Eric Siu and Neil Patel share four marketing mistakes they made. Eric wasted months targeting a low-volume keyword. Neil warns most channels are saturated. Content marketing takes 18 to 24 months to build traffic. Hiring junior marketers with fresh ideas, like their social media hire Fabian, drove real growth.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about 4 marketing lessons that we learned the hard way. So the very first one for me that I learned the hard way is that, yeah, I'll use this example. This is a good one. So when I first started doing SEO, I built this website called lightshowvideos.com. And those earlier listeners probably know this story, but I optimized for the keyword light show videos. And after I got it to rank number 1, I thought I'd be getting hundreds of thousands of visits per day. But that didn't happen because I optimized for a keyword that didn't drive volume. And I focused too much. I had too much tunnel vision on one small thing. I wasn't thinking bigger picture. And even the whole business as a whole, lightshowvideos.com, how does that make any sense? What was I trying to do there? So I didn't think it through. And because I didn't think it through, that led to me spending a lot of time in the wrong direction and putting resources in the wrong the wrong place. Here's what I'll say. In the very beginning, you actually have a lot of time. You have a lot more time than money. So feel free to make these mistakes. I just realized I made that mistake by not doing enough research and by not thinking it through, even though I had a lot of time.
The second mistake, and this was the first one that I ended up learning, was if you're gonna do something in marketing, keep in mind most of these channels are saturated. Most people have already done what you're trying to experiment. I would just go and I thought I had the best ideas since sliced bread and I'd go try to experiment. Some of them worked, some of them didn't, but I wasted a lot of time. And the reason I wasted a lot of time is I didn't run Google searches seeing what other people have tested out. Now, even if something didn't work for other people, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try it out, but you should do your research before implementing something because there's so many articles online of people doing different marketing experimentations where it can not only give you a signal on if it can work or not, But it can also give you ideas on how to fine-tune or improve things. Because people break down case studies on, I did this, or I did this CRO trick or this SEO trick. And when you're trying to implement something, you can get ideas on how to do it better and fine-tune your approach and your idea by just reading case studies online.
All right. And then last one from my side, and then it's back to Neil. So thinking about time again, when we think about content, I used to think that I start a podcast, I'm going to get a ton of traffic. Guess what? First 2 years was a complete failure. When I think about the Single Grain blog, when I first came into the company, we were getting 3,000 or 4,000 visits a month. And we've, since then, we've moved up quite a bit to 300,000, which is good, but it's not like millions, but it just takes a lot more time than you think it's going to take. So I always like to say the content marketing journey is anywhere from 18 to 24 months, just being conservative. And so just, and same thing with business too. We've talked about on this podcast, In general, with business success, to start to see traction, probably 3 years. If you're lucky, you hit lightning in a bottle the first year, then, you know, more power to you.
And last, from my end, I always had this notion that, hey, I want to hire experienced marketers who know what they're doing. And that's great. I'm not trying to knock down experienced marketers, but a lot of marketers who have been doing stuff for a very long time have these notions in their head on this is the only way to do it. Now I'm not saying that they're wrong. Most, probably 9 out of 10 times they're going to be right. But what I learned the hard way is you need to also hire junior rookie marketers who are starting off because they breathe this life of creativity into your team. And they'll talk about all these ideas that you may think are foolish, but maybe 1 out of 10 of their ideas is a home run and something that's awesome and amazing that you should consider. Example of this is one of my social guys, Fabian. He's just super creative. And when we hired him, he was super young and he was pushing the team to do stuff that they're like, what, what are you talking about? You're young. But look at Fabian now. He's crushing it. He's helped grow my social profiles so much. And it's just because he looks at things at a different perspective than most people.
Yep. So the beginner's mindset, really important for people to have. So that is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/pro to get Talks from experts, get exclusive content, ask me anythings. Neil and I will be hanging out in there for $1 for 14 days. Check it out, marketingschool.io/pro. And we will see you tomorrow. Hey everyone.
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