Marketing Strategies to Crush it in 2020 (Neil Patel and Eric Siu)

And let's see if we can kick it back up. All right, you guys ready? Yep.

Are you kicking it back up?

It looks like it. Okay, we are rolling.

We're rolling or no?

We're rolling the audio. Yeah.

Live? Can you guys hear us? If you guys can hear us, type something, but let's go ahead and begin. I'm going to go ahead and start, okay?

Yeah.

All right. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

If we all talk about the same old link building tactics that have been used for 5 years, that's not fresh. That's not new. And interesting, of course, you guys already know what that is.

I think good examples of this are obviously very large websites. So Wikipedia, there's constantly people, there's moderators, and then there's people constantly adding to content. Sometimes it's not the relevant content, but the moderators are there to kind of keep it, to police it. So there's new content being added all the time. And it's one example I pull back from the past is Abraham Lincoln. When that first post came out, I think it was about 2,000 to 3,000 words or so. That post now has about 15,000 to 20,000 words or so, and it ranks number 1 for the word Abraham Lincoln. So people have constantly kept it fresh and Abraham Lincoln's been gone for a while, but they've kept it interesting. And then you look at Yelp, people write reviews, you know, it's interesting, it's fresh, right? So—

But with Abraham Lincoln, with that example, right? It's, they're updating old content and we can talk about that in our next episode.

We did say interesting though.

Yeah. But so, so the real question is, is, you know, you write copy at Single Grain, you're in the marketing world. I'm in the marketing world. A lot of this stuff that's out there is already regurgitated. How do you keep the content that you're writing fresh, like new hip stuff that people haven't talked about? Interesting. Especially if you're a beginner and you're still learning and you're not sure, hey, this is what I should write about that everyone wants to hear. Like, what's your process for that?

Yeah. So I have a friend, Kong, he runs a company called Jumpcut and he's really good at video. He's really good at creating like really good ads. And he's also, he's gotten his YouTube channel to 4 million subscribers or so, over a billion views. So he knows a thing or two about creative. And what he said is like, You know, people like you all have your own unique experiences. How do you how do you connect it with something else and make it interesting? So for example, let's say I have a background in gaming, and Neil has a background in playing tennis, right? And he has a background in marketing. If he molds the two together, if he combines it, and that basically has a new fresh approach to it, right? So he can take a bunch of tennis statistics and then mold it with marketing, and it becomes more interesting and it's fresh. So it's combining maybe different experiences you have. Or looking at, you know, if everyone's writing blog posts, maybe you create a video and then that's kind of fresh and interesting because everyone's playing in this red ocean, but then you've kind of created a blue ocean for yourself.

Another way to keep things fresh and interesting is through the design of your content. So a good example of this is there's a post on Backlinko which breaks down what he learned, him and Eric have learned from over how many million—

5 million or so.

5 million title tag variations and A/B tests. And it's an interesting article about SEO. If you guys haven't seen it, check that out. But the way they kept it fresh and interesting wasn't just new data, because I know not all of you guys are able to create the new data, but the graphics help keep it interesting where you want to keep reading more and more. Now you can pay a designer to do that. If you don't have the budget, you can use really affordable tools and free ones like Canva or Infogram. I know Canva has a free version. I don't know if Infogram has a free version. Nonetheless, through them, you can design really cool graphics. Like a lot of my Neil Patel blog posts, I'm using Canva for free to create my graphics. Like, I'm not paying a designer or anything like that. If you don't have the time to do it yourself, you can go to fiverr.com and find someone for a few bucks, like $5, to help create the graphics for you as well.

Yeah, I'll just share a final example before we close it out. FiveThirtyEight, so if you spell out the numbers, the number 5, the number 30, the number 8, .com. It's a sports blog basically, but they have a lot of really good data visualizations and that kind of separates themselves from everyone else. And Neil used to talk about, And infographics still work nowadays, but just not as good as before. But, you know, he had all these infographics with one of the previous blogs that he had, and it did really well. You know, a lot of people would share it, he'd get a lot of links for it. But it's because it's a novel piece of content. It's instead of saying, here's a blog post, it's like, here are some data visualizations, which is like today. But back in the day, you know, infographics, which to me is also like another data visualization.

So to wrap it up, if you want to keep your content fresh and interesting, few things to do. A, consider using graphics. You don't have to create them yourself. You can use tools like Canva. B, if you don't have data, that's okay. Go gather data around the web, try to integrate it within your content and link out and cite your sources, of course. C, go try to see what's trending. You can use tools like Google Trends to see what's hot, up and coming. Start talking about more of that kind of stuff versus all the stuff that people have already regurgitated and talked about. Hundreds and hundreds of times on the web. And last but not least, another thing you can end up doing is look to see what's working in other industries that's not yours and see if you can replicate them in your industry. A good example of this is I used to see how infographics were played out because everyone was using them. Then there was something that came out called infograms. They were more like animated infographics or animagraphs. I forgot exactly what it was called. I used to call it GIF-ographics. In which the infographic had elements inside that moved. And you can see a good example of this by Googling how a car engine works infographic, and you'll see like pistons firing off and fuel firing off into the engine. But I took that from another industry and I started replicating that into my own industry. So if you follow those tactics, I think you'll be better off. That's it for today's episode. If you guys want to attend an event with Eric and I in Malibu, Make sure you check out marketingschool.io/live, and we'll see you tomorrow.

All good? Take like 1 or 2 questions, maybe 1 question, then we can move on.

I don't know if we've got any, because we kind of lost, we lost some of the people in the first. We had to get a new link.

Oh, okay.

We don't, we just have, we can hear you now.

Okay, okay, great. Let's just keep going. Get your questions in there.

Okay, and we are rolling in 3, 2, 1.

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how often you should update your old content. So we've talked about this tactic quite a bit in terms of this is something that's been working really well for us. So, you know, you update a piece of content, you know, Google sees it, and then all of a sudden Guess what? You're going to rank for more keywords on that page and then you're keeping the page fresh. Meaning, what tends to happen is all of a sudden, whoa, you're actually ranking higher for that main keyword on that page. So that's why you do it. So the question, Neil, is I know you have full-time staff dedicated to this. I do a lot of this content updating stuff. How often do you actually go about updating? What's your cadence?

We write one new blog post a week, or technically I do. So that would be 4 to 5 a month that I write. And then as for updating, we have a team of 3 people and we update roughly 90 posts a month in English. I do know we update more in Portuguese and a few of the other languages. So my guess is maybe 150,000 to 200,000, I mean, 150 to 200 blog posts a month is my guess. And it's worked really well. We first started this in Portuguese And Portuguese is now about to overtake United States in traffic to our blog.

I mean, some of our top performing pieces, when I look at our analytics, is the pieces that we've updated. There's one piece I was looking at the other day, and it started about, you know, it started going up. And I think it was getting like 1,000 visits a month or something like that, which is not bad for a blog post. But we decided to hone in on it, and we updated it because it was trending in the right direction, that the traffic kept going up. So we're like, okay, let's update it. So we added a paragraph, and then boom. We kept adding paragraphs maybe every quarter or so. And all of a sudden, that post now gets about 25,000 visits a month. And that's great, that's nice, right? So the question is, how often do you update? So one tool that you can use out there is, there's a content marketing agency out there called Animals, and they actually made a tool that tracks the decay of your content. So they'll look at your piece of content from its highest point, and then they'll look at how much it's decayed since the highest point. And then it's a free analysis to do. I think you could just type in Animals Content Tool, and then you'll go and find it. It's free to use. And then there, from there, you can kind of make a decision. It's easier for you to make a decision. I'm curious to know kind of what your guys' process is. Sure.

So on a quarterly basis, we go through all our content no matter what. So whether we do that daily, weekly, we just have to make sure we look at all of our content on a quarterly basis. And the first thing we do is anything that's old and outdated, that is no longer relevant, we'll just delete it and 301 redirect the URL. A good example of this is articles we had on Vine, which no longer exists. Twitter acquired them and then they pretty much shut it down. We don't leave them around the web. And the reason being is if someone Googled it and landed on our page, it provides no value. We don't even care if it has a ton of traffic. We do this because it creates the best user experience. The second thing we do is we look at content that's dropping in traffic. We do this through Google Search Console. So on a monthly basis, We look at month over month, what are our pages that are losing the most amount of traffic? That gives us an idea of the pages that have the issues. And we first go into those and adjust them and tweak them. And that's mainly our 2-step formula. It works really well and it keeps it simple. And that way we always prioritize the pages with the biggest drop-offs.

Yeah. There's another tool out there, Content Explorer from Ahrefs. It does actually look at your— allow you to look kind of into your space. So, you know, maybe like 2 or 3 competitive blogs, you can kind of get a sense of how often they're updating their content. When I look at, let's say when I look at Backlinko, Backlinko doesn't have that many blog posts on his site, but what he does do is he updates quite a bit of his content. I'm looking at, you know, it looks like a 25% ratio, sometimes 25 to 30%. It's a lot. But he's kind of the exception, because a lot of us are publishing more. We have more than just 30 posts on our site.

Yeah, I think it's 25, 30% per month?

Not, actually, yeah, it looks like that when you look at the Content Explorer tool.

Yeah, that's not bad. But you got it right, and he's able to do that because he has, I don't know how many pieces of content, my guess is around 40?

Probably more now, yeah.

So because the quantity isn't there, he goes more in-depth on each article. That's worked really well for him. It's easier to maintain. If you write too much content, it makes it harder and harder to maintain. I gave a speech at a conference in Utah a few weeks ago, and I was telling them, I'm like, look, the biggest mistake everyone's making here in the room is they create new content versus updating their old content. And if you go into your Search Console and look at the last 16 months, you'll find that a lot of your most popular pieces of content are just dying and dying in traffic. And you're subsidizing by writing new content instead of just updating and fine-tuning the old existing articles.

The analogy I always give is like, you know, you don't go buy a car and then throw it away after like a couple months. You know, you drive it. Well, hopefully you're not wasting money, but you drive it to the ground. And you don't just, you know, accrue it—

Drive it to the ground means 10+ years.

