And why do you ask that question? Let's go into why as well.

Yeah, why for each one is good too. So the reason I ask that is because if you're not growing as a marketer, marketing is changing so much, you're going to be dying like quickly. Like if you say, if you say you don't read marketing blogs, That's already a red flag, right? And if you say, you know, I don't— you know, I like to just learn by doing, that's certainly fine. Like, you should definitely learn by doing, but if you're not reading, learning from other people— not saying you can listen to our podcast if you want, but sure, we're not saying you have to— but learning from other people, like, I listen to a ton of podcasts a week and I learn so much from other people. You're gonna fall behind because people are just iterating so quickly.

Question number 2, what would you change? The reason I ask that is when someone that you're hiring for your business or your company or wherever you work, if they don't tell you specifically what they would fix or change or make better, then how do you know that they're going to perform? The last thing you want to do is hire people who don't know what they're going to do and have to learn on your dime. Now, when you ask this question, some people may end up coming back to you and being like, oh, I haven't had a chance to look at the site, or I haven't had time to do my homework. That's a big red flag. Hopefully they take their time. But if you like them, what I would do is I'd be like, no worries, here's a computer, browse the site, tell me what you would do. You want to see how they think on the spot and if they can figure out things on their own versus if they need time to do research. You want people who already have the expertise and know what to change.

Number 3 is have them do a case. So this is more so an assignment, this is part of the interview process, but having them do something. I'm paying them for their time too, by the way. If you can pay them for their time, you know, Basecamp does this, you know, they pay them. It's not like they're paying a lot of money, but they're at least paying them for their Right? Pay them for the time, or you know, maybe if it's a really long-winded kind of process, in some cases you might not have to pay them for their time. But having them come in and say, "Hey, look, okay, do this exercise," and maybe it's not for my company, but it's for like a dummy company, and here are the problems to getting them to kind of go deeper on what Neil said earlier. Is they might come in for like an hour or two hours, spend time on that, and present to you. That way it's going to show them a how they think about things. B, how they present to you. 3, how they articulate as well. And that goes a lot further than just asking them questions during an interview.

Yeah, number 4, I always love asking, what do you do when an experiment fails? In marketing, it doesn't matter what department, everyone runs experiments. I want to see what their thought process is because not everything is going to be a win. From how did they look at it, how did they learn from it, do they document it, do they share it with other team members? This is all really valuable because if people aren't documenting and sharing their knowledge with others, then more people in your organization are going to potentially make that same failure. You want to make sure everyone's learning from each other so that way when they are running campaigns and experiments, there's a higher probability that they will succeed.

Number 5, this is a more executive question that I ask, but this is nonetheless— I think this is— actually, I've started asking kind of more junior people too. If you had $10 million, what would you invest in, right? Specifically, what startup would you put the money in? This shows you how they think about things. Is it really just kind of broad, or do they have a cause that they're behind? Again, I want to know how they think about things because ultimately when you're looking for people, 2 things, right? I want to— I want people that are hungry, right? And I also want people that are very smart too. So this tells me a lot. And also this question also gives me an idea of how humble they are. Because if you're arrogant and if you think it's just about you, if you think it's all about making money, I can probably snuff it out with this question.

Number 6, what do you think our competitors are doing that we aren't and should be? Love the thought process on this. Love to see how people are analytical, can look at other sites, look at data, and spit it back out in an actionable way. And then once they give that, then I ask them to organize it in short, run, medium run, and long run solutions when they're going to implement. The reason being is not everything can be done right away. So the first part helps me analyze how they think. The second part helps me understand how they're thinking about getting stuff done because in business it's very unrealistic to get everything done tomorrow. So you want to see how they prioritize, what they think will have the biggest impact, and why.

Yeah, and number 7 is tell me your most impressive marketing accomplishment. So I want to know, A, again, you're showing me how you think with this, right? So when you answer this question, I find out what you think is impressive, and then I ask you to go deeper, right? So I start with that one, I say, why do you think that's impressive? What did you do specifically? How did you contribute? What and where were your failures around this? And you start to get deeper and deeper, and then it starts to kind of scrape away from the surface level, and you start to again, again, get deeper, know how they think. And then because if you trust how they think as a marketer, they're probably going to do a good job for you if you end up hiring them. But if you don't kind of evaluate this portion and they start to give you kind of, you know, dilly-dally answers, well, that's when you know to kind of axe them. Anything else you want to add?

That's it on mine.

Alright. So before we go, we have another review to read. This is from Paluzzi. Paluzzi says, perfect, to the point, and actionable. show has helped spark projects within my team. The tactics and ideas that come from Eric and Neil are well thought out and easy to consume and implement. I not only love the marketing information that you discuss, but the thought— but the leadership tips you share as agency owners and operators. Keep up the great work. So thank you, Paluzzi. And guys, singlegrain.com/dtla for the application for the Downtown LA event. We're doing that in June. It is free to come, but we are capping the space, so make sure that you get in, fill out all the information. And we will see you tomorrow. Yeah, there's a lot of people having issues with the livestream. So guys, but guys, the reason we're not streaming directly to these mics over here is because that's for the live. These are for the actual podcast episodes themselves for people listening on iTunes and Spotify. So the live right now is icing on the cake. If you guys would prefer that, you know, We can either— there's 2 options. We can either do away with the live or we can just make do with what we have right now. Let me know what you guys would like to do in the comments. I think the live just takes us more extra effort on our side, so just if it's not good enough, we want to make sure that it's good enough for you, so let us know. Yeah, I mean, everyone's just talking about the mics, so.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. And then Brian says, great start guys, looking forward to see you guys improve the live sessions.

Yeah, we could, we could just start using those battery lav mics now.

That's even more work for you.

Yeah.

Ready?

I'm ready.

Alright, let's do it. Alright, we're rolling and 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're going to talk about when does it make sense to actually have sales reps.

So in general, most people talk about sales reps being like, oh, I want to make more money, let me go hire sales reps. I'm a big believer that you shouldn't hire a sales rep without testing out sales yourself. It doesn't matter if you are an introvert or you're not good at sales. The reason you want to test it out yourself is it's your business, you're in the organization, you probably understand it better than most people. You need to understand what objections you're going to run into before you start scaling out your sales. Once you start dialing or once you start doing cold outreach or dealing with inbound leads and you figure out what issues people are going to run into, and you do this for a while, I'm talking about like 30 days to 60 days. You'll now have a whole list of stuff that's going to cause problems for when you do hire sales reps. I would then go and try to tackle all of those kind of things, and then I would go test sales again for a week or 2, making sure I'm not getting those objections or any other major ones. Once I've proven out the process and I can make it work, then I go and hire reps. It doesn't even mean it matters if your closing rate sucks compared to other people, you're not the best at selling, but once you start getting sales down, Now you know you can end up hiring someone else and ideally scale it out and hopefully get even better results.

Yeah, one of the biggest reasons why startups fail is due to premature scaling. And this was written by Paul Graham from Y Combinator. And this is the same thing, right? It's applying marketing too early before you have product-market fit. So what Neil's talking about is kind of getting to product-market fit. You have to know what your conversion rates are. You have to also know What questions to ask, what objections that you have to deal with. Hiring someone else and expecting them to figure it out for you is lazy, A. And B, when you're kind of starting out, when you don't have a sales team, you got to figure it out on your own. You got to roll up your sleeves. And if you're—

if you—

and I've actually made this mistake many times where like I let someone else do it. They're not going to figure it out for you. It's not their job, A. B, they don't care about the product as much as you do. C, I mean, their job is to come in, have a process defined already, and for the most part figure it out. You know, figure it out based on the process that you have that's working already. It's the same thing with marketing too. You start plowing marketing into something and you have a leaky funnel or the product doesn't work that well, they're gonna drop right out. And so it's the same thing with sales. So you start hiring a bunch of people and all of a sudden you're gonna have to can them because you didn't do a good job of figuring out the process on your own, defining the conversion rates, defining the right questions to ask, and then, you know, you end up losing a lot of money and you might even lose your company.

Yeah, and in general with sales is, once you figure this stuff out and you start hiring people, You'll even find that when you hire people, it may not end up working out. Most cases, sales reps do not perform. Before you even hire them, I would even have them do a test pitch and be like, hey, here's the circumstances. I'm a client, here's what I'm looking for, or I'm a customer, sell me. And they don't have to sell you right away, you can give them time. And if you want to even pay them for it, that's fine too. I don't know what the laws are based on where you're based. But have them pitch you, because that'll help reduce the chances that you're hiring someone who's not a good fit.

Yeah, there was something, there's a blog post, actually this was a couple years ago from Jason Lemkin who founded EchoSign. He now runs SaaStr, one of the largest software conferences. And you know, he actually had a blog post that broke down the math on when it makes sense to hire a salesperson. And the minimum contract value that they're selling, so minimum contract size needs to be about $3,000, right? Per year. If it's not a $3,000 thing, it doesn't justify hiring a salesperson. He broke down the math in that blog post. But check that one out, just type in Jason Lemkin, when does it make sense to hire a salesperson, right? Go find that, and then you'll get some math around it. And then you can see if it works out for you or not. But I think the worst thing is if you go in unprepared, you think this, you think you have a great product, you have a great service, and a salesperson is just gonna come in and cure everything for you. That's a big mistake. I've made it in the past. I'm sure Neil has too. So don't make it.

