Eric Siu and Neil Patel argue that content marketing success depends on volume, not quality. Blog traffic converts poorly compared to homepage visits because intent differs, but HubSpot's billions in traffic show that publishing dozens of articles daily compounds over time more than Backlinko's infrequent, polished posts.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today, we're going to talk about why content marketing doesn't work the way that you think. Neil, do you want to take it away?
Yeah, so most of you guys believe that there's 2 notions of content marketing. The first one is you write a lot of content, you're going to get rankings, you get a ton of traffic, and you're going to generate a shit ton of sales. So if your website has a conversion rate of 1%, And you generate an extra 100 visitors through content marketing, you're going to also generate 1 sale. Now, let me ask you a question. Eric knows the answer to this. If someone comes to your blog post versus your homepage, are they going to convert the same?
Nope.
Why not?
Because if they came there, the intent is to read something, it's not to buy.
Correct. Now, this doesn't mean you can't generate conversions from your content. You can add in opt-ins, sidebars, header opt-ins, content upgrades, the list keeps going on and on. And we're not saying you shouldn't do content marketing, you just have to keep in mind your conversion rates from the content marketing will not be the same as the conversion rates for people going to your homepage, product pages, things like that. The next thing that most people don't realize with content marketing is they believe quality wins the race. the highest quality content, you're going to do well, people are going to love you, you're going to build a loyal audience. Now, one person who's really well known for writing quality content in our space is—
Backlinko.
Yes, Brian Dean. He doesn't write content often. He'll write it maybe once a month, I think, right?
Less than that now.
So it's something rare like that. He's generating traffic and he's growing. His content's good. Now, who's the biggest in our space traffic-wise?
God, I don't know.
HubSpot by far.
Yeah.
Yeah. They beat out Moz. They beat out SEMrush. If you look at Alexa, you look at all the data, HubSpot beats everyone out. Now let's be quite frank. You know, I know Dharmesh, I know people on the marketing team. I don't know Dharmesh well. And if you think about HubSpot, what do you think about their content quality?
It's not nearly as good as what Backlinko has put together.
Forget Backlinko compared to a lot of people in this space. What do you think about their content quality?
It's not as good.
Yeah, Eric's nice. A lot of it's shit, right? I'm blunt. But that doesn't mean they're dumb at marketing. I still think they're smart because if you look at a lot of their content, they still do extremely well. Yes, they have good pieces of content, but they also have a lot of crap on there. Like they'll write posts on how to edit a video because they just know they can get a ton of traffic from it and they don't care if it's related to their core product. But quantity in the marketing space, especially content marketing space, Quantity is what wins. HubSpot's worth $4+ billion. Backlinko isn't even worth, I don't know what the rate is, but probably not even $10 million. And now I'm not saying Brian's doing a bad job. I love him to death. He's a really good friend. But this just goes to show that quantity wins. Even if you compare HubSpot and my Neil Patel blog, they're crushing me. Why? Because they're just doing so much more in quantity. They don't care as much about the quality.
Yeah. 100%. So Neil talked about actually a couple episodes ago, we talked about how you can literally, if you, once you get the flywheel going, if you're Backlinko, for example, or if you're Neil, there's a ton of people that want to guest blog posts for you. And here's the thing, HubSpot, the guest contributor program, it is a big deal for them. So they have a lot of people. I mean, we've written for them in the past. They're always continually asking us to do more partnerships with them. They're very aggressive about it. And they used to have really high quality content. At one point they decided to make a strategic shift. And you can see to Neil's point, It's more about quantity now, it's more about occupying mindshare, it's about taking keywords that have a high volume and then eventually figuring out what to do with them. You can retarget them later, you can take them further down your funnel. So, I also like using another example. There's a friend of mine who was an editor for a site that gets about 7 to 8 million visits a month. And I was like, okay, what's the secret? She's like, honestly, it's about creating a framework, a system where a lot of people can write for you and you're just publishing quantity. We're publishing 23 articles a day or so and it's just stacking up over time, it's compounding. And I recommend reading this post from this venture capitalist, Redpoint Ventures, Tomasz Tunguz. He wrote about how content marketing compounds and he has a graph that shows over time how it continues to stack. So yeah, you're going to have some home runs and you're going to have some duds, but you know, if you have a higher frequency, you're more likely to hit those home runs versus publishing once a month or once every other month or so.
Yeah, so you pretty much got everything from my end right. If you're going to do content marketing, you still should because it boosts the authority of your overall site and all your pages rank higher. So in general, it's still a great thing to do. We're not advocating that you shouldn't do it, but A, keep in mind that conversions won't happen the same percentage-wise as they do on your homepage or product page. And B, quantity really wins the race when it comes to content marketing.
Alright, that's it for today. Go check out our marketing tools to grow your business, and we will see you tomorrow. Oh, by the way, you have to go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, so go there. See ya.