Yeah. Well, yeah, most people won't do that. But if you're really frugal, then you would do that.

My parents had 17 years for our car.

It must have been a Toyota.

It was a Toyota.

There you go. There you go.

The Asian way.

Anyway, so, Do you have anything to add?

No, that's it. I think you guys have the formula. As I mentioned, I review my content, all of it, at least once a quarter. And on a monthly basis, we look at the content that has the biggest drop by doing a comparison within Google Search Console. The ones that have the biggest drop are the ones we update the most frequently.

All right, so go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V, if you'd like to hang out with Neil and myself in Malibu. This is going to happen early November. And right now we only have a few spots left, not fake scarcity. Real scarcity. So marketing school dot io slash live, L-I-V-E, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Great.

Maybe we'll answer one question.

Yeah, let's do it.

How about the future of podcasting in India? My car is 2008. Great job, Tara. Okay, Lucas right here. A lot of doubts when we talk about investing in an inside sales team. We have a freemium B2B app, pretty cheap, so LTV is $300. So Lucas, LTV, lifetime value of $300 for a product and the inside sales team, I think it's a tough racket. I don't think it's gonna work. Based on some of the numbers I've seen in the past, you should have an LTV or an ACV of, so annual contract value, of at least $3,000. Otherwise, the numbers aren't gonna work for you if you have an inside sales team. Unless you somehow make it work in like a, you know, maybe not a first world country, but I just think it's tough. What are your thoughts, Neil? It was the—

what was the question?

Inside sales team with the LTV of $300. I don't think that's possible.

That is very hard. It depends what region though. In the United States, that is really hard. In some other regions like Brazil, the $300 would be $1,200 and you could potentially make it work. But yeah, in the United States for $300, I would try to do self-service and I would consider doing webinars and have, The webinar sell for you because it's much easier to do a $300 price point over the phone.

Yeah.

I understand it may not be $300 upfront, but it should be easier to get the whole $300.

Oh, Brazil.

Yeah, Brazil.

So it works, it works.

If you're in Brazil, I think you could do inside sales for R$1,200. Right now I think the exchange rate is a bit more, so you should be able to make it happen.

There you have it. Justin has a question here. I think maybe we'll save it, Justin. So stay till the end, Justin. But should you niche down on your— he's asking why we didn't niche down on our agencies. Happy to answer that. Alex coming in from Alabama, thank you. And let's go ahead and go with the next one, then we'll go with some LinkedIn questions.

Okay, rolling.

1 minute.

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 leverage content marketing when you are selling multiple products. Oh, how fun. Who wants to go first?

That means I want to go first because you looked at me.

I'll go first. Okay, so here's my take on this. So to me, content marketing is podcasting, it's video, it's blog, it's speaking. That to me, even throwing a dinner to me is content marketing, 'cause like you're creating a great experience for someone. So to me, I like doing all these things, and the audiences slowly grow, some faster than others. And I stick around, I try to stick around marketing, right? So if my audience continues to grow around marketing, then I can build around marketing. I can either build or I can acquire, and then I can plug things into my audience. where I know there's a certain segment of my audience where there's a specific need and it serves them. So basically right now, like, if you think about our entire funnel, like the podcast Neil and I do right now, this is our free content, right? Then we have like our premium content too, like people want like connection. And then Neil has like Ubersuggest, right? Which I'll let him talk about in a second. I have ClickFlow, which serves like a need too, and more so targeting the enterprise area. But we're targeting different areas that we know where we can help our audience. And that's what I love about content marketing, 'cause it doesn't just pigeonhole into us, Doing one thing, it allows us to expand because I get bored easily.

Well, it— see, Eric and I though, still when we do content marketing, we're still in the same space. If you look at everything, it's all marketing related. So it's a bit easier. But now imagine your e-commerce site, you're selling hairbrushes, makeup, you're selling all these different kinds of things. Content marketing does get a bit more difficult due to the fact that you're not continually offering the same thing. Because if you look at most of your companies, Single Grain offers traffic generation. ClickFlow offers you more traffic. A lot of the meetups, events you do, in essence, you're teaching people how to get more traffic. But yeah, if you're going to do content marketing, you have a lot of different products. The only solution that I know is you go and create categories and you go and create content around all the stuff that you're selling, or you can end up creating lists. Like let's say you have a ton of beauty products, but they all serve different things. Like you can do lists like 10 essential beauty products that you should always travel with, not the best title, but you guys get the point. And then you can start going after 1, 2, 3, 4, and they can all be different types of products that serve different needs. And you can break down why people should use them to look more beautiful or feel better or whatever it may be and generate sales at the same time.

I think HubSpot's a really good example of this. They have, they create so much different content. And we talked about how they create blockchain content, But they have their CRM, they have their email service provider, they have a chatbot, they have all these different little products within HubSpot, the suite, and somehow they make it work. And so, I think it was Tony Robbins that said this, but it's like, if you're like a movie star and you tend to stay around Hollywood, like things are gonna work out for you. But if you're a movie star and you try to go into like doing, maybe you try to become like, I don't know, like a game developer or something. A, you're starting from scratch again, you don't have the relationship, it's way harder. But if you keep building on top of content marketing, eventually you're going to be allowed to venture into different areas where you can offer different products and different services.

Yeah, and look, with content marketing, the thing that you need to look at is if you have a lot of different products and services, I would consider first tackling the ones that are more popular. Do keyword research, look at which products are going to sell the most. If you're unsure, even when you do keyword research, a simple hack is You can go to Amazon, see what's the most popular products and services within your category, and look at the number of ratings. And more ratings usually means that there's more buyers, and that'll give you an idea which products are the most hot. From there, start creating content around those products. Same with services. If you offer a lot of services, go look to see which ones are the most popular. First, go and create content around those. And then once you saturate a lot of the content in the space and you're running out of ideas, Then go and start creating content around the ideas that aren't as popular.

All right, so that is it for today, but before we go, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. And before we go, before we go, Neil and I would like to see you in person in Malibu, November, early November, November 4th and 5th. And to apply, go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E. And if you apply, you'll personally get a call from me if your application looks like it's a fit. So I'll personally call you, guaran-damn-teed. All right, see you tomorrow. It's true, I call them. I call them. And those of you that are watching the stream right now, I will call you too. Let's keep going. Let's go like 2 more, then we'll answer a question.

All right, we are rolling. 3, 2, 1.

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about our favorite marketing blogs for 2020 and beyond. So marketing, there's new stuff coming all the time.

Other than ours.

Other than ours. So neilpatel.com is a very good marketing blog.

Same with Single Grain, but let's not talk about ours.

We'll not talk about ours, so I'll start first. So Andrew Chen, CEO, he's ex-Uber. He's been in the growth Silicon Valley kind of growth circles for a very long time. He tends to release one epic essay every single month, and when I say essay, it's like very long form. It's very thoughtful, a lot of data points, very smart, very intelligent. And so I recommend reading that if you like to just be aware of kind of what's going on, because he's now a he's now a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the premier VC firms out there, and just super smart guy. If they hire a guy like that, you know he's damn smart. So I met his sister before, Ada, super smart girl too, and she has her own business, so recommend reading that.

Yeah, another one that I love is Ad Age. So there's all these big Fortune 500, 1,000 companies, none of us can really relate to them because they're so large and we're not there yet. That's okay though. But here's the beautiful part. They talk about on Ad Age trends and things that these big companies are focusing on, And some of them you can end up doing for pennies on the dollar. And here's the beautiful part. When they start talking about trends, they know that they're going to catch on. A lot of these companies are going to go after them. So A, you can consider offering them as services and start selling them. So if you're an agency, that's a good way to make money. But B, a lot of times early on, it's quick for an individual entrepreneur to do these things, such as they talk about voice search a lot. You can tap into voice search for very little to no money. You don't even have to buy a Alexa device to start marketing your business through voice search. You can use tools like Jetson AI. And when you start seeing those trends, by catching on to them early, especially being small, you can end up getting a lion's share of that traffic from those channels because you know all the big guys are going to take forever to adapt.

Yeah. Number 3, I guess, I like ProfitWell. We've talked about ProfitWell in the past. Patrick Campbell is a friend of ours. He's just really good at understanding kind of, you know, where SaaS is. Super smart product guy and really good at pricing, which is what his company is based on. They also have a free product there too. So whenever they release something, it's really good. And they have a new video series now, actually with one of Neil's partners, Heaton. Patrick and Heaton are doing a video series now on basically something around product. I forget what it is, but they, they try to push the boundaries when it comes to content.

Another blog that I love is ConversionXL. It's from a guy named Peep. And the one thing that is certain As they say in this life, is taxes, death, and what's the other one?

Well, technically, if you live in Puerto Rico, there's only death. You don't really get taxes.

Yeah, what's the saying? Taxes, death?

Death and taxes.

Death and taxes. Well, there's a third thing that is guaranteed. Cost for marketing is continually going to rise because, you know, Google AdWords and Facebook ads are going to continually rise as well. So I love Conversion XLs because it tells me new conversion techniques that I can test out and try. Because if I can boost my conversion rates by extra 10%, 20%, 30%, It allows me to compete with the bigger companies who have more budgets than me. And at the same time, in addition to ConversionXL, also check out VWO. I know that's a website that does A/B testing, but what I love about VWO is they post a lot of case studies of other people who have run successful conversion tests using their tool. That also gives me ideas of tests that I can run that'll help me boost my conversion rates.

All right, so I guess this is like number 6. So Hot Pod News, we've talked about this one in the past, but When it comes to podcasting news, this guy focuses completely on it. What's happening in the industry, big acquisitions that are going on. So constantly following that because the podcasting market in the US, I believe, is now $600 million a year. It's— I think it's grown to like $7 or $8 billion in China. Last time I mentioned it was like $6 billion or so, but it's getting bigger and bigger. So I'm constantly monitoring it. Neil's monitoring it too because we're doing— we're literally doing a podcast right now. So we put our time into it. So why not look at it? Because voice is is the future.