Yeah, so I have nothing else from mine.

Alright, Neil has nothing else from his end. So we're going to read one more review, and I think I might have read this one already, but we're going to read it again. So this is from Jack Wsch, 5 stars. Short, sweet, and packed with great info. You guys do an awesome job of packing in a ton of great info and tips into bite-sized podcasts. Love it. Also, thanks to Neil for the Ubersuggest tool. Literally one of my favorite tools to use. Guys, by the way, singlegrain.com/dtla for the application. We're doing Marketing School Live in June. We haven't set the dates yet, but we are going to figure it out. And yeah, go fill it out and get a spot because spots are going to be limited. But we're also going to record it as well, so check it out.

That's it for today.

Great. Can we just adjust your mic, Eric, so it's coming— So you're not talking to the side of it, just rotate it more like that. If it's comfortable. Yeah, it's fine. Cool.

I always like having a good light in front.

All right, how you guys doing?

Ready.

Good. Okay, ready? Yep.

Okay.

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 you should do when people complain about your product or service. So I can start, but it looked like you wanted to start, so you start.

No, go for it.

Alright, I'll start. So it's actually a good thing when people complain about your product or service because you actually get more value from the feedback versus all the good things people are saying, right? So when people say things like our mics aren't that good, or let's call this a product right here. When they say, hey, maybe you should improve the intro. What I'm looking for is I'm looking for the feedback that's recurring, right? Over and over and over. And that's giving me signal. If I hear feedback and it's like I hear it maybe one time, maybe I won't take any action from it. But if I keep hearing the same thing over and over, That's when I figure out, okay, I'm hearing this over and over, maybe we should prioritize this, maybe we should talk with the team about this, because this is an issue that people are dealing with. And then we start to figure out how it happens, right? But the first step is actually prioritizing the complaints that you're getting and then doing something about it, because that's where you're going to get better, right? Bill Gates has said, you know, success is a lousy teacher. And I believe that. I think the complaints, the feedback, those are the things that are going to help you get to where you want to go, because what you build in the beginning is going to continually evolve based on what your customers need.

Yeah, I love when people complain. I look at everything as, can you improve? If you don't improve your business, you're never going to grow and be the best or the biggest. When anyone gives you positive feedback, I even ask them, hey, that's great, really appreciate that, but what would you change? What would you improve? And that will give you what you need to make your business better. Now here's the thing, sometimes you're going to get feedback of people complaining and it doesn't make sense for you to make a fix or a change because that could only be 1 out of a million people who may have that issue. So when people are complaining, the first thing you need to do is, hey, is this an issue only with them and other people won't have this, or is this an issue that you know, another 2, 3, 5% of my visitors may be facing. If enough are having that issue, you want to start fixing them, but you shouldn't just start fixing any of them. Start with the ones that most people are facing and then work your way down, because if you fix the biggest problems, that's when your business is going to improve the most.

Yeah, so Neil, let's talk about some practical things that people can do to start to collect this feedback and kind of process it, right? So One of the things I like doing is we send NPS surveys, so Net Promoter Score. You can use like a survey tool or you can use a tool like we use AskNicely, that's asknicely.com. And then that allows us to continually send these to current customers. We send them feedback every quarter or so asking them for like to rate us kind of, you know, 1 through 10 or 0 through 10 actually. And from there we can kind of compartmentalize it. And then figure out what to do from there.

Yeah, we also like doing a ton of surveying just by popping it up on people's sites like through solutions like Qualaroo when they're on the page. What else would you improve on this page? What else would you like to see? All that kind of stuff again helps you improve so then that way more people are happy, they're satisfied, and they're going to end up converting.

Yeah, and you can obviously use SurveyMonkey, that's a survey tool. You can use Typeform as well. SurveyMonkey actually has built-in kind of feedback tools in there. Again, like, you're not going to get better if you never get feedback or if you're not open to feedback. Complaints actually humble you because people that are very— people that take things personally, it really kind of humbles them. And if you can't take feedback, you're not going to be able to grow into what you want to become eventually.

Yeah. In addition to that, when you're just getting this feedback and you're trying to improve, Speed is the key. People don't realize this, but once someone is really upset with you and you don't fix that as soon as possible, your reputation is going to be tainted in their eyes. It doesn't matter if you build a better product or service or you solve it a year down the road. Once people have their opinion about you, it's really hard to change that opinion. So you want to fix it as quick as possible so people see that you're proactive and you're willing to take the feedback and improve based upon it.

Great.

Anything else you want to add?

That's it for mine.

Alright, that is it for today. But guys, don't forget to leave a rating, subscribe to this, tell everybody about this podcast so we can call you out and talk about your awesome rating. So we are doing that live event in downtown LA. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla for the application. It is a free event, but we're capping the attendance rate. It's going to be a really good group of people. Marketing School Live, it's going to happen in June. Hope to see you there, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Great.

Read some comments real quick. What do you guys think about writing great text in the description of Instagram publications with 1,000 or 2,000 characters with relevant content? Is this efficient or a waste of time? My opinion, waste of time. Just cut it down. You don't want to write 1,000 to 2,000 words. I don't even think it's gonna show up in there, Neil.

Yeah, I haven't— when you add in more descriptions, it doesn't help much. It's nice to have, maybe it'll help people find you when they're doing searching and researching on Instagram, but it doesn't help too much.

Yeah, Diego does a good job with the red circle in chat because that caught my attention. Mark says 10 out of 10. Feedback, what is the previous point of school marketing? Join later.

I don't know what that means.

That'll look right.

Yeah. Alright, ready to roll.

We got a good one coming up. Stay tuned. Share it with everyone. Share it on social. Show it to your email list.

Let me know when you're ready.

Ready.

Okay, 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 you can market when you're a nobody.

Yeah.

So, go ahead.

Why don't you start off?

Yeah. So, Hey, look, I was a nobody, Neil's a nobody.

I still am a nobody.

I'm gonna say I'm a mini nobody. Maybe Neil's a bigger nobody, who knows?

Look, the way I look at it is even if you're popular in your circles, you're still a nobody to the majority of the world.

100%.

So when it comes to marketing out there, everyone's just like, oh my God, I don't have a big social following, I don't have all this money in the world, how do I get some traction? Well, the simplest thing to do is look to see who else in your space is getting traction. A good example of this is you can end up going out there and creating content. If you go use tools like BuzzSumo, you can see what's already hot in your space, figure out how to write something better. You can hit up all the people who shared their article on Twitter and social sites, ask them to share your content. You can see who linked to their articles. Ask them to link to yours because it's better. You can even link to other people when you write your article. Let them know you mentioned them in your article and ask them to share them. The easiest way to market yourself when you're a nobody is flattery. And if you look at that BuzzSumo example I'm giving you is you're telling people who already shared another piece of content, hey, we have one even more detailed. Saw that you're an influencer in the space. Love you to death. You know, it'd be amazing if you shared mine, or I linked to you. Would be great if you share this out. And you can do that for almost anything. You can flatter people by being like, hey, let me go get 30 influencers in the space, interview them all, create a roundup post, message them all when it goes out, ask them to share it as well. Flattery is the easiest way, and when you surround yourself with other experts, people start seeing you as also being an expert.

So it's actually exactly what I did to create this little mini brand, right? And when I first started in marketing, when I got Neil to respond to my emails, that's when I was like, oh, I wonder if he'll share my content. And then I started writing content and I started emailing him and I started emailing his partner Heaton as well. And they would actually tweet out my content. And I would actually do a lot of roundups before I even started doing the Growth Everywhere podcast, which is an interview podcast. And then I started getting other people and they would share it. Like my first 10 guests, I think it was Neil was in there. We had Rand Fishkin from Moz. We had Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. I think Noah Kagan was in there as well. But my first 10 were already pretty— I started this podcast in 2013 or 2014. And yeah, I mean, that's what kind of jumpstarted it in the beginning. Even though like it was a struggle, but people were still sharing it. And then doing that consistently over time has allowed me to kind of build this audience around marketing. And Neil's right. I mean, when Neil goes out into the real world, nobody knows who he is. And that's the beauty, right? When he goes to a conference, everybody knows who he is. So he's kind of like a celebrity in that space, but when he goes into the real world, nobody knows who he is and he's not going to get swarmed. And it's like a perfect balance. What would you say? Would you agree?

Yeah, I would agree. Most people do not know who I am in the real world. And even in the conference world, I go to an event, most people don't know who I am as well.

And I like that.

The reason being is the more people who don't know who you are, the more people you can potentially convert into a follower, a customer, whatever it may be. You don't want everyone to know who you are because that means you're capped out.

That's a good point. That's a good way to start. I mean, look, you can— flattery is a good way of going about it. It still works. I would say on the blogging side, these roundups, they don't work as well anymore. I think from a practical side, thinking about how you can utilize the other mediums such as Instagram or YouTube, podcasting is an example too, but podcasting is becoming a little saturated too because everyone's doing an interview podcast. So be creative about how you do it, but flattery always works. I remember I spoke to a guy a week ago that was on my podcast, Alex Benayan, and he got an interview with Larry Kim— Larry Kim— Larry King. And basically he told Larry King, hey, he followed him around, really annoyed Larry, and then finally he was just like, Larry, I really respect how you are. Can you teach me how to interview, right? That's just how— can you teach me how to interview like how you do? And that led to a mentorship session, and they became friends, and that led to other connections, and that led to him writing a book called The Third Door. Check it out.