Another site/blog that I like looking at is Product Hunt. It's not necessarily a blog, but a lot of marketers end up talking about new tools and features that they're releasing there. So when Intercom has a release, as a marketer, I use them, I'll at least get notified because on Product Hunt I can see it and usually I'll see it there before any other place. The same goes with like SEO tools or people making changes. A lot of stuff I find on Product Hunt, like when Hotjar makes a lot of changes, they release it there. It's just a great place to see what's new and trending. That way, as a marketer, you can catch on again before everyone else.

All right, last, last one from my side. I'll give a couple. So swiped.co. I like this website because I can go look at old-school copywriting swipes, swipe copy. Human psychology doesn't change. So I want to know what kind of hooks people, what gets people in it when it comes to writing copy. And I encourage you, it doesn't matter if you're writing like a social media post, an ad or something like that. You have to become good at copywriting if you want to be a good marketer. So I recommend looking at those. land-book.com is one for landing page inspiration, because, you know, at the end of the day, I know I'm not original, so I like to draw inspiration from people, and then I get ideas on how to, you know, pump out nice landing pages. And then what else do I— those are 2, and then, oh, UserOnboard. That's been kind of really top of mind for me, because onboarding to me is also how you market your product. If you don't do a good job of onboarding, guess what? People aren't going to retain. Like, onboarding is kind of hand in hand with retention sometimes.

And the last one for me is Google did over 3,000 algorithm changes last year. Expect that number to keep going up and up. One blog that I like checking out every time there's a Google algorithm update, and you will need to use this blog in 2020 sometime, is Search Engine Roundtable. It's an old one. A lot of people in the industry don't really read it as much unless you're like old school and you're an expert. More people go to like Search Engine Land or Journal or one of those places. But check out Search Engine Roundtable. Anytime there's a Google algorithm update or signs of one, Barry does more updates than I've seen than anyone else. And the community chimes in and everyone's talking about what's happening, what they're seeing with their traffic, is it going up or down? Is it affecting a specific industry? So that's really well worth all of you guys paying attention to. So that way, if something's happening, you can have a pulse right then and there in real time.

So I'll say what I do in the morning. Sometimes we take for granted what we know, but I look at my phone and it, I use an RSS reader called Feedly, and Search Engine Roundtable, actually I use one also called Nuzzle, which pulls kind of what people are tweeting a lot, and I follow some SEO people. And what always happens is Search Engine Roundtable keeps rising to the top, so I'm pretty much aware day of when an algorithm hit, algorithm update hits before my team knows. That's kind of my secret, and I, you know, that's the secret for you guys.

Not anymore, your team's listening.

Now they know, hopefully. But just to be aware, it's like, oh, like traffic's disappearing. Why is it happening? And it's like, okay, let's just look at that. So anything else?

Well, that's it. Eric and I want to meet you in person in Malibu. Check out marketingschool.io/live to attend.

All right.

One more, then we'll answer a question. Ready?

So we are—

One minute.

I'm going to modify the title.

All right.

We're holding. We're rolling. LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you're coming from, more questions. Anthony Lopez, hello. Podcasting sounds like it's been growing globally. How many years do you think it'll take for Medium to plateau? I don't know.

I mean, I'll say at least 4 or 5 years. It's still in its infancy.

It's so small in the US.

In some regions like China, I know it's still growing, but I think it'll start plateauing soon.

I say 4 to 5 years.

Yeah, I would say around 4 to 5 years. In regions like India, podcasting still isn't as popular as it could be. Similar like Latin America. 4 or 5 years, I would say for at least US and some of the major markets. Some of the other regions like Latin America and other parts of Asia, maybe a bit longer, like 7, 8 years.

Yeah. Eileen, that is a really good topic. How do you decide when to monetize your podcast with ads? I think I'm literally going to steal that headline because it's better than what I put. Okay. Jess Pacheco, what is your formula for building a high-converting landing page? How about we put that in there too? What is the high-converting landing page formula? I like that one. Great job, Jess.

Okay. Do you care what day I moved the title for the podcast one?

Nope. Nope.

And then Khalid's coming from Dublin. Khalid, I'm actually going to be in Dublin October 13th through the 18th. So I'm going to enjoy it because I'm going to go shoot clay pigeons.

Are you really?

Yeah. That's what we did last time.

It was great.

So clay pigeons, not real ones.

I mean, I don't know why they call them clay pigeons. It's like those discs. So I don't know why they call them clay pigeons. Oh.

Yeah.

But it's not like a pigeon, though. Why don't they just say disc?

Why don't they just shoot off a fake pigeon, like a clay pigeon that looks like it and go quack quack quack?

You know? All right, let's go.

We're still rolling.

All right. And three, two, one.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

I'm Eric Su, and I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how to get the most out of Google Analytics. So I can go first. So Google Analytics. You want to get good at Google Analytics? I'll give you one thing first. So kaushik.net, that's his Indian last name. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. K-A-U-S-H-I-K.net. I think I got it. But search for it, just search Avinash Kaushik. Okay, you'll find it. And he still writes on his blog. I think it's still like once a month or so, but he's got kind of the comprehensive blog around Google Analytics because he, I think he still works for Google, or at least he's an evangelist, if I'm not mistaken.

I have no idea if he's still there. He's also written some amazing books called like Web Analytics in an Hour a Day.

Yeah.

Worth checking out. And, you know, consider getting the books as well if you want the most out of Google Analytics. Another thing you need to do is, look, you guys already know the basics like goal tracking and all that kind of stuff and tracking conversions. So let's get into some stuff that you guys probably aren't looking at. One of the things I would look at is cohort reports. Google has a cohort report. You can either break it down by day, weeks, or months. I usually like looking at weeks and then I do a 12-month interval. It'll tell me how many people are continually coming back. So what a cohort does, it'll look at all the people that came to your site today or this week and how many of them came back the next week, then the week after, then the week after, et cetera. And when you look at it, let's say over a 3-month time period, and then, you know, for my website, I'm like, Crap, only 2.6 or 2.7% of people are coming back. My problem isn't getting traffic. My problem is retaining the audience that I have. Like I look at my traffic on a monthly basis and I'm like, all right, yeah, I get millions of visitors a month, but majority never come back after 3 months. So what I start doing is creating different things and elements to try to get more people to come back and I run tests. And the cool thing with the cohort report is When you release tests, it'll show you your cohort report on a daily basis as well. So you can instantly see after 24 or 48 hours if the test is helping improve retention as well.

Yeah. And I think it's really important to understand how to read cohort charts. A lot of people don't, they haven't looked into it. So I just literally Google how to, how to read a cohort chart and then go from there. Really important to understand all the changes that you're making on your site. The other thing I'll say is adding annotations. So In the last episode, we talked about if a Google algorithm update hits, what happens? Like we'll look at Search Engine Roundtable, right? But we also annotate it inside our analytics just so we can see over time, like what are the big events that are happening? So we have a better understanding of like maybe why, what caused the traffic to drop or spike. So annotations are important. I think segmentations are important too. So advanced segmentation, instead of looking at all your traffic together, maybe you segment out your really engaged traffic. So people that are you know, uh, visiting your site for more than 2 minutes or so, or people that have converted. And then you can compare that versus like your overall traffic just to see how it's performing. So you can kind of slice and dice the data. I think that's important. And then talking about getting the most out of Google Analytics, don't forget to hook it in with your Google Ads and don't forget to hook it in with your Google Search Console. Because then if you hook in with Search Console, you can have conversion data with those pages too. And then you can also look at your campaigns all in one area too.

Yeah. Also check out their cross-device feature that ends up breaking out the overlap in which, you know, how many people are on your website for mobile, desktop, tablet. If you're seeing a lot of crossover, then you know that you can have similar messages on all of them to start targeting people. But if you don't, you can start adjusting up the messages because maybe, hey, mobile people aren't coming back on their desktop or whatever it may be. So let's see how I can end up fixing this. The other thing that I love looking at within Google Analytics is the devices that are using my website. And here's why this is really important. As SEOs, a lot of time we take mobile traffic for granted. Sometimes we get a lot, sometimes we get a little. And a lot of us SEOs, yeah, we have mobile responsive websites, but we also have AMP pages. So with Google Analytics, you can see how many people are coming to your AMP pages and you'll be like, oh, my mobile traffic doesn't convert as well. And the big reason is I see a lot of SEOs using AMP pages and AMP strips off everything. So all the conversion elements are gone. you got to go back and add it in. That's another thing to check out in Google Analytics to see if that's you, because if it is, fixing that will boost your revenue.

Yeah. And don't forget about multi-touch attribution too. So a lot of people like to attribute everything to last-click attribution, meaning if I click on Neil's ad and I, and I buy, then it doesn't take into account all the other channels that I hit. Maybe I came from organic first and then maybe I came through social. But looking at just last-click attribution, is just giving all the credit to the ad, but it doesn't take into account the other areas. So it's not the— I wouldn't say it's the most accurate, but it at least gives you a sense of where your conversions are coming from, where your assisted conversions are coming from. So clicking on multi-touch attribution can be helpful for you. And let's see what else you mentioned. Goal tracking too. So goal tracking, e-commerce tracking too. These things take time to set up, but you don't want to skimp on them. And the final thing I'll add is, You know, looping in Google Tag Manager and then, you know, looking at all your other analytics tags, that just makes it easier to manage analytics overall. So you don't need to worry about getting more engineering help for, you know, tasks that they don't want to do.

Yeah.

And another thing that I love in Google Analytics is benchmarking. We're all known to use SimilarWeb or SEMrush or even Ubersuggest for benchmarking, but Google Analytics has better benchmarking data than most of the other places that I've seen. The reason being is there's a lot of Google Analytics tracking codes on people's websites. So it's much more accurate. And within there, you can use their benchmarking reporting to see how you stack up against your competition, which will give you insights on if you're doing well or poorly. When there's a change in the algorithm, how do you benchmark compared to them? Because you can see, hey, have other people got hit in their traffic? Are they still doing well or is it just me?

All right. So I think this one's pretty good. We can always do another one, but that is it for today. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. But before we go, also, also, if you want to hang out with Neil and I, In Malibu, November 4th and 5th, in person. We have an application live. It's marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E. And if your application looks like it's qualified, I will personally give you a call. That's guaranteed. And we'll have a great conversation. And that being said, see you tomorrow. Should we answer one question?

Yeah, let's go for it.

Let's see, those are—

okay.

I'm a professional video editor. This is Pro Media Hub. How could I market myself to a DMA to get a job? Noah, what's a DMA?

Digital marketing agency. Yeah.

Oh, okay.

You can send me an email. Send noah@singlegrain.com an email.

Yeah, send noah@singlegrain.com an email. Pro Media Hub. Actually, literally, that's something we need help with, right? So, okay.

Yeah.

Send us, send us a— yeah. If you're a video editor and you'd like to work with Single Grain, noah@singlegrain.com, or if you want to work with Neil, Send it to mike@singlegrain.com.

You mean mike@neilpatel.com?

Oh, sorry, mike@neilpatel.com. Yeah.

Damn.

Well, thank you. You saved me.

Yeah.

All right, next one.

Do you have someone who works for you that's named Mike?

We used to.

You'd be like, why am I getting all these emails?

Yeah, Mike Ball.

Okay, just jumping in right in, or?

Yeah, ready for the next one? Let's go. Future podcasting in India is fantastic. You know why? Because it's growing in China and the US, and it's actually pretty— I think I read on The Economist somewhere, but I think in the next 10 years or so, India is slated to become number one. We'll see. And then China number 2, and then US number 3 for podcasting. No, just overall GDP.

I doubt that, but we'll see. I'll bet you in 10 years, I'll bet you 10 years China will explode and India will go up. But India is really far behind.

They have a lot more people though.

They do.

US has less people than China. We've still been strong for a very long time.

Yeah. Well, not to get into politics, but yeah. Ready?

That's economic.

That is economics.

Not politics.

But kind of goes into politics. Ready?

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 the best marketing courses for digital marketers. So Neil, I was actually looking at YouTube about a week ago, and I think it was like in the evening, and then I saw a video with you, and it didn't look like a normal video. So I clicked it and it was, what's it called? Agency Unleashed?

Agency Unlocked, yeah.

I was like, wait, what is Agency Unlocked? So I watched the whole webinar and it was actually really good. So, you know, first we'll talk about other people's first and we can talk about the stuff that we have. Maybe that's fair.

Sure, yeah, we have Agency Unlocked on my end. You have Leveling Up, right?

Mm-hmm.

Brian Dean has a good one on YouTube and he also has a good one on link building. Those are worth checking out.

SEO that works and then YouTube that works. I don't know. Yeah.

And there's stuff that, and you don't have to pay for marketing courses either. I know some of the stuff that we're mentioning right now costs money, but let's go over some free stuff like HubSpot has.

HubSpot's always good.

HubSpot has a lot of free certification courses that teach you a lot on marketing. This is great, especially if you're starting off. Google AdWords has certification stuff that helps you get started with Google AdWords. There's also, what's those? Course sites, Coursera, Udemy. Yeah, Udemy has like a Coursera. Those guys have a lot of stuff that's like on SEO and all those things, and they're dirt cheap, like $20, $30.

There's Lynda, which is now LinkedIn Learning.

Yeah, that's true. They changed the name. Yeah.

Digital Marketer has good stuff.

Yeah, Digital Marketer is really affordable. There's a Slack community that's really good. This isn't a course, but this teaches you a lot about marketing, and people share the latest and greatest techniques. It's called like Growth something. What is it?

Traffic Think Tank.

Traffic Think Tank. There you go. And that one's purely based off of Slack. It's not necessarily course format, but that helps. And I think that's pretty affordable, like $60 or $100 a month.

Oh no, it's like $119 now a month.

Oh, they increased the price?

Yeah, it was $99. Now it's $119.

Got it. Yeah. What else is good that's free? You know, I found is a lot of marketers are trying to find courses to learn everything. But marketing has been changing in which I remember when you and I started, it was like, all right, how can I learn SEO, pay-per-click, social media, be well-rounded?

Those are like big ones.

Yeah, and now we're just like, how can I specialize and be the best at this one channel? Because there's so many and too many. And once I'm amazing at it, you know, that's great. I'm just going to specialize and focus in this one area. You can find a lot of YouTube videos for free that'll help you educate. Brian Dean also has a lot of YouTube videos. You do, I do. Ahrefs has a lot of YouTube videos that educate as well.

Ahrefs has a good course too. I was with a group of friends and then we were having breakfast and this guy's like, you know, Ahrefs has a—

Tim's course.

Yeah, Blogging for Business. And so $800, right? And then I was like, hey, can you just give me the password? And he's like, oh, it logs into my Ahrefs account. Okay, fine. So I instantly paid the $800 for it and now we have it. I went through like a couple of videos, like this is pretty good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a lot of good courses out there. Again, there's free solutions if you want as well. Now, keep one thing in mind. I think this is the big mistake people make when they go after courses. They'll buy a course and they think they're good and they're done. Even if you learn everything and implement it, marketing changes. That's why sometimes Eric and I will tell you something now, and in 6 months we may tell you something different and you guys will be like, ah, you guys contradicted yourself. And we don't try to do this on purpose and we do apologize for that. But marketing changes. So as the market changes, we adapt with it. And the same goes with courses. If you buy a course or you leverage a free one and you learn and you implement everything that you're learning, over time, expect marketing to change and not everything that you learned in the course to be relevant or even be accurate. So for that reason, you always have to continually learn and you have to continually adapt so that way you can stay ahead of the curve.

My take on it, I'm going to read this YouTube comment afterwards, but my take on it, you should look at the bottom. Anyway, my take on courses, why should you pay for courses? So I think, look, if you're looking for the, if you can't afford it, if you're just starting out, I would recommend looking at all the free stuff. So to Neil's point, our YouTube channels, it's free. This podcast, it's free. My other podcast, it's free. There's always a layer of free, right? But even a lot of the most prolific kind of content creators out there, they have the paid versions too. So it's not like we're selling out, But I've worked in online education for a while, and I can tell you that the completion rate, when it's like, let's say it's something that's free, it's 2%. So it's 98% people actually don't finish a course. The reason for that is 'cause when you have something for free, human psychology, you aren't, you're not held accountable. There's no incentive for you to really finish it off, unless you're super motivated, you're the 2%. So, but if you charge for something, then the completion rate goes a lot higher, because at least they put some skin into the game, right? So I guess, Neil, my question for you for Agency Unlocked, Why, like, we do all this free stuff, like, why even decide to charge for something?

Yeah, it was so expensive to end up producing that it would be hard to just give it away for free. And I've done courses, I've given away both paid and free. And what's funny is, I know this sounds counterintuitive, when I released the free courses, less people take action and I have less success stories even though more people have access. It's kind of like what you just mentioned a bit earlier. When I go into even my older courses like Advanced Marketing Program, which I no longer sell, I have so many more success stories because people paid some sort of money, and because they paid some sort of money, they took action like you mentioned.

And they're grateful for it too.

Yeah, but for me, you know, and I know you're the same as well, I honestly don't care if you're grateful if I help you grow your business or not. I'm just happy if you succeed, and to me that's enough, and I know you're the same. You're similar, Eric. But yeah, for some reason I found that when I charge for something, even if it's $7, for some weird reason, people believe that it adds more value and they convert more. I don't know why. They get better results.

Yep.

I can speak to leveling up for a second too. That's kind of our individual and team training. And a lot of people are like, okay, like how do I train my team exactly? How do I train? How do I train? You know, how do I just train myself? And like, they ask for additional features, right? So maybe there's a Slack group that they want. Maybe there's a Facebook group that they want. Maybe there's additional support that they want. These are the things we can offer if we, if we charge for it. But at the same time, look, if you can't pay for it, totally fine. You can have like a free layer, right? But I think at least from my perspective, it's like, okay, there's people that really, they're ready to commit to the next level. There's always a group of people. Let's say the audience, your audience is a big piece of your audience is consuming stuff for free, but then there's a, there's a next level that's motivated. And they want, they're ready to pay. And then beyond that, they want to pay for the next level too, and the next level and the next level. So take that into account. We're not saying, you know, you should charge or you shouldn't charge. It's just kind of, you know, where we landed right now and kind of the progression of, of where we've been. And do you want to add anything else, Neil?

Yeah. If you want to hang out with Eric and I, check out marketingschool.io/live. We're throwing an event in November in Malibu. Make sure you go there, check it out, fill in your details, and we'll be in touch soon.

Goodbye, Neil. What's ISRO? Is that India Space Rocket?

Oh, I just looked it up.

Oh, I had no clue what that meant.

Supposed to be a very reliable rocket, but the satellite got stuck in the ah.

That's okay. They tried.

Yeah, try again. Storytelling for business. Go to singlegrain.com/leveling-up and welcome to the podcast. Hi, Neil, dear friend of mine. This is Alberto Antonici.

Hello, Alberto. Pleasure to meet you.

Hey, son.

Neil, you helped me a lot.

You're welcome.

Thank you. Whenever I see that writing, I'm like, he's rich.

Which one? Oh, the—

Yeah.

My advice on TikTok is they just actually inked a deal with the NFL. I think it's so early. The retention on TikTok isn't that amazing. I would wait a little bit more for it to be more popular before you consider joining.

Ready, oh?

Yeah.

So we got seven done so far.

Yeah, I think these are longer than our normal ones, right, Noah?

Yeah, they are.

Hey, Daniel. Hello from Sweden. Must be like ten p.m. for you.

We're like eight minutes, seven minutes, seven minutes, four minutes.

Yeah. Yeah. Ready?

Yeah. We're rolling in three, two, one.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

I'm Eric Su, and I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how do you decide when to monetize your podcast with ads.