Yeah, I have nothing else from mine.

All right, singlegrain.com/dtla for our application for our live event, Marketing School Live. It's gonna happen in June. Applications or attendance is going to be capped, but we are gonna record it as well. So fill out the application now. Get in and be in. What is it? Be in or be square?

What is it? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Whatever. Anyway, we'll talk to you tomorrow.

Cool?

Mila says, is it worth it to buy links for SEO? Probably not.

Just let me know when you guys are ready.

I'm ready.

Ready? Okay. 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 give you 7 creative ways to collect emails without being spammy. Number 1.

Are you going first or am I going first?

You go first.

Alright, spin the wheel. Eric's used spin the wheel, I've used spin the wheel. As long as you offer something that's amazing, gives you— gives people a lot of value, they're gonna be ecstatic and they're gonna wanna spin the wheel.

Alright, number 2. What you can do throughout your post is you can actually add little yellow boxes. As they're reading a post, you can get them to opt in to whatever your offer is that actually has a decent conversion rate in addition to whatever spin the wheel, pop-ups, things that you're doing.

Number 3, I would do— and what Eric is talking about is content upgrades. So that works as well.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot what it was called.

Number 3, you can block off content. And I'm not talking about making people read half your content, blocking it so they can't read the rest. I'm talking about, hey, you already produce content, that's great. Why not produce a little bit extra content Maybe in-depth guide, something that's a bit more unique, much more value-added, and block that off unless someone puts in a name and email. And when you do that, what you'll find is people, alright, I'm getting more information, might as well give them my name, email, and all the details they want for it.

Alright, number 4. So this is, this could be related to, I'm going to talk about this in the context of doing a podcast tour, but you can do the same thing for video collaborations or anything else. Where you're on different mediums, what you can do is you can create a link, right? And for WordPress, there's a plugin called Pretty Link, and you can make a pretty link and link it to— let's say I go on the Neil Patel Show, I'm just making things up right now, right? And I say, hey guys, by the way, if you want to check out our special offer for you, just go to singlegrain.com/theneilshow, right? And then people can go and pick up the special offer, and you can also track that link as well. So you're basically making cloaked links and driving them to an offer so you can track how that offer is doing for you. And it's not that spammy because you're offering value first and then you're offering additional thing of value to them.

Yeah.

What are we on, number 5? Number 5, I like doing quizzes at the end. Have you ever tested out quizzes?

Mm-hmm.

And when you're doing quizzes, collect all the information you need also for a full lead and give them like a crazy cool report or a custom analysis at the end. It's one of the highest converting things I've ever done.

Alright, number 6, related to that, use a tool like Outgrow. You can basically make calculators on your website. Sure, you can hire a developer to make calculators for you, but Outgrow already has the calculators available for you, so why not just use that? It's outgrow.co.

Number 7, you can use tools like MobileMonkey. If you haven't tried out tools like MobileMonkey, not only can you get people to opt into your Facebook Messenger list and you can chat with them, But you can also get them to give you their email address. So it's a 2-for-1 because you can then blast on Facebook Messenger, get more traffic that way, and you can also get more email subscribers.

Alright guys, singlegrain.com/dtla for Marketing School Live in downtown Los Angeles. It's happening in June. We hope to see you there. If not, we'll also record it for you as well. And we will see you tomorrow. And don't forget to leave a review and a rating so we can call you out on this podcast. See you tomorrow. Be there, be square. Yes, June, you're correct. Be there, be square. How'd I forget these things?

Let me just make sure I can't hear out there. I think we're okay. I'm just gonna message there and—

Yeah, it feels like we're okay.

Yeah.

Hey guys, can you hear the noise from outside? Can you hear people talking?

This is a different mic.

Oh. To that one?

That one will probably pick up a little bit, but—

Oh, they're not complaining.

Yeah, I think on the podcast it'll be fine.

Yeah, if they're not, then we're okay.

Yeah.

Okay, and—

We ready for the next one? You guys want to jump right in?

Yeah, I think I have to pick a few more. Let's do the best community for marketers.

Best way to get customers to respond via email marketing? Well, Diego, the best way is to actually show them something of value and also ask them— so what I do with my first email is I say, in some sequences I'll ask them a question, right? So question for you, and then they'll basically reply and give me an answer to it. And that way we actually get people to respond. So think about how you can do something that actually gets them to engage and respond to you. Mark says he can't hear the other people, so it's all good.

Okay.

So, we're good. Thank you, Mark. I keep talking into that mic, but thank you, Mark.

Let's go for it, man.

Here we go.

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 the best Slack community for marketers, and Neil is probably gonna agree with me. At least for me, it's Traffic Think Tank. So let me talk about what that is. So Traffic Think Tank is a community ran by Matthew Barbee, who is one of the growth executives at HubSpot. Also, Nick—

Is he still there?

He's still there, yeah. Nick Eubanks, who runs an agency called I'm From the Future. And I believe there's someone else, sorry, I don't know who the third person is, but there's 3 people that run it. And it is one of the most engaging Slack groups that I've seen, especially when it comes to people talking about the newest happenings in SEO content. Analytics, you can even, you know, people posting jobs up there too. I just see a lot going on and I'm happy to go a little deeper, but at least that's the first one and I'm curious to see if Neil agrees or has something else.

Yeah, we even have a few memberships on our team, so people are paying for them and they're using them and they like them.

Do you guys pay for any of them? We use them, certainly. We use them, it's great.

Yeah, so we think it's worth it. We pay for that. We also pay for a lot of other tools. Funny enough, I signed up for Authority Hacker.

Their Slack group?

No, not their Slack group. I signed up for their course just because I liked their Facebook ad. Ivan left a comment like, good Facebook ad. So I paid the $500-something. I haven't used the product. I didn't even check it out. I just paid them because I thought their ad was really cool. But yeah, we're really big into testing these communities, whether it's Facebook groups, Slack communities, or anything like that. And what Eric mentioned, the one he did, Not only do I think it's one of the best ones out there, but my team does as well, and it's the most requested one we get within our company for people to join and pay for.

Yeah, I mean, look, I was in Vegas this past weekend, and on Saturday, instead of going out, I spent time watching their videos, their event videos from when they had an event in Philadelphia, and I got so much value from that, more value than what I got from playing poker the night before, playing till like 2 or 3 AM. And I really enjoyed my time. I literally just watched videos until like 5 PM in my room.

Well, here's a real question. Were you up or down playing poker the night before?

I was down that night, but I won later on Saturday to make up. Alright, good for you.

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, look, there's no other group out there— and I've been in a bunch of different groups, right? And I've actually ended up leaving all of them, but they stay engaged, they keep adding more value to it. There's like a new webinar every single month. By the way guys, if you like a Marketing School group, let us know. Because I mean, look, it's like a webinar each month that adds the value and the community itself is what the true value is. And Marketing School, I'm realizing, and Neil's realizing as well, that we have a little community of our own as well. But, you know, we also want to call out the best Slack groups out there and I think we both agree that Traffic Think Tank is number one in our eyes at the moment.

Yes, I would agree with that.

Alright, anything else?

No, that's it for mine.

Alright, that's it for today, guys. Singlegrain.com/dtla for the live event, Marketing School Live. It's gonna happen in June. We haven't set on a final date yet. It is gonna happen though. We are gonna record it for those of you that cannot be there. Also, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast and share it with other people too that you think could get value from this. And we will see you tomorrow. Hello, Manav. Good morning or good evening to you in India. It's gotta be like 11 PM or something? Ready-o?

Yep.

Let's do it.

Okay, recording 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 7 creative ways to monetize your podcast. So way number 1, You can use advertising. So advertising is very simple. I'm sure you listen to other podcasts. If you don't, if you might listen to like the Tim Ferriss podcast, for example, he has a— he has different— he has a, let's call it a pre-roll, right? That's before the ad, the content actually starts. And he also has a— he does not have a mid-roll, and he has a post-roll as well, which means after the show, right? So before the show, he reads 2 ads, and then at the very end, he reads 2 ads as well. And then that's how he monetizes. And then you can basically The CPMs right now, or cost per 1,000 impressions, are anywhere from, you know, let's call it $33 to $50. So podcast attention is very highly rated right now. And look, that's one way of monetizing, and we have decided not to do that on this podcast because we think we have other creative ways to do it.

Yeah, so number 2. How many are we on? This is 7?

7, yep.

So number 2, you can always throw your own event and you can charge for it. Funny enough, we're throwing an event in June, but ours is free.

That's right. And we can talk, we can go even deeper into that in another number.

Yeah, for sure.

Double dip in there.

There you go. So you can end up charging for events and it's a great way. Podcasts, I don't know the exact percentage off the top of my head. I found the number back in the day on Salesforce, but it has, out of any other marketing channel, it has percentage-wise the highest income of people that listen to podcasts, I think, of people who make over $75,000 or more a year.