So you know this is interesting because Eric and I have had a debate about this for a long time now.

Three years.

Three has it been three years?

We've been doing this for over three years now.

Yeah, and yeah. You know, I've never wanted to monetize through ads, being blunt. Eric's been more open to the concept.

I'm always open.

Eric's always more open. Even when we did the in-person event, I never wanted to charge for tickets. And Eric mentioned to the audience, like he did a live survey. Yes, I did. He's just like, hey, how many would you pay for an event? Um, we just have different opinions there. Now with podcasting, uh, you know, it takes up, space from us, office space. It takes team, it takes people.

Travel time for you, actual time. Yeah.

And in general, we're starting to lose more and more money on podcasting. I look at things, if you can keep losing the money, that's fine. And there's a point where Eric and I were just like, okay, we want to get better equipment. We want to have higher quality audio. We want to keep creating more and more material for people in addition to the podcast. How can we create—

And I got a new place to have a nicer studio too.

Yeah. You're like, how can we create eBooks, all this kind of stuff and just give away more stuff for free? And we're looking at all this stuff and it costs money. You know, for us, this is the point where we're like, hey, all right, let's start having ads. And we found someone, there's a lot of people that approached us for ads. We found someone, DreamHost, that we're working with at the moment to roll out ads with. And the key is, you know, finding a company that A, you believe in, B, that fits the audience. Because for us, at least marketing, if your site loads faster, you improve your conversion rates and load time. But it came down to, you know, if you're okay with losing the expenses, fine. If you want to turn— make something bigger, like we're trying to create more material, more— get better equipment. We're trying to add more value so you guys can grow your businesses faster and get more traffic.

Yeah.

We're like, all right, the only way to do this is we either, Eric and I, we were estimating the cost. It would cost us roughly $19,000, $20,000 combined a month, or we get some advertisers to help cover the costs.

I think in many ways, like let's say Neil and I might not see things eye to eye exactly, but in some ways we kind of come back to the same thing where it's like, we just want to grow faster. So the money is kind of a means to an end to grow faster. Because you already know me, It's not like I plan to pocket it. It's just like, we want to do more things.

Yeah, neither of us plan on pocketing the admin. We're just like, all right, how can we do more stuff? And speaking of more stuff, like we're doing an in-person event in Malibu in November. If you want to learn more, make sure you go to marketingschool.io/live. But in general, if you're thinking about monetizing your podcast, if you really need the money, do it then. Or if you want to do more, then you can consider doing it because then you can use that cash for more. But the one thing I would tell you is don't monetize unless you have at least 50,000 monthly listeners. I think if you monetize too early, it can hurt you.

Yeah, I think in most cases I agree with that. But remember we talked about this guy from Japan that he did this Japan startup podcast. I think he was getting like 8,000 downloads a month or something, or 5,000, and he was making like 8 grand or so. So if you actually find the right sponsor and you feel like you're delivering something that's really exclusive—

And the right niche.

Yeah.

Because if the niche is big enough where a customer's worth a lot, you can make Yeah, you can make a ton of money, but if you're like in a broad category, like, I don't know, furniture or household or housing, I don't know, whatever it is, a few thousand podcast listeners isn't going to do much for you.

Yeah. And I think, look, only you are going to know when it's the right timing for it. But if your audience is not that big, I think focus more on delivering value than anything. Because if you start polluting, it's like when you start a blog first, if you pollute the blog with too many ads in the beginning, Google, guess what? If you're a brand new website, Google doesn't look favorably on that and it becomes difficult for you, right? So if you start to pollute things with ads too quickly and you don't really have a good understanding of who your audience is, what they want exactly, that's going to not be a good experience for your listeners. And the listeners are what help attract the advertisers at the end of the day. Anything else?

Yeah. The last thing is, is if you decide to monetize your podcast and you don't need the cash, take that money, don't pocket it, dump it all back into your podcast and make it grow faster. Because it's good branding. It's still early in the podcasting age in which if you do that and you double down, in 3, 4 years, it'll definitely pay off for you. You look at people like Lewis Howes and they're like, oh, he does extremely well from his podcast. He's just been resilient at it. He keeps doing it. He keeps dumping his money back in. And it takes a long time before you get to a stage where you're all going to be happy.

And there's only 700,000 podcasts as of this recording, which is nothing.

Globally or just on iTunes?

Globally.

Oh, that's not that many.

Yeah, it's not much at all. So now's still an opportunity to get in. And to me, I feel like podcasting is easier to do than blog posts, but I think you also need to have experience accumulate before you can do podcasts. Anyway, that is it for today. If you'd like to see us live in Malibu, this is a small event. It's an intimate event, November 4th and 5th. Marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E. Go to apply, and if your application is qualified, I will actually call you myself. It's not gonna be a machine. I'm gonna call you myself, and we'll have a conversation. See if it's right fit, and go from there. Goodbye.

Great.

We'll answer one question. Jaya, Jaya, Jaya. Michael, yes, these are chopped up and put on Spotify and YouTube. Or sorry, not maybe it is on YouTube too because this live hangs.

The live just stays there.

Okay. Okay. Got it. No, that makes sense. Love from India. Pro Media Hub.

All good.

Thank you, Kevin. And JJBurjay, should I monetize with my 10-year-old company brand or create a brand new brand, brand new brand like Marketing School versus Single Grain, Neil Patel Digital? I think if you can just stay with your company brand instead of creating a new one, I think it takes a lot of work. Marketing School works because it's the effort of both Neil and myself. And then, you know, we have our own things going on. Is podcasting the new YouTube in 2020? You mean, is it like the new big channel? Is it the new big trend?

Yeah, I think it is.

Yeah.

Especially with voice search like Alexa, Google Home, and all those.

I think it's gonna be really huge. Yeah, and all those facts schema is all like for voice search. All right, let's do it.

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 going to talk about how to skyrocket your traffic in 2 days. Where did this title come from?

You're wondering what the title is?

Yeah.

Do you want to—

oh, how to skyrocket your traffic in 2 days.

Wait, do you want to start this recording over again?

I can go, I can go get— you could have kept going, but we'll restart. We'll restart the recording. Sorry, sorry, live.

Sorry, live. This is your old title for the November update. It's 2 Days to Skyrocket Your Traffic.

What November update?

November Mastermind update.

Oh, okay, okay, okay, got it, got it. All right, love it.

Ready?

You like my title change?

It's good. I need context sometimes. All right, here we go. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about how to skyrocket your traffic in 2 days. So Neil, I mean, this is very intriguing. How does one skyrocket their traffic in 2 days?

So there's a lot of tactics that are too hard to break down in a 5 to 10 minute podcast episode. You agree with this?

Agreed.

So what Eric and I are doing is on November 4th and 5th, is that when it is? We're doing an in-person event in Malibu, California. And you can always attend by going to marketingschool.io/live. And apply there to attend. Now, what are some of the crazy cool things that we're going to cover there that are going to be hard for people to learn over 5 or 10 minutes?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing, Neil, you and I have been in these types of groups before, is when you get a level of intimacy with super successful marketers and entrepreneurs, the level of learnings that you get just from having a casual conversation or doing roundtables with the people, even if you learn 1 or 2 things, these are the types of things that can skyrocket not only your traffic, but your revenues too. Like, I remember being in groups in the past where I just learned 1 tactic, Take it and use that, and boom! My conversion rate increases, and my traffic doubles over time. And we've seen that time and time again.

Yes, speaking of revenue, like one of the attendees who's going to be there in November, he specializes in pricing. And in general, from everyone who I've known that's used his service, they see at least a 15% increase in revenue just from his pricing.

He charges $100,000 at least minimum.

Yeah, that's true. He charges over 100 grand, which is expensive. expensive, but he's good.

Mm-hmm.

You know, it's easier to— you can also read articles online about pricing as well, but learning the formula works really well. Other things that we're doing too is we're breaking down like growth hacks that'll work in 2020. Some that'll involve experimentation. For example, we have a ton of data on things like user experience, because Google's all about user metrics, such as, click-through rates, bounce rates, and we have a lot of cool hacks that take a little bit more time to implement. And we have a ton of data on what's working and what's not. That'll probably take, you know, 40, 50 minutes to break down and explain on what you can copy and how it can work for all the different industries out there. Because the user experience hacks and the changes in things like title tags and website elements, it's different for e-commerce than B2B, than SaaS and all these different categories. So to explain that takes sadly a bit more than 5, 6 minutes.

Yeah, and we're not gonna just talk about, like, we don't want this to be a glorified conference at the end of the day. Neil just mentioned one of the speakers. We are bringing in one of the world's renowned webinar experts too. We talk a lot about webinars, but ultimately it's these people that are in the day-to-day that understand, you know, how these kind of 7 to 8, 9-figure webinars work, and they'll explain kind of the ins and outs around it. This is kind of the 5% of stuff shared in the marketing and kind of entrepreneur world that you're not going to see out about in the world. And we want to bring the right people together. And the other thing too is we're not trying to make this group really big. We're making it a very small group. It's supposed to be intimate, which means the quality of the learnings that you're going to get is going to be higher, which makes it easier to skyrocket your traffic faster.

Well, think of it this way. So when you go to most conferences, there's speakers, they come and speak and then they leave. Sure. Here you can network with the speakers, but that's not the main point. The real value is, is Eric and I are putting on something where we ourselves are also going to be in the audience learning. We're bringing in people who are leveraging tactics that we want to learn because we know they're going to be effective in 2020. So we want you to have that same experience in which if we can learn from these people, you can as well. Sure, Eric and I will also be teaching and educating you guys on some tactics that we're leveraging that most people aren't. But at the same time, we're also bringing in other people that are leveraging stuff that Yep.

And look, we want to make sure it's a top-tier experience at the end of the day, which is why I'm personally looking at all the applications and looking at the ones that seem to be the right fit. And those of you that are, I will actually give a call to. And again, we're not trying to have too many people in it, but we just want to give you a better sense of what's gonna happen. And these, these meetings— I mean, this one's gonna happen in Malibu November 4th and 5th, but we're doing 3 2-day meetings every single year. So it's a chance to kind of connect and build strong relationships with people. Yeah, and People. I think that's the most important thing. And it's from groups like this. Neil and I, we literally just had lunch. It's the people that you surround yourself with that are gonna help you get to the next level.