Yeah, well, I'll give you— there's— I don't know. Oh yes, it's $75K or $100K plus.

Yeah, so either way, in the higher income bracket, podcasts has more of those people than any other marketing channel out there.

I'll give you another fun fact too. If you look at MeUndies, they do about $75 million plus a year, and they say a third of their budget— they've been doing podcasts since 2014— a third of their marketing budget goes towards podcasting. That's how big it is for them.

Yeah, it's really effective in Asia, like China. Podcast advertising is much bigger than it is here.

And this actually leads to what? What are we on? You're on number 3. Alright, number 3. Because if you look at Asia, what they're doing with their podcasts, they're allowing people to have sponsorships within their podcast. Meaning not just advertising, subscriptions is what I mean. So if this podcast, look, we got a million people or a million downloads a month, let's just call it, you know, 100,000 people that listen a month, right? And if we charge a subscription, let's call it $5 or $8 a month. Some people might find it reasonable to pay that for premium content. And all of a sudden, instead of, you know, making, you know, let's call it $30,000 to $60,000 on podcasts, you know, if we advertise on this one, that might become, what, $800,000, right? And it's probably less than that, but I'm just giving you an example of what the difference could be if you monetize differently through subscriptions. And Asia does a good job. That's why their podcast market is $3 billion, and the United States is only at $314 million.

Yeah, number 4, the other thing that you could do is sell info products. If people are digesting your audio-based content on the podcast, you can always send them to a landing page, start selling ebooks, courses. People who tend to listen to podcasts, from everything I've seen, are also good buyers for info products. A good example of this is John Lee Dumas. He has a popular podcast. He then sells info products related to that. He crushes it, he makes over 6 figures a month. I don't know if he still does, but he used to post his income earnings online. And another good example of this is Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income.

He doesn't post it anymore.

Yeah, he doesn't, but he used to. He's probably making more now, he just doesn't want to post it anymore.

It's another— maybe we should do that as another episode. I just put that in there. What are we on, number 5?

Yeah.

So number 5, look, you can basically say with our live event, We aren't charging people for it, but we have sponsorships and we have little side things such as a private dinner that we're capping at about 20-25 people or so with Neil and myself, which is gonna be in downtown LA. Those are premium kind of VIP things that we have, right? And we're only reaching out to kind of premium tier kind of sponsors that make sense for our audience. That way we can cover the cost and we might make a little profit. But that's how we— that's how you can monetize without having to charge people to attend your live event if you do a live event.

Yeah, number 6, the other thing that you could end up doing is you can end up promoting other people's products and services and take an affiliate commission. Joe Rogan is a great example of this. He used to promote some product, some pills or something like that, and then eventually I think he bought into the company. Is that correct or was that his from the beginning?

Bought it.

Yeah, did he buy into it?

Yeah.

He bought into it, right? Because he was driving them so many sales. I could be off there, but either way I do know that works. In which when people are paying out an arm and a leg, have them create a special URL, drive people to it, and boom, you can end up driving sales and getting paid affiliate commissions for it.

Yeah, and look, number 7, this kind of builds on the whole, you know, having— doing info products, but you can also do physical products too. Because going back to the John Lee Dumas example, he's got the Freedom Journal. There's a lot of these people that do podcasts that have journals, and journals are nice because basically with the journal what you do is you fill out— you fill it out every single day. in the morning, like I buy the 5 Minute Journal, I've been buying it for, God, 4 or 5 years now, so it's recurring, right? And I'm filling it out, you know, what I'm grateful for and all that. So you can put that in a journal, and I'm not saying you need to do a journal, that's just an example, but that's what John Lee Dumas does, and that's been another income stream for him. Learning how to make that journal, fulfilling it, doing all that things, doing all those things versus just starting with the info product. Now he's gone into physical products as well. Anything else you wanna add?

No, that's it.

All right, speaking of the live event, singlebrain.com/dtla for Marketing School Live. We are going to have sponsors. We're going to have cool stuff going on such as the VIP dinner. Email me at eric@singlegrain.com to learn more about that, but go to singlegrain.com/dtla for the application for the live event. It's going to be free. We're going to record it for those of you that cannot be there. And also don't forget to rate, review, subscribe to this podcast. Share it with everyone. Share it with your loved ones. Share it with people you don't like too. Maybe they'll like you again and maybe you'll like them again. Who knows? See you tomorrow.

Bye. Best advice of the day.

No, it might actually work. It's the way to get a hold of your leads through marketing.

Ready? Yeah.

Yep.

Okay, 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 going to talk about a couple of slick ways to get a hold of your leads through marketing. What is slick way number 1, Neil?

Slick way number 1, text messages. You can send people a text message like, Eric? They typically respond with, who's this? You say, hey, I'm blah blah blah from Neil's team. I just want to talk to you in regards to X, Y, and Z. Let me know when you're free to talk. It's a great way to get in touch with more people.

Yeah, number 2, kind of similar to that, is Messenger. So Facebook Messenger specifically, you can use a tool like MobileMonkey or you can use a tool like ManyChat, either or. And you can basically— what happens is when you collect their information when they chat with you, you can broadcast them using tools like this. Think of it as an email broadcast. And the open rates, even a couple years later, 2, 3 years later, they're still pretty high on these Messenger messages. So take a look at those. Those are worthy considerations.

Another thing that you can end up doing is if you're trying to get a hold of your leads is schedule a call right when they come in. So have them select a time slot on the calendar so then that way it's going to go into their calendar invite system, G Calendar, Outlook, whatever they use, and then you can follow up with text-based reminders as well like, hey, your meeting is tomorrow at 8 AM. You know, and you can do that a day before, you can do one an hour before, and you can set a text reminder 15 minutes before as well.

Yeah, what is that? What was that one tool called?

ScheduleOnce.

ScheduleOnce is great.

HubSpot also has one as well.

I think in the context of texting people, Sly Broadcast or Stratix Networks, those tools are still available. And with ScheduleOnce, you can certainly set broadcasts like SMS, like you can certainly pay them for it. But also you can broadcast to people. I think Call— oh God, is it CallLoop? Yeah, I think it's CallLoop. CallLoop is a tool that you can use to also broadcast through text message as well. Just got to make sure it's kosher in whatever kind of country that you're in to be able to do that. But doing things like this, getting people's attention— look, the number I got a couple years ago was text message open rates are like 99% or so, maybe 90% plus, who knows, but it's really high. I know I read all my text messages. Sometimes it takes me time, sometimes it takes me time to respond, but that's the same for me. It's probably the same for Neil too.

Yeah, other than that, those are the main strategies that I use. You know, also if you want to end up getting a hold of more people, especially right when they come in, if you call them within the first 5 minutes, like so lead comes in within 5 minutes, if you call them, your closing numbers, you're getting a hold of them should be over double versus if you wait, let's say a day or even an hour to get a hold of them. Remember when someone's filling out a lead information, they're on your site, The chances are they're free right then and there. It doesn't matter if they're SMB or enterprise company.

I say you throw a live event like what we're doing too. Get your leads to go to your live event.

Yeah, that's free. You connect with them in person. That's a great way to also close them as well.

Yeah, and you don't have to throw a live event. I mean, I think we're mostly just talking about the in-person touchpoint because it goes so much further. Even if you meet someone for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, it's much further than just engaging with them through email or phone. Wouldn't you agree?

I do. And you can do a lot of creative things around that, like Eric's mentioning. Like, I'm speaking at South by Southwest tomorrow. So what we already started doing was reaching out to our community, our leads, saying, hey, if you're gonna be there, schedule a meeting with me and let's have a talk. So you can do a lot of stuff like that to solve the problem as well.

Alright, so that's it for today. SingleGrain.com/GTLA for the application for our live Marketing School Live event. It's gonna be in June, and also don't forget to rate, review, subscribe for this podcast— to this podcast. Share it all around the world, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Okay.

Ready.

Alright, 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 going to talk about if luck is even a thing in business. I'm curious to get everyone's comments about this. Neil, what do you think?

Guy Kawasaki once said— he has a book called The Art of the Start-Up. I met him years and years ago and he said to me, you know, if he could invest in one thing, he would pick luck over anything else as a venture capitalist. And it makes sense, like, you know, companies sometimes, a lot of times, get lucky. Too hard to pick luck. You can't, it just happens or it doesn't. But if you can, you know, go for luck over anything else. And the reason being is luck is luck.

Do you buy that?

I do buy it. Do you buy it?

Well, I read something recently that I think you're going to agree with. Well, A, Thomas Jefferson said the harder he works, the luckier he gets. Now I'm going to talk about Jim Collins who wrote the book Good to Great. And he wrote this one post, and you guys can all find it. Google Jim Collins return on luck. So it's basically like your ROL, your ROL, right? So your return on luck is this. Let's look at Bill Gates, for example. So we can say, okay, grew up in a kind of upper-class family, like parents were lawyers, right? And you know, whatever you guys say, I mean, you know, white, being white in a country like America, it is beneficial too. Went to a really good school, grew up in good surroundings where he was set up for success, right? So people say like, oh, he's so lucky, he's so privileged, no wonder he founded Microsoft. But here's the thing, how many people in the world grew up like that? In the United States specifically, there's more than one Bill Gates that grew up in a privileged kind of— grew up as a white male, right, in a privileged family. There's much more than that, but how come you don't see much more of Bill Gates coming out, right? So that's one aspect of it. Bill Gates was certainly lucky, but his return on luck was way higher. Like the way he worked on things led him to the success that he's at right now. Same thing with Warren Buffett too, right? They're anomalies when it comes to how hard they worked and how they worked in general. Now what about all the other people that grew up in privileged families? Not all of them turned out good, right? They didn't make the most of their luck, so their return on luck was not that good. So after reading that, I was like, man, that makes a lot of sense. Return on— like, I certainly believe in luck. Like, I like playing, you know, I like playing poker. And the other thing is I make the most of what I have, right? It's not like I grew up in like an upper-class family. In fact, I would say I probably grew up in like a lower-middle-class family. But you make the most of the opportunities that you get. And I would argue that Neil, same deal for him too. It's not like he grew up in a rich family. You didn't, right?

I didn't grow up in a rich family. But here's the thing, like, in business, Everyone gets— people don't always feel it, but you just get lucky. Sometimes you get a big company hitting you up and you don't know how they found you. Sometimes a deal just comes through when you really need it. Now, hard work, execution, great founders, talented people, yeah, you should always pick that because you can't pick luck. It's just something that just happens. But keep in mind, everyone does get lucky here and there. You may not think it, but You may feel that your luck sucks compared to someone else, but we all do catch a lucky streak here and there.

I agree. I mean, my software partner for ClickFlow, that was a total stroke of luck. That was— there's no way I can even reproduce that because what happened was I was scrolling through Facebook and then this one post popped up and it happened to get a lot of engagement. And he wrote in this Facebook group that I don't even engage in. And he was just saying, look, I'm looking for like a, you know, the next project. I've worked on this project and this project. And so many people responded already. I was like, man, there's no way I'm going to get this guy to respond. But he actually spoke with like 14, 15 other people and then we got on a call and we just hit it off immediately. And lo and behold, we've been working together for a year and a half, coming up on 2 years now. And yeah, it's been a smashing success because of luck, right? The algorithms got us there for a group, for a guy I didn't know, for a group I hardly follow. And a stroke of luck got me past, you know, 15 to 20 other people that he had a conversation with. So yeah, that's luck.

Yeah, and you know, in general, don't worry about luck. It'll just happen. As Eric mentioned earlier, work hard. Hopefully things will keep going the way you want.

Return on luck, raw. Alright, that's it for today. SingleGrain.com/DTLA for the application for our Marketing School Live event in downtown LA. It's gonna happen in June. Guys, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. Share it to everyone. You're gonna get luckier if you share it with more people. Your return on luck is gonna be higher if you do that.

So see you tomorrow. Cool.

You're welcome, Diego. Shiban, Maniv, Shiranvazan. Yeah, hello to India.

That was a good one.

Yeah? ROL?

Yeah, I'm gonna use that. Yeah.

Alright, we're on fire today.

Yeah.

Keep that fire going?

Yeah, keep the fire going.

Let's do it. Alright, we're rolling. 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 where podcasting is going next. So I can kick it off first. If you look at— there's a company called Luminary or Luminosity. They just— they're basically trying to do the Netflix of podcasting. So what they're doing is they've got Guy Raz, they've got all these big podcasters, kind of like a— they've kind of consolidated all of them into these shows that they sponsor. So they put a lot of money up front saying, hey, look, you're on this network, you're exclusive with us. It's almost like the beginning of Netflix where they started to make a lot of shows like Narcos, also like House of Cards too, and they started getting all the attention because they had these premium quality shows, right? Their model is different in that the company is going to charge you subscriptions. It's $8 a month. There are gonna be some ads, but it's mostly gonna be ad-free. And that is kind of where podcasting is going. It's becoming a lot more— it's becoming— it's becoming more mature, we should put it that way. If you think about the internet, it was very immature in the past and then started to get better and better. You know, Google and Facebook show up as the players. So it might be consolidating a little bit where I think they actually raised $100 million and You know, people are just kind of clamoring about like, wow, you know, I guess this is happening. And Apple isn't taking advantage of the mindshare that they have right now, so these other people are trying to kind of sprout up. That's actually the first thing that comes to mind, and I have something else that, you know, we can speak to in a little bit, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on where you think it's going.

I think podcasting is going where it's gonna be integrated into your daily life. So we already have a— what is it called— Alexa, What is it called?

Google Home?

No, no, I know Google Home. Alexa Flash Briefing.

No, we have an Alexa thing that's connected so that way people can listen to Marketing School.

Yeah, it's Alexa Flash Briefing. Alexa, play Marketing School.

There you go. So I was like, wait, do you have Alexa?

No, no, that's playing their system.

So I believe podcasting is going to start getting integrated into daily life, just like how you listen to the radio or you watch the news on TV. Podcasting is up to date with people that you want to end up hearing from and you can pick and choose. Why can't it be integrated into your cable box? Why can't it be integrated into your Alexa device? Why can't it be integrated into your Google Home device? And I know it already is to some extent, but when you wake up in the morning and you have your alarm clock, I believe what will start happening is, hey, if you like listening to news in the morning or you like listening to Marketing School in the morning, it'll automatically start playing when you wake up. And that's where I believe podcast is going. It'll be the version of radio that'll be portable and it'll be everywhere. It's just a question of when. The problem isn't podcasting. The problem is the surrounding devices that would be playing podcasting. From the alarm clocks to Alexa to Google Home, they're not advanced enough. Podcasting isn't connected to TVs yet, or at least in an efficient way where people are using it. But eventually it'll be streamlined. It'll just be part of it.

Yeah, there's this investor, her name's Mary Meeker, and she does an internet marketing— internet trends report every year. She's no longer with Kleiner Perkins, but the report used to be with Kleiner Perkins.

Yeah, she raised like a billion-dollar fund.

She has her own fund now. Yeah. So look, in the early days, she does these cool charts all the time to show like, you know, mobile's growing. But in the early days, we're talking like the '90s, it showed the massive growth with internet, and it showed kind of the gap in terms of monetization. That's what's happening right now with podcasting. I recommend reading this post. If you Google Statuary, so that's S-T-A-C-H, maybe T-C-H-E-R-Y, Statuary Spotify podcast, you should be able to find this article. But it basically talks about, it shows that kind of gap with podcasting, and it shows what Spotify is doing. Spotify just bought Gimlet Media for what, $230 million or something? Here's the funny thing though. That's 2/3 of the entire podcasting market. So did they overpay? They probably did, but they know what they're doing. They know what they're buying into in the future, right? So you got that, they bought that, and they also bought Anchor too. So Anchor allows you to make podcasts, makes it easier for everyone to kind of start distributing their own podcast. You can also monetize it with ads as well. And then they basically bought the attention from Gimlet Media. So to make premium podcasts, they're buying that attention, and they're also making it easy for people to start podcasts. And if you think about it, Spotify's already got this ecosystem where they have 200 million or so users, right? I think it's monthly active users. And from that, what's gonna happen? Well, they're gonna be able to— they might be number 2 right now, very far away from Apple, but they're catching up quickly because they're taking advantage of it and they want to become the number 1 player in the space.

Yeah, and there's all these platforms who are gonna play— make plays on different things, but the big thing that we're gonna have to wait before podcasting is really popular and everyone starts moving into it is AI. And I talked about this, AI is just not there yet, but the moment it does get there, it'll know when you want to listen to things and when they should be playing you different channels, different shows, whatever it may be that they know you'll be interested in but you haven't even checked out yet.

All right, anything else?

Nope, that's it for mine.

All right, that's it from our end, uh, today. singlegrain.com/dtla for the application for the Marketing School live event that's happening in downtown LA in June. It is free, but we are capping attendance, so make sure you fill out the application now. We're reviewing every single one, and it's gonna be live for you, recorded for you, maybe even live for you, probably live for you. And yeah, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast and share it all around the world, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Great. I need to run to the restroom.

Alright, go for it. We'll answer some questions while you go to the restroom. Alright guys, let's see. Thank you, and Eric, if that person is yet to respond, how are you selecting which question is going to get the best response? Is there a resource you use to use effective email marketing? I'm not sure if you're asking about the tool. I use Drip. I think Neil, you use ConvertKit?

I use ConvertKit.

Yeah, those are the tools that we use. If you wanna know how to write better emails, I recommend reading the book The Boron Letters. That's from the late Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert actually has a site right now and they share like a newsletter every single month or so, or maybe every single quarter, so check that out. And I would also recommend reading the book Breakthrough Advertising. It's no longer in print, but get the Breakthrough Advertising PDF. You can find it through Google. If you try to buy it, it's like $600 because it's no longer in print.

Dude, I've been using Privy the last few days. This thing's so expensive.

Oh, based on your traffic?

Yeah.

I'm building my own. It's too expensive.

You're just like, say it.

I can't. Like, I'm already at 50,000 page views and it hasn't even been up for 24 hours.

What's it cost?

I don't know, but it's like $79 for like very little visitors.

Dude, do you want to see our new exit popup?

Yeah.

It's a new exit popup.

Single Grain's latest growth studies with Slack, the fastest center for—

Hey, looks pretty good, huh?

Looks really good.

Yeah, we didn't even design it.