Yeah, so make sure you check it out, marketingschool.io/live, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Goodbye.

Ooh, SEO advice for a brand new YouTube channel. That should be a new topic for the future.

All right, one minute, one minute. SEO advice for a brand new storytelling for business.

We're going to add that into the queue for today. A lot of really good titles, guys. Today, a lot of really good ones. Look, I'm invisible on Slack.

Storyteller.

Yeah, I'll change the one after that to storytelling for business.

Let me know when you guys are ready to go.

We— I think I'm going to—

Oh yeah. Noah must use—

I'll push record and then I'll bounce out.

Okay.

Wow.

You're going to bounce out on us?

He's going to bounce out. All right. Don't go too long. Ready? Oh, you've been holding it for a while. 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 SEO advice for a brand new YouTube channel. So first one, first bit of advice. If you're starting a brand new YouTube channel, you got to have the right tools in place. I prefer using TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy is a Chrome plugin. It allows you to do keyword research, allows you to tag things at scale. It allows you to do kind of split testing, image creation, all these different things that help grow your YouTube channel, not just from an SEO perspective, but overall.

Yeah. Do you want to know a secret on how I'm able to grow my YouTube channel so fast?

Your email list.

Email list is one, push notifications.

Push notifications from, what do you use, Subscribers?

Yeah, you can use anything, but—

Subscribers.com, guys.

Uh-huh, so most people, like there's all these tools like vidIQ and everyone's optimizing for everything. And I found this for a lot of other YouTube channels as well, because we create them in different languages. So we found that over everything, if you just email blast and you do a push notification in the first 24 hours, Your videos crush it because YouTube SEO is all about the first 24 hours. It's not about what happens after the first week or two. So like with your content, you guys crank out a lot of content. You don't push them hard in the first 24 hours.

We used to have push notifications on. I've kind of debated putting them back and not, and not for the longest time, but you're kind of compelling me again.

But I kid you not, that's why we do so well on YouTube.

And your YouTube has grown so fast too. Where are you at now?

I think like 400 and something.

And last year you were at 200.

I just got my 100,000 subscriber plaque.

Like it just came. That took you so long.

I don't know. They never sent it until recently. Carlos hit them up and he's like, can we get it? And I pinged them in support and I kid you not, like 2, 3 months, they're like, we're still looking into this. They can never figure out Carlos' Twitter.

Dude, when you get to a million, you should just ask your Google ad rep to get it for you.

Yeah, I should do that. But here's the big thing. So I'll tell you 2 things because I've played around so much with their algorithm. Everyone, if you don't have a channel that, I mean, if you don't have a big email list, that's okay. Push on your social media, whatever you can within the first 24 hours, Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere you can. I know sometimes they don't like YouTube videos, but the key is the first 24 hours. But here's something else that I learned. If you get too many people too fast, it goes against you because they think you're cheating. So because I do push notifications and my list is too large—

So do you throttle it?

I had to throttle it. So I'll do the— I'll stagger the deliverability. So then that way it goes over a few hours and then it actually causes my videos do better than if I send them all within a 10-minute window.

Yeah.

Because they think it's just bot traffic.

Yeah.

And they don't count the views.

Yeah.

But I kid you not, for everyone listening, the biggest trick is you get more views in the first 24 hours and then you'll rank. So now let's go over ways you can get the most amount of views in the first 24 hours, because not everyone's going to have a big email list or push notification list.

Yeah. Well, one thing, one thing I want to add around, because this one's around SEO advice for it. One thing I'll say, our mutual friend Syed has a WordPress plugin. So I'm assuming a lot of us If you use WordPress, if not, it's fine. But there's a plugin called YouTube Subscribe. And basically I can go to Neil's channel, take one of his videos that I like. I might have an SEO blog post. I'll take one of his SEO videos and I'll put it on the blog post. And then when you hit the subscribe button, it actually subscribes to my channel, not his. The other thing too, ideally you'd put your own video on there because it increases the dwell time on your own site. Good for SEO.

Yeah, but so in general for SEO advice, if you're trying to rank on YouTube, I kid you not, it's not as much as Like, yeah, keywords and all that still matter, just like traditional SEO.

Yes, you won't see a good bang for your buck.

Yeah, but it's all views in the first 24 hours. So the videos that are popular in the first 24 hours and have good engagement rank the best on YouTube from everything that we've seen.

I'll say, um, to answer your question more directly, I think, um, what's been working for us recently— God, I should really turn notifications on now. I really just want to do it right now. Team, we're turning it back on. But, um, one thing that's worked for us, we actually had a conversation with, um, the guy that works with Evan Carmichael. I think his name is, uh, Jimmy or something. 2 million subscribers or so. He got on a call with us, did a consultation. He gave us like a lot of things to do, so we ended up doing all the things. Um, thank you for that. And, um, basically instead of making your videos 5 minutes each, we increased it to 10 minutes each. So the watch time is increasing. So watch time helps a lot. Um, and then the, the push, definitely like the promotion, that's like major impacting. But we found that when we started increasing it, we started to get more wins. I think like 30 to 40% of our videos would actually Um, go above average. Whereas when we did like 5 minutes or so, um, they would all, a lot of them would fall kind of below average.

Oh, just increase your length of your video?

Yeah. And what I would do is I just search—

You don't have 5-minute videos.

Yeah, I know. But all you have to do is just add a story to each one and then it goes to 10 minutes.

Yeah.

You don't need 10 minutes. We found the sweet spot's like 7, 8, anything around there plus is great. We try to keep it under 10 because LinkedIn doesn't want videos over 10 minutes.

Oh, multipurpose.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So then you can use on-channel. Okay. So going back to, How do you make sure you can do well in the first 24 hours, even if you don't have a big email list and push notification? Well, email out to whoever you have, push out to whoever you have. If you don't have, start collecting emails and pushes. Tweet out every single video multiple times in the first 24 hours using different titles. You can push it out on your LinkedIn. You can tell people on Instagram to head over to YouTube if you're using any other social platform.

We don't recommend ads though.

No, because the problem with ads is it takes a while to get them ramped up and approved. Another thing that I do is I have a lot of people, like a community of marketers that I know. You can ask them, hey, check out this video. You can notify them and say, if you like it, leave a comment, engage with them. I found that that helps too because it's creating good engagement in the first 24 hours.

Facebook groups too.

Facebook groups as well. Although Facebook, yeah, Reddit, where else can they promote?

Those, I mean, those are kind of the starting points. I mean, look, if you're starting from scratch, you're gonna have to hit all these. You're gonna have to— what I would say, like, if you have a really good piece, you reach out to the people that you might have mentioned in a video. Ego bait always works.

That's great too. Email them, ask them to push it. And then do you transcribe your videos and get SRT files?

We, yeah, we use Rev for that. Rev.com.

Yeah, and you upload them to every YouTube video? Yeah, that works well. as well too. 'Cause YouTube, although they do automatic transcription, it's not the same as if you upload it manually. You'll find you'll get higher rankings as well.

They're almost there. All right, so anyway, those are a couple things you can do to kind of get started if you have a brand new channel. Thank you. Special thanks to Storytelling for Business coming from our YouTube Live for that question. That is it for today, but if you'd like to see us live, L-I-V, go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V. You can join Neil and myself in Malibu November 4th and 5th. And we'll see you tomorrow.

Oh, so his topic idea was not storytelling. It was YouTube.

Yeah, his channel is storytelling, but that's a good topic too. Storytelling for business.

No, I got to—

there's a question here.

Let's do the high converting landing page one because that was earlier.

JWE Revolution says, is Neil and Eric married? Yes, we are.

I'm married. You're not married.

Oh, to each other? Yeah. I interpreted it as, are we together? I said yes. Would you do trailer native videos on LinkedIn and push to YouTube, post full ones?

Huh?

Storytelling for business. Can you rephrase your question, please? The market of podcasts in India. I don't know.

It's young now, but it'll grow within 4 or 5 years.

Jaya, I think the moment you start to see it tick up, when, when people around you maybe start mentioning podcasts, I think even starting now is a good time to do it. Because it takes time to build that following. Anyway, are we ready?

Yep. All right. All right, we are rolling. And 3, 2, 1.

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to give you the high-converting landing page formula. So I guess I can start first. You want me to start?

I'll start actually for this one. Okay, go for it. The key to a landing page, and then we can go into the tactics. The key to a landing page is first answering objections. Most people, when they're thinking about landing pages, they're like, oh, here's Russell Brunson's webinar formula, or, oh, I saw this case study on ConversionXL and this is what I'm going to copy, or, oh, my competitor's running A/B tests and I can see that through BuiltWith and I'm just going to copy this page. The key to a successful landing page first comes down to objections. You got to find out what issues people have and why they're not converting, and the most important thing you can do is answer those objections within the copy, whether it's video, audio, pictures, images, testimonials, answering objections is the key to a high-converting landing page. And the way you first get those is you can run surveys through Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey, any of those tools to figure out what issues people have, because Google Analytics is quantitative, it tells you numbers and drop-off rates, but it doesn't tell you what people's feedback is. You can even use tools like usertesting.com to figure out what issues people have. Then once you have that, now it's time to create that high-converting landing page. So let's go into how they can create that high-converting landing page once they know the issues people have and what they're answering on the page.

Which is a big piece. If you don't understand the objections and you don't figure out ways to frame around it, you, that kind of goes into the content that you're creating on the page. But first thing I would share is we talk about headlines a lot. And, you know, Ogilvy himself said 80 cents on the dollar is basically spent on the headline. If you can't grab their attention on the landing page with that, with a strong headline, you risk losing a lot of people. And you don't want to waste all that money that you've invested in the landing page just to fall flat on the headline. So if you want to know how to write good headlines, Magnetic Headline Formula from Copyblogger. I always recommend reading Breakthrough Advertising, which you can now buy for $125, I believe. So you don't have to pay the same $600 that I paid. $125, you can get yourself a copy of that. That book will make you money many times over. But yeah.