They did.

Oh, my stomach.

You're using Exit Intelligence.

That's right.

How's it working out?

I don't know, we just put it up yesterday.

How much did they charge you?

Okay.

You know, I hit up ExitIntel.

And?

And I was gonna have them do stuff. It was like $1,500 a month, but then they told me it was gonna take like 2 to 3 weeks to get something out. I'm like, man, screw this shit. I signed up for Privy. I did it myself in less than—

Oh, you put it up yourself?

Yeah. But I need really customized stuff because based on your geolocation—

You should make your own.

Yeah, I have no choice. There's too many regions and languages.

Make your own. We'll talk about it. Guys, Neil has a privy tool coming. He's got a spinning wheel tool coming.

Oh, I'm not gonna end up charging for it. I'm just gonna do it on my own site.

Like there's not gonna be. Oh, never mind. No Neil version.

There's yeah. It's just gonna be for me.

It's just gonna be for Neil.

Dude, Exit Intelligence. Their site doesn't even work.

It's exitintel.com.

Exit Intel. Intel.com, right?

All right, guys. We're into home stretch. We got four more episodes for you. Probably should have told you to take a restroom break, but we got four more episodes, and now you got to hold it in.

Yeah, that's what I hit up yesterday. Exit Intel.

Okay, ready?

Ready. Ready.

You sure this is Exit Intel? Yeah, force to exit and do this.

Air conditioning real quick. Oh, it shut off now.

I was like, where's my phone? Is it even going?

It's not even going anymore.

Oh.

Yeah, it's fine.

You could start it up.

It's all locked up.

Oh, forget it.

Yeah.

All right, so we did good today.

Yeah, today was super efficient.

I did so much work during the podcast.

You did? Yeah.

Nice. See, this is more efficient than, you know, super efficient doing our own thing.

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, well, What's the ROI, the return on investment, of a live event, of throwing a live event?

What do you think the investment— what's the ROI? Well, let's break down our costs. Okay, so we're going to throw a live event in June, and you guys can all attend by going to singlegrain.com/dtla. There's a cap on how many people because we can't keep paying for endless supply of people, sadly. To do an event right, it roughly costs $20 to $30 a head, right? So if you have 100 people, and if you want to do it right, Eric and I are a bit crazy, let's say $30,000. Let's say there's 200 people, that ends up being $60,000, and it just keeps going up and up from there. But what's the ROI of it? In theory, we're not charging for it. If we were charging for tickets, it wouldn't be that hard because you can just recuperate your costs really fast.

Yeah, it might be like $500 to $1,000 per ticket.

Yeah, you would make money right away from that.

Yep.

But again, ours is free, but for most live events, I would recommend charging money. The reason being is they say if you don't charge money, 40-50+ percent of the attendees will not show up. And I remember when I had a paid event and we had a few thousand attendees, in many cases you would have 10-15% of the paid attendees Not even show up.

Yeah. So Neil's point is there's got to be some skin in the game. So look, for this event, we're not charging because we— that's what we promised in the first place. But if we look at it, let's use those numbers, Neil. So $60,000, we're estimating to be our cost, right?

Yes.

So if we do this dinner, right, and people have actually signed up for this dinner already, let's say we have 25 seats or 20 seats. I'm gonna be conservative. Say we have 20 seats, right? 18 actually, because Neil and I are 2 seats. So 18 times $2,000, right? That's $36,000 right there. And let's be conservative, let's say we only have 5 sponsors, let's be conservative, say they spend like $15,000 each, right? That's $110,000 right there, let's round it up to $120,000.

And I wouldn't even say that's being conservative, I would say that's being aggressive. When you're doing dinners, you're probably not going to be able to charge as much, sponsors won't pay you as much.

Yeah, so let's take it down a little bit. So let's take this down to— what do you want to take it to?

For dinner, $500 a head.

Okay.

And if you're doing sponsors, assume $5,000 per sponsor.

Okay, so let's be very conservative here. Okay, so we're losing money in this case.

Yeah, we're losing money, and that's fine. The way you would make money— typically the way most conferences make money is the ticket sales cover the cost of the event, the sponsors are the profit, and however many sponsors you can get, that is your profit. But the way, if you have a service-based business, you can make money by pitching your services, your products, and stuff like that, and you could potentially become cash flow positive on that as well. That is not Eric and I's intention of the event. Our goal is just to throw a free event for the sake of it. But all these companies like MozCon, Optimizely, you know, all these companies, even Intercom, they have their own event. They all do this because they know they're getting an ROI from it. It's hard for every business to figure out, hey, this is how much you're going to make, but in general, these things are profitable. Keep in mind, sponsors are your— they'll either pay for the event or your profit. Ticket sales, either your profit or they'll pay for it, whatever you want to end up considering it. So take one of those 2 groups because they both should be paying. One of them will cover your cost, the other group will be your profit.

Yep, and by the way guys, we're just kind of doing this number, like those of you that are watching live right now, you kind of saw us doing the numbers, working out the numbers. So being conservative on Neil's side, this event will lose money for us. Now being conservative on Eric's side, it'll make money for us. So we don't know where it'll go, but you know, we'll sort it out when we talk to, you know, the people and finalize the numbers.

Yeah, and our goal isn't to make money. So Eric and I don't want to turn a profit. We don't mind losing money, but if we're a dollar over cost, we'll dump the money back in. If we're $10,000 over, we'll dump it back in, expand it to more people, etc. As we mentioned, our goal isn't to make money from this and we won't end it with a profit.

You know the people that, I mean, used to have an events company, and we know people that have had events companies, and those are tough and they end up kind of going away or shutting those down.

Well, they're worth good money. Look at Traffic and Conversion Summit and Affiliate Summit.

They both sold.

Yeah, they sell to the same group.

They sold to the same group, and I realized that because I was speaking at Affiliate Summit. I'm like, Dan, what are you doing here? And I'm like, I thought you're part of TNC. And she's like, oh, event company. We're owned by the same company.

I was like, all right, huh, interesting. There you have it. That's— I'm— the group's called Clarion, so you guys can maybe look them up and see kind of what they're doing. I think their model, based on what I learned about them, was that they just go around buying conferences. They know people are super engaged, and they'll just Try to make it as profitable as possible, and then they know it's gonna be like on a downward spiral and then just go buy another conference.

No, so they're much smarter than that. What they do is, if your conference is doing well, and let's say you're like Affiliate Summit, you only have 1 or 2 events, they'll add in more events.

Oh, that's why Digital Marketer is doing so many different events now.

Okay, and then the second thing that they do is, oh, you guys are all in the same space? Let me cross-promote the sponsors with each other and get more sponsors for each event. The third thing they do, which is really smart, is, oh, we're going to end up selling out a 4,000 or 5,000 person event? Let us just buy all the hotel rooms for pennies on the dollar and get a bulk rate and then sell them on Expedia and Kayak and charge 3 times more and make money off the hotel rooms as well.

So they— They've got a machine.

They've got a machine and they're able to generate more profit per event than anyone else. TNC only did one event. If they did 2, 3, 4 TNCs, Plus they do all these other things. They're gonna be making way more profit.

They got New York, they got Australia now.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Anyway, that is that is it for today. But speaking of our live event, singlegrain.com/dtla. Reach out to us. Just DM me on on Instagram @ericosu if you're interested in dinner. There are people that are filling up right now at you know at the higher price point. And singlegrain.com/dtla for the application for Marketing School Live. That's in June. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and share this podcast with everyone around the world because it's going to help us get to the new target, 2 million downloads a month. Alright, that's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.

Great.

Ready?

Yes. Shall we?

Yes.

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 you shouldn't share your income. So I'm gonna preface this with saying, if you look at the people in the past that have shared their income, Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire, JLD, I think he still shares it but not as frequently. It used to be like every single month. And then, people can correct me if I'm wrong, and Pat Flynn no longer shares his income reports. Now, my thing on this is when you start sharing your income everywhere and things are going well for you, People are gonna start copying you, right? And you're gonna invite more competition. And the problem with that is there is almost no benefit to sharing your income. If anything, you invite competition and you invite resentment from people around you.

Yeah, in general, when it comes to sharing your income, I believe that not only do you get more competition, you're also gonna get sued as well. Most people don't see this, but I've just been sued so many times over the silliest Like I remember one time I referred— a potential customer wanted to work with me, I didn't want to work with them, I referred them out to someone else, I didn't even take a commission. I said, hey, you can work with them at your own risk, make sure you do your reference checks, all that kind of stuff. They hired them, they weren't happy after a while, they came back and then they sued me for the amount that they spent with that company. And I've dealt with so many bullshit lawsuits like this kind of stuff and I don't post my income online by any means. But some people for some reason assume I have money. Some of the things could be my fault because I'll write blog posts being like, I bought this site—

I just spent $500,000 on clothes.

Yeah, or I bought this site for $500 grand, or I lost X dollars, right? So it's largely my fault. But all these things can end up creating issues for you, and they have created issues for me over the years as well.

Yeah, you just paint a target on your back when you do that, in my opinion. And when I see other people's income reports, I love looking at them. They spent all the time and effort on it. The benefit to me is I now know how your business works and where I think the holes are in your business. And I'm just going to do things that are working really well for you. And the other stuff, I'm just going to— so you've added a lot of value to me, but the value that you get in return is— I mean, typically when you add value, it's disproportionate, but it was like even more disproportionate. Like you get negative value from it. So again, you build resentment, you build competition, and you invite people To, well, also sue you, to come after you. I would say, look, if I'm like a really good hacker and I find out someone's doing really well, what am I going to use my skills for, right? So food for thought.

Yeah, in other words, don't do it. If you want to do it early on when you don't have a ton of traction, that's fine because your income is low so you're not going to have issues. But once you build up the audience, you can start sharing a lot more Or once you have a lot more income, share less. But at the beginning, share as much as you want because it'll help you build a following.

Alright, that is it for today. But guys, singlegrain.com/gtla for the Marketing School Live application. It's happening in June. We're gonna record it for those of you that can't make it, and we are capping the attendance, so fill out that application. It is really important that you do that. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. Share it around with everybody, and we'll see you tomorrow. Alright, 2 more.

Cool. Ready to go?

Yep.

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, well, if you're overwhelmed by all the new marketing tactics, you should do this instead.

Yeah, so what is this instead, Eric?

So it's focusing on one channel, right? You hear, look, you hear Neil and I talk about so many different things. You probably listen to other podcasts too. You're reading articles everywhere. You have this ADD thing. I can certainly say like I have this ADD thing where I want to try new things all the time. Neil likes trying new things too. But in the very beginning especially, like if you're overwhelmed and you're not sure what to do, why not just double down on what's already working? Look at the numbers that you have already. And even if it's early days, like I was looking at a post, ConvertKit was just writing about their journey to $15 million ARR, annual recurring revenue. And you know, one of the things he talked about was like focusing, right? Like they were trying all these new marketing tactics and realized like webinars just work really well for them. Why not just double, triple down, quadruple down on webinars instead, instead of trying out all these new things? And you might look at Neil doing all these different things, but look, the one thing he still does is He writes blog posts himself, he creates the content, right? But he's not trying to do everything under the sun. Like, he knows if it comes to like paid acquisition, he's not the one that's running ads, right? He's gonna do what he's actually good at and focus on that.

Yeah, so what is the thing that you're good at that you're focusing on?

I like creating content.

What kind of content?

I like to do— videos are the easiest way, like videos like this, because it goes to podcasts too and it goes to blog posts, and then you can have your team to help fulfill that.

Yeah, and then what kind of results have you been getting from video so far?

Let's see, so videos, our YouTube channel, right?

And Facebook and Instagram.

Well, let's just go with YouTube. YouTube's the biggest one. The other ones are still small and growing. YouTube's small too and it's growing, but when I think about when we first started focusing on YouTube 2 years ago, maybe we were at, let's just call it 2,000 followers or so, right? You're at much more than that. And then now we're at like 16.7K. Which is decent. It's growing.

That's a lot.

But, you know, Neil says it's a lot, but he's got like 230,000 or something. But yes, it's growing. It's growing slowly. But I will say what's made it easy is that because I do podcasts too, I can convert a lot of that content into podcast format, and that can easily be converted to blog format. Because I used to just do blogs, and now we've kind of added in this other stuff.

It's funny, I can see your growth graph. You're getting right now roughly 1,400 or 1,350 new subscribers a month. 1,000 subscribers per month, which is awesome, and 64,000 views, which is probably a large portion of your blog traffic. Technically, it doesn't drive traffic to your blog, but it's probably 1/3 of your audience is on YouTube, maybe 1/4 of your total audience is on YouTube.

Yeah, yeah. And he's looking at Social Blade, by the way.

Yeah, I am.

Yep.

Hyena's looking at— actually, I already know Hyena. Yeah, in general, you just got to figure out what's right for you. I do videos as well. I don't do videos as much as Eric. I love text-based content. Like, I'm flying to South by Southwest tonight and I'll end up writing a blog post. It's probably going to be titled, How to Find the Right Keywords to Rank Number 1 on Google For. And I'll just crank it out on this 2.5, 3-hour flight. I already know what I'm going to include in there. The screenshots I can't do on the plane because the damn plane Wi-Fi compresses the images.

Sorry.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, you can't do screenshots on there, screen captures. But other than that, I'll just crank it out on the plane and I'll create some content and hopefully people will like it. You gotta figure out what's right for you. Look at Gary Vee, he loves doing some— being similar to Eric in which he loves doing video.

He's always on, it's crazy.

He's always on. I don't know how he does it. But you gotta just figure out what's right for you and just focus on that. And then you can have people fill in the gaps like on Instagram. One of my guys, Carlos, he's amazing. He manages my Instagram and he just comes up with all this stuff and puts it out there. I'm like, cool, thanks Carlos. Like, he wanted to start it and our Instagram is growing now. Like, do what you're good at. If you aren't good at something, hire other people or work with other people to have them help you with those other channels.

And we've talked about this in the past. Like, there's an episode where we talked about like why we're not on Instagram. It's because we both are not good at Instagram. And when you have someone that's good at it, Carlos doing it now, His Instagram is night and day. Like, when he was doing Instagram, it was just a picture of him like speaking, just like, I don't know, maybe you're hosting like holding like a poll. What are those things called? Poll sticks? Yeah, yeah. And then like, but Carlos now, it's like taking his videos, repurposing it, like making it native to that format. So that's another thing, focus on what you're good at, and then when you have volume, when you can hire help, go get help to do it, right? Because it's not like I'm good at editing video or anything like that, like it's not my thing. So again, think about what resonates, what gives you energy, go do that, and stop trying to do everything under the sun. Even though we talk about everything under the sun, it's kind of our job to do so on this podcast because it's called Marketing School. Anything else?

No, that's it.

Alright, that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla for the application for Marketing School Live. It's happening in downtown LA in June. It is going to be recorded as well. It is a free event, but you have to fill out the application because we are capping attendance. That is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.

Let's change this one, put that down.

Alright, final one.

Save.

I think we can get— Hey guys, how many episodes do you record in a day? Dhanish, we record generally 15.

Yeah, 15 generally, sometimes more, sometimes less. Today, so far we have done 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. We've done 15 so far. We'll probably end the day with either 17 or 18, 'cause we're getting pretty close.

Mm-hmm.

Ready?

I'm ready.

Let's do it.

Okay, and rolling. 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 what the ideal amount of blog posts is to write each week.

So how many blog posts do you guys write each week?

3.

3? What's your publishing schedule?

I don't even know at this point. I think it's Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Do you guys write your own content or do you have guest writers?

We write our own and we also have guest writers, but the ones we write, I believe it's 3.

So you probably are producing 4 or 5 pieces of content a week then?

Let's just call it 3 to be safe.

I can actually check right now. Why don't we go to SingleGrain.com/blog? Slash blog, I'm guessing?

Slash blog.

It's either that or it's—

Are the dates in there?

No! See?

Oh man, you took out the dates.

That's what I thought.

Why'd you take out the dates?

Oh, you know.

I took out my dates too.

Exactly.

Last year sometime. I get complaints over it. I don't care.

It works really well.

Okay, so I don't know how many versions of content that I'm— or Eric's writing 3, 4, 5, somewhere in that range. I'm writing 1 a week. Now, the difference of the strategy is I'm writing— Eric's going— what's your goal with your content? I'm assuming you're just going after the keywords, correct?

Yeah. And I said 6.

Well, keep in mind— Count them.

So, okay, Eric, we got the real number. Eric produces 6 pieces of blog posts per week on Single Earners. That's actually a lot of content. I'm producing one a week.

Yeah, and we'll talk about that.

And there's a different strategy.

What's the whole purpose of your strategy?

So here's the thing. The way I think about this is that once we get to more— because right now overall visits, let's call it like 200K uniques per month, right? We want to get it to 500K to a million or so, and I think we need to publish volume, and then we can switch to more quality like what you're doing. Because there was a period of time where you were doing a volume push, and it was not you writing everything, right?

Yeah, when you go to a volume push, there's no way. That's all I was doing full-time working with the team at CrankingOut. I didn't like it.

But once you get to where you're at, it's okay in my opinion to switch into just Neil.

And for me, if I was starting over again, I wouldn't go with the volume route. I think the blogosphere is too competitive now. I would still go with the route of just writing one really detailed personal article per week. And that's it. And I believe if you do that strategy, you can do really well. Now, some industries there's not that much competition and you should end up creating the 4, 5, 10, 20 a week, whatever you can get away with and just crank it out. But for the industries that are already saturated, go with the personal stuff. Go with the approach that's opposite. Because if you look at most of marketing content, I'm doing the opposite of everyone. Everyone's talking about tactics and traffic stats and how to grow. Almost all my blog posts are based off personal experiences.

I think in an ideal world, I would want a journalist— journalism type of experience. What I mean is, if you look at The Information, which is a subscription, or Statuary, they write really detailed posts that have a ton of data and they're longer form. I would go with that, and I might even say if I was the one that was writing it, I'd be okay doing like once a month, but once a week is good too if you have the time to do it. I actually have a friend that is a professor at USC and he started writing this blog about unintended consequences. I recommend you check that out. It talks about second-order kind of consequences like when you make decisions, like what's gonna happen next. And I think a lot of people don't think about that. A lot of people just think about the surface level. But he started writing like one post a month, long form, and he started sharing it to Hacker News and it started to do really well. And the Hacker News community is a very kind of— it's where people in tech go to share content. And they're very critical and they'll eat you alive if they think, you know, you're not doing a good job. And that's what he's doing, that's his schedule and he's getting a lot of subscribers, he's getting a lot of traffic right now.