Yeah, and, you know, when Eric's talking about 80 cents on the dollar spent on the headline, it's true. So there's a fact that 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will click through and read the rest. In other words, you're losing 6 out of 10 people on your headline by not making it appealing enough. The next thing I would consider doing is have visual aspects that explain your message. And multiple variations of them. I found that some people love reading text, some people like looking at images, some people prefer watching videos. And I learned this from conversion rate experts. They ran a test on Crazy Egg back in the day. We figured out all the objections and we took all of them, created amazing copy. We drove people, the conversion rates went up. And what was funny is we took the same copy and also turned it into video and had the video and the text and give people an option to view either one. And our conversion rates went through the roof because we quickly learned that not everyone is a reader. Some people just prefer videos, especially now because we all have smartphones.

To that point, actually, we talk about, there's a lot of different chat programs out there. You can use Intercom or you can use Drift. And when people land on the page, sometimes they have questions like our, for our Growth Accelerator Mastermind, the one that we're doing in November, When people land on the page, marketingschool.io/live, L-I-V-E, what happens is people start asking questions. There's a little chat on the bottom and people are like, just, do you have any questions about our mastermind? And people start asking questions and then it pushes to our Slack and we start engaging with the people immediately. And that leads to conversation, that leads to conversions. Some people like to just start engaging in a conversation, they're further down the funnel. Some people like reading a piece of text. Some people like maybe watching a video. Who knows, right? You don't, you just don't know who you're interacting with. So you kind of have to cover your bases. Yeah.

Another thing with landing pages that you'll end up finding is some people like short landing pages. I found that it's better to be longer and thorough because as long as you're getting across every single objection and you have multiple call to actions under each section, that's fine. If people want to skim or they just want to get to it and purchase, they can. But I found that it's better to be longer than just have a short page. And everyone's like, oh, short, to the point, let me just get them to click on the button. You'll get people to click on the button, but you'll see a big drop-off on, let's say, your checkout page or your signup page or your lead collection page. So for that reason, I'd rather have a more in-depth, longer page with call to action sprinkled throughout to try to get people to the next step versus just forcing people to click on the next link.

Yeah, and don't forget, housekeeping item here, don't forget to add the relevant pixels on these pages. So if it makes sense to add your Google Analytics, go ahead and add it. But you probably want to add your advertising pixels on these pages, and then maybe the next, the thank you page too, because then you have a sense of where they ended up in the funnel, and then you can market to them accordingly. Because if they didn't buy and they watched something, maybe there's a good chance for you to retarget them and then get a better cost per acquisition at the end of the day. So that's kind of table stakes.

And a few things, I'm just going to start rattling off tactics that can boost your conversion rates. Exit popup, easy win. If someone's going to leave, might as well try to get them at a last ditch effort. You can have a top bar that scrolls. That's a great way to draw people's attention to wherever you want. Having testimonials, case studies on a landing page, those help well too. Make sure your buy buttons aren't an image where it's like an image filled with everything. I recently looked at a buy page or a landing page the other day, and someone's buy button wasn't just a buy button, it had images all around. It was one big image. And I didn't realize it was clickable. It just looked like a graphic instead of a button. So make sure your buttons actually look like buttons. Consider also putting chat on your landing page. I found that average— adding Intercom to our page drastically boosts conversions because everyone always has miscellaneous questions and you can't always answer them. You know, and speaking of questions, another thing that we like adding to our landing pages is an FAQ. Another quick tip is whatever your landing page is, you have a funnel from there, they go to a next page and maybe a checkout page. And then a thank you page, have congruent messaging that flows throughout all of them. Because when the messaging ties, you'll find that you'll get a higher conversion rate than when you just use random landing pages that don't fit in well with each other.

Don't forget to, don't forget to add video as well. When I say video, if you're doing a video, don't forget to add the transcript. So we use Wistia on one of our pages, and a lot of people are going to play video without sound on. So if you start the video, make sure you have a transcript in there so people can just start reading. That makes it easier. And some people just leave the sound off the whole time. Like, I know when I'm— sometimes when I'm reading landing pages, I just read the text for whatever reason instead of turning the sound on, maybe because it's in the evening and I don't want to get annoyed. But that's another thing that you can do. We talk a lot about site speed too. So don't— we talk about some things, elements to add to the landing page, but you don't want to bog it down with too much stuff that's going on. Because if it starts to slow down things, guess what? That's not a good user experience at the end of the day. And if you're spending money driving traffic to that landing page, that could cost you a lot. And take a look at swiped.co. There's a lot of landing page examples there. Plus there's a lot of long-form copy examples as well. So if you want to get good ideas for long-form copy and landing pages, that's a spot that will kind of hit 2 in 1. And then land-book.com is where I like to draw more landing page examples. Yeah.

And if you want to meet Eric and I in person in Malibu, check out marketingschool.io/live. We look forward to seeing and meeting you in person.

Storytelling for business, would you post the YouTube link on LinkedIn or post a trailer natively to post the full YouTube video?

If you're just trying to get more YouTube views and boost it, then post your YouTube video on LinkedIn. If you ideally want the most amount of views, it doesn't matter what channel, take the video, re-upload it to LinkedIn, and you'll do better.

Jaya, I used to use WP Super Cache, we might have changed it to WP Rocket. What caching plugin do you use?

None.

Oh, we're on— what are we on? Oh, we're on Kinsta now. I think maybe they have their own, I don't know. But yeah, to Neil's point, before we switched to WP Engine, we did have WP Super Cache, and I think we had to take it off. And now we're on Kinsta, so I don't know what we use anymore.

Yeah, and I'm about to switch to DreamHost, so I don't know, but I'm probably gonna try W3 Total Cache.

Yep, and I'm gonna move over too, so whatever you use, you tell me. And then Jeff says, do you suggest posting audio-only podcasts to YouTube with static graphics?

Do you suggest posting on—

No, because, because natively people are used to watching videos on YouTube. I've tried that in the past. Engagement's not good.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember.

'Cause when you first started doing it, you're like, hey, do you want to upload it to your YouTube channel? I'm like, no, I'm going to tank my overall channel authority.

Yeah. The watch time and everything. People are just like, what is this? They want to watch stuff, which is why we're live on video right now too. 'Cause you are, you're watching a live video. I don't know. So anyway, next one.

Let's do it. Should—

what's the next one? Should you get rid of services? No.

We need like a minute. Should you convert your YouTube video to podcasts? Geminis, yes, you should convert your YouTube video to podcasts because that's exactly what we're doing right now. We're converting our— this is YouTube, this is LinkedIn, this is on Twitch, this is on Facebook. This will go to podcasts as well. This will go to Spotify, this will go to Google Play, it'll go to Apple, it'll go everywhere. Except it won't go to SoundCloud anymore, because SoundCloud has been not that good for us.

Okay, we are rolling.

Rolling? All right.

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 7 different customer acquisition ideas for the rest of 2019. So, acquisition idea number 1. Number one is channel partnerships. So a lot of people don't pursue channel partnerships because it takes so long to get going. But if you could just make a list of the top 25 people that you should be working with or businesses, just reach out to them, find out what type of collaborations they do, find out what their goals are. You get that relationship building, then it can lead to doing maybe a joint blast, an email blast, right? Or doing a joint webinar or doing maybe other things where they speak at your conference and you speak at theirs, right? We're going up and up. Higher and higher in the funnel, but you can start with as simple as a blog post or like an email blast or like a tweet, retweeting each other. But you're looking to build a relationship, make that top 25 list of people, be relentless, go after them for maybe, you know, 3 to 6 months or so, and then you're gonna have these relationships. Maybe, maybe you only have 5 of the 25, but that's still 5 more relationships that are strong that you didn't have in the beginning.

Yeah, another thing that I love, and I've talked about this, but very few people do it. So one of my big traffic drivers for 2019, and it will be for 2020 and beyond, is free tools like how I have an A/B testing calculator, SEO analyzer, Ubersuggest, whatever it may be. And you can do simple stuff. I know many of you guys are like, Neil, I can't afford to do what you're doing. No worries, I got a solution for you. It's called CodeCanyon. CodeCanyon is a site where you can buy already existing, let's say you have a marketing agency, you can buy an SEO tool and just slap it onto singlegrain.com. Or you can buy a mortgage tool or a free parking, you know, map tool or whatever it may be. There's tools for every industry on CodeCanyon, and they only charge anywhere from like $2 to $20 for one of these tools to be popped onto your site. That's $2 to $20, one-time fee, not monthly, not recurring, really cheap, really affordable. Everyone here should be able to do it.

You can also go to 1ksideprojects.com too. I think I talked about this at Marketing School Live, but same idea. You can buy sites for less than $1,000. A lot of developers go there to throw their projects away. So it's literally the number 1, ksideprojects.com, and I think that's the site. And then what are we on, number 3?

Yeah.

Number 3. So number 3, I think even though we talk about it, it doesn't mean a lot of people are doing it. A lot of people are producing content in vacuums. I think thinking about how you can take, like this video that we have, for example, will become many podcast episodes. It's also publishing to LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch at the same time. And then it's going to Spotify, it's going to Google Play, it's going to all these different channels. But we're repurposing it. And then the ones that actually take off, like Neil's actually gonna go make some videos and put them on his YouTube channel. We might look at the ones that take off and say, okay, let's make them into long-form blog posts. But it's taking away a lot of the thinking because a lot of when it comes to content production, the thinking is a really stressful part. Like, how do I come up with new ideas? What do I do next? What do I do next? But if you have a process for it where you're able to expand your content, it's gonna make your life a lot easier. And then you're also not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Yeah, number 4, Jetson AI. So we all talk about voice search, but everyone's like, oh, we get all this voice search traffic. What are we going to do? How can we end up monetizing it? Jetson AI is going to make this possible where it's easier for you to monetize your business through voice search, whether it's service or e-commerce space. Check it out. Think of it as like a Shopify, but for voice devices like Alexa. And they make it where people through these voice devices can quickly order products from you guys. Services from you guys, sign up as a customer, and they're doing it for all industries, even including like local restaurants and businesses, and it's really affordable.

Number five is Pattern Eighty Nine. So there's a lot of talk about AI for advertising, and Pattern Eighty Nine actually does that. We've seen on average that they increase performance, ad performance by an average of twenty one percent or so. And what it does is it basically look at your accounts and be like, okay, this ad set isn't working that well. You should make you should Take that budget and reallocate it here. So it takes a lot of the thinking away. There's a lot of suggestions in there. I think the next step is just full automation, but you know, right now it's at the suggestion stage. Maybe it does do that already, but it'll help you with your Facebook ads. It'll help you with your YouTube ads. Hey, you should stop spending on this demographic and you know, this is what's going on. So ultimately it's a time saver and it's going to help you make more money.

Yeah. Number 6, SEO is moving towards machine learning and AI. There's tools like ClickFlow that Eric has. Distilled also has a tool called, I think ODN or something like that, Online Discovery Network. And what these tools do is it automates SEO for you so you don't have to do as much work. And that's great because whether you have a CMS or not, it puts a piece of JavaScript on your website and then it's able to make the HTML changes for you. I do believe that is the future. Reason being is who wants to go and make 100 manual SEO changes when you can just do it all automated through JavaScript and then you yourself don't have to have as many people implementing it and you should have less errors as well.

Yeah. Number 7 is there's, there are a lot of different chat programs out there. I personally like Intercom quite a bit and Intercom allows you to build a lot of different, you can build chat funnels, right? Or you can have an operator there that's kind of serving people. It also has product tours in there too. So it's kind of becoming this all-in-one kind of, you know, chat management, contact management type of tool. And there's product tours. The reason I like product tours is because It helps with onboarding. You can also put it on specific pages on your site to help increase conversions too. So if someone is on like your checkout page, and this is something that Neil shared during Marketing School Live a couple months back, but guiding people to take a certain action, that can help increase conversion rates. What did you see when you shared that stat, the product tours on the checkout page, like 15%?

I think it was like 12 or 13% or somewhere around there.

Yeah, something like that. So anyway, that is it for today, but don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. It helps us grow. And if you'd like to see Neil and myself and a bunch of high-powered marketers and entrepreneurs in Malibu, November 4th and Malibu, California, right outside of Los Angeles. Yeah, beautiful city, by the way. Marketingschool.io/live. Live. Do you want to add something?

Yeah, it's a beach city, so we'll all see you there.

Yeah, goodbye. Let's see how many do we do today.

We can probably get in at least.

One more? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do two more.

Yeah, let's see the niche down your agency as well.

Cool.

Ready?

Yep. Okay, we are rolling. Three, two, one.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

I'm Eric Su, and I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about what experiential marketing is. There's an experience going on behind us, by the way. We put this in on purpose. There are sirens in downtown LA. That's Experiential for you.

And we did not put it in on purpose. He's just joking around.

Yep. So experiential marketing, I mean, I think the definition is, a good example is Halo. So Halo partnered up with an organization that actually owns the Harlem Globetrotters as well. So I have a friend that runs that entire organization, Andrew Wexler, and I met up with him and he introduced me to someone from his team called, name is Howard Smith, the president of kind of these experiences. So Halo is a game, Which was kind of started by Xbox, Microsoft. And what they wanted to do is they wanted to get into live experiences. So they started doing these live tours around the US where you can go, you can play like laser tag. There's like Halo experiences. There's a lot of Halo, like there's like live signings, things like that. That's an experience. And you're getting to experience the whole brand. You bring people into it and it's worthwhile. It's, it's, um, look, it's remarkable. I'm losing my voice.

Yeah, and a lot of brands are starting to do this, like Red Bull, when the Oculus goggles and everything came out, they would have videos of people jumping from outer space and landing back on Earth, and they would show it to you in 3D, and it's all Red Bull branded, and it makes you feel like you're right there, you're on the edge of your seat, you're experiencing the thrill, to even Google having pop-up shops And you can go in and experience all their new products like Google Home and play around with them, play games.

I saw that. Interact with the devices.

Yeah, it was right by my house.

Right by your house? And also they did this at conferences. They have the most expensive booths and you can go experience all their products there.

That's right. And there's a lot of companies that are doing the same thing. And the reason being is when you can experience something, you're much more likely to buy it. I was at the Century City Plaza Mall, not this, Yeah. This weekend that just passed, you know, like that Thero gun that like just hits you and makes you like, uh, feel loose, like that massage gun.

Yeah.

They had this like this pop-up shop and I was there and they were like giving me a free massage. They're like, would you want any? And I was like, no, thank you. It was like $300, but, but I got to experience it. And then my wife was like, oh, do you want it? She's like, we can get it. And I'm like, no, it's okay. It wasn't as good as I thought, but at least I got to experience it.

So now it's remarkable because now you're talking about it and we're broadcasting it to a million listeners a month.

Although I probably didn't generate him any sales by telling him it's not that good.

But the thing is, word of mouth is one of the most powerful things too, right? And we look at Disney, that's an experience in itself, but everyone talks about how great Disneyland is.

Yeah, that's right. So it's like, look, for a lot of the people listening, your business, including Eric and I business, our business isn't big enough where we can just go all around and like, Do our own version of Halo and have people play laser tag with each other. We would go broke if we did that.

Yep.

But we do give experiences to people.

But yeah, but check this out. Our experiences are really simple that everyone here who's listening can replicate. For example, good customer support. Most people offer shitty customer support. That's a good experience. If you look at companies like Nubank, they're that bank that's valued at over $10 billion. What did they do? They just provided a better experience than their old school competitors. You can also do things like producing better content, whether it's video content, podcast content, going live like we're doing here right now. If you're listening to this podcast later on, you won't see us live, but these are all examples of experiences because not only are we giving advice on marketing, we're interacting with people through our live video and answering questions right then and there. These are all examples of stuff that you can do for your business. You can even do Live chat. You can offer amazing experiences helping them out through live chat, even if it's not related to your core product or service, but it's within your industry and you have advice to give them. If you can help them, you can do that. We also do webinars, right? You've done webinars a lot. That's an amazing experience in and of itself.

Yep. Also, don't forget too, if you have people on your team, the employee experience that you have too, that's also experiential because that markets to people outside to help your business grow. So that helps your business market itself.

Yeah, so in general, get creative, leverage a lot of the channels out there, but go above and beyond than just say, hey, we're going to release some content and get some traffic, we're going to do some SEO or paid ads. The real key is if you're on a shoestring budget, interact and engage with your audience. It could be as simple as going live on your Instagram, you know, once a week, even if you barely have anyone listening, that's okay. If you look at Eric, when he first started off, he would go live and we would do, this podcast on marketing school. And when he would go live, sometimes there's only like 5 or 6 people live. And I was like, we could if you want, I didn't mind. But in my head I was thinking like, all right, what's the point? But I do know that, hey, over time he would build his audience and Eric was persistent. Now when we go live, in many cases there's over 100 people live, right? It's just being persistent and it's trying to create all these different kinds of experiences. And if you block off time to just do these simple things, Your audience, your fan base, your community—it'll start growing.

They'll love you.

They'll appreciate it, and over time, people will sign up as a customer due to it.

All right, so it's important. Check it out. That is it for today.

Before we go, we also have another experience that we're doing in person in Malibu. If you guys want to learn more, go to marketing school dot io slash live November fourth and fifth.

Goodbye. We got one more.

Yeah, let's.

Let's do it. Niche down.

All right.

Let's do it. I thought I lost my voice.

Okay, we are rolling.

3, 2, 1. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today, we're going to talk about if you should niche down your agency. So we get, we actually, believe it or not, there's a lot of agency owners that listen to this podcast. So this can tie into the context of if you have a services business too. And I think to an extent, when you think about products, niching down does help quite a bit. I remember I had someone on the Growth Everywhere podcast, or now called Leveling Up, a company called Kahuna. And when they started niching down and focusing on a very specific niche, like the company was tanking. And then after they niched down, they started skyrocketing. So my opinion on this, and maybe—

BVXL, they're for just Shopify and e-commerce. They've done really well. A lot of agencies that niche down, Business Online just does enterprise, B2B. They've done well from that. I think they got to like $10 million a year.

But in a sense, like, okay, so with your, with your agency, you know, you do niche down to a degree. What does your niche look like?

We don't niche down. We're global.

Because you target specific sizes.

No, we don't target specific sizes.

Oh no, no, no.

You have Neil Patel Excel too. I forgot about that.

Yeah, we have both the SMB agency and enterprise. We do all markets from low-end mom and pops who are starting off because we believe why should only big companies be able to pay marketing agencies?

Go through your thoughts first.

Yeah. So my end is I do everything from people starting off their business all the way to Fortune 1000 companies that generate over $100 billion plus a year in market cap, or even revenue in some cases. And I don't niche down, but, you know, I'll be upfront. I don't think most people will be able to replicate what I'm doing. I don't think I'm smarter or better. It's just more so, I have a ton of leads. I was going through this with Eric the other day. I started turning on lead collection on Ubersuggest. I'm generating 2,900 leads a day.

Higher.

What?

Higher.

Well, yeah, but in general it's 2,900. Right now it's started going up to around 3,800 leads a day. So there's a certain point where it's just like, I have people from all industries, but I know most people can't relate to that. And my recommendation is if I was starting a brand new business, not using my name, not using my lead flow, I would niche down. And the reason I would niche down, and this is for the one reason only, and I learned this earlier on in my career and I saw a huge revenue increase. When people say like, oh, you niche down, you can focus and you can be better and you specialize, that's not the real reason why most people end up making more money by niching down at the beginning. It's because when you niche down, you can get case studies in a specific area and you can leverage those case studies to get more clients in that space. Yes