Yeah, so yeah, in general, the number is going to be up to you, pick whatever you want. I would start off slow and steady. If your space isn't competitive and there's a wide open field and all the keywords get a ton of traffic, crank them out as fast as possible. And do it before anyone else.

Alright, that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/gtla for our application for the Marketing School live event in downtown LA that's happening in June. No specific dates set quite yet, but it's gonna be June, probably mid-June to late June. And don't forget to rate, review, subscribe to this podcast, and we will see you tomorrow.

Great.

That's a cap— that's actually a good one right there.

What?

This guy had an idea. Should we focus on multiple keywords in a single blog post or write up posts?

Cool, I like that. Let me adjust the title.

Cool.

We're still going. You wanna do one more? We're still going.

2 more. 2 more?

Yeah.

Oh, alright.

Still going.

Okay.

Are you okay to go though?

Oh yeah. Okay.

Cool, let's get started.

I got 22% on the battery, so I'll let you know if we get lower. Oh, we got—

we're good.

We got 22 minutes about.

Alright.

Okay. Ready? And let's go.

I'll start it.

Yep, rolling. 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 if podcast advertising actually works. So in a couple episodes ago, I talked about MeUndies, and MeUndies, they sell underwear online, and they used to advertise on the Tim Ferriss podcast. I think sometimes they still do, and they do over $75 million a year, and they sell underwear. And I was reading a post, and they actually spent— they spent a third of their marketing budget. So if you look at a company that's doing $75 million a year, and let's assume 15% of their budget, let's call it $11 million. They're probably more aggressive than that. Let's call it $11 million. $11 million, and then a third of their budget So that's $3.71 million a year on podcast advertising. If you spend a third of your marketing budget on something, I don't care what you say, if you're doing it for years, you're either really stupid, which is probably not true, or it's working really well.

So here's the thing about podcast advertising. One, the good shows get sold out fast. Any shows that have availability whenever you want, they're probably not the right ones to advertise on. Two, you need to keep advertising on new shows, so repeating your ad 20 times on the same podcast over and over again isn't going to be as effective as continually finding new shows. Now that doesn't mean you can't advertise on the Tim Ferriss podcast 2, 3, 4 times. It's just that once you start advertising 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 times, there's diminishing returns each time because there's a lot of repeat listeners. Sure, you're drilling the same message in over and over again to people, which is good, and that's why I don't mind doing an ad campaign 2 or 3 or 4 times. But I wouldn't go out there and advertise on one podcast for a whole year straight.

Yeah, it's clear that it works, right? Like, there's a lot of people that actually reach out to us. I'm sure they reach out to you too to like advertise on our podcast. And if you look at it, let me just break down the numbers for you. Let's call it a $33 CPM, okay? We get a million downloads a month, and if it's a million downloads, so let's just call it 1,000 times times $66. So I'm just basically doubling the $33 CPM because we might If we were to monetize, we'd have a read in the beginning, maybe at the end, because a lot of people do like 2 to 4 ads or so. And then we multiply it by 12, that's $800,000. So that is what— that is clearly people are like trying to reach out to us and we're saying no, look, we don't do any advertising stuff. But those are the numbers that you can get, right? And this is why like people talk about the Joe Rogan podcast. I don't know how many downloads he gets, but they estimate that he makes $90 million a year on his podcast.

Yeah, whatever the number is, he's making a killing. It's probably not $90 million, but either way, he is making a killing. Podcast advertising does work. It's about picking the right ones. It's not just about advertising on the most popular. They have to be related to your space. If we're a marketing podcast, if people advertise marketing tools on this podcast, it would work well. If people advertise nutritional supplements on this podcast, no matter how many listens we have, it's going to be useless and it's not going to convert well.

Yep. Marketing 101, you got to know who you're targeting. Podcast advertising works if the attention It works, not work. But if the attention is there already, marketers are gonna go there. Marketers tend to pollute everything. They are gonna be there. How come you're not drinking my nice water?

I wanna finish the bottled water first because I don't wanna waste water.

Okay, fine. Anyway, do you have anything else you wanna add?

No, that's it.

Alright, that's it for today. Singlegrain.com/dtla for our live event in LA. It's called Marketing School Live. Look, we are capping the attendance, so make sure you fill out that application. It is gonna be free though. We're gonna record it for those of you that cannot make it. Also, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. And share it with everyone, share it with your loved ones, and we will see you tomorrow. Alright, final one. Alright, we're ready.

Alright, armed and 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 if a blog post should focus on one keyword or multiple keywords for SEO. So this topic actually came through one of our live viewers right now. Let me get his name real quick just so I can make sure I give credit. This is from Dinesh. Neil, what are your thoughts around this? I can go first.

Yeah, go for it.

Here, I'll go first. Neil's thinking about it. So while Neil thinks about it, I actually read this post from Ahrefs recently. I was reading it on a plane. And they actually did a study on how many keywords a page can rank for, so I recommend reading that one. God, I think it's not safe for work websites that rank for the most types of keywords. So, you know, I don't think I need to paint the picture. You get it. But my opinion on this is that you should focus on one keyword first, get it ranking, and then you can go into Search Console, look for keywords on that page that you're ranking for but actually aren't on the page, and then add those keywords in. Then you can think about it. So you layer it in, right? You do well with one keyword first and then you layer in the other keywords.

I have the opposite approach. I don't even rank— I don't try to rank for one keyword or multiple. What I found is, you know you're going to write a piece of content on whatever subject. Whether you're going after the keyword SEO, SEO company, dog food, it doesn't matter. You're naturally going to include that keyword in. You're also going to naturally include other keywords that are related. So yeah, you can do some keyword research. You can use whatever tools you want. Plug them in and try to go after more keywords. But similar to Eric, what I do is I just write content, I don't worry about the keywords. I then let it sit for 30 to 60 days, see what keywords I'm getting traction for, and then I'll go in and adjust the post and then add in all different types of keywords or focus on one keyword or focus on multiple keywords. But it all depends on how the post lays. See, what people don't talk about in SEO is it's a big hit or miss approach. Just because you know SEO and you're good at it and you know how to target keywords doesn't mean the page that you're focusing on that one keyword is going to rank for that term. It could be a different page on your site that you're not controlling. Just sometimes the user metrics aren't there or the backlink count isn't there or the social shares or people don't care for that piece of content. Blogging is a big hit or miss. It's not like, oh, I'm going to write a post, they're all going to go viral. I would truly focus on just cranking out amazing quality content Based on whatever subjects, see where it lands, then go and adjust those posts and figure out, hey, should you focus on 1 keyword, 2 keywords, 10 keywords, 20, and what are those keywords? Because then you'll know if that post lands. The last thing you want to do is spend an extra hour optimizing a post before it even ranks for anything.

Yeah, I can give a couple practical things. What I like looking at is looking at Ahrefs, and I found out, by the way, watching the Traffic Think Tank video, It is pronounced Ahrefs, so we're pronouncing it right. So after 2, 3 years of doing this, we're pronouncing it right.

Yeah, how else do people pronounce it?

Ahrefs. Ahrefs.

I just thought it was Ahrefs.

No, it's Ahrefs.

Yeah.

And we're right. Because it's a link, you know, when you're coding a link, it's just Ahrefs.

Yeah, Ahrefs.

Anyway, so look, you can go to Ahrefs and you can look at the top pages and it shows you all the keywords a page is ranking for. You can look at that. What we're considering doing too is looking over time, looking at how many keywords that page ranks for. I think they should have a report that actually does that. They don't though. And that's going to give you some context. Also at the same time, look at Google Search Console. It's free to look at. And you, again, you can go, it's a little manual, but you can go to your site and then look at the page, all the keywords that your page is ranking for. And look at the ones that are missing. There actually is a blog post out there. God, I think it's from Built Visible. And they talk about, there's a way to programmatically do it. And I think we're trying to do that right now. So I'll share that in another episode, but it's going to make it a lot easier. But right now we're giving you the manual way of doing it. You can also use ClickFlow, which is my tool, and you can find the top 50 keywords for the page and then layer those keywords into it. That also pulls from Google Search Console as well.

Cool.

That's it for this episode. Make sure you check out singlegrain.com/dtla if you want to attend our free in-person event. And of course, please leave more ratings, reviews, subscribe to the podcast, tell other people about it. We need to get to 2 million listens so we can throw a second event.

All right. That's it for today. See you tomorrow. Alright, that's it. Rush, that is what I said. Vivian says, great content, how do you get all the content ideas? Honestly, Vivian, what we do is I will put in a bunch of ideas the night before and then Neil will come in and adjust and that's worked for us for a long time. That way we basically both agree.

Yeah.

Meaning Eric and Neil seem to— yep, we do agree. Alright guys, wow, I didn't realize how loud it was. That is it for today on the live side. We're gonna shut this off now, and we will see you in the next live recording. Have a good day and have a good night.

Bye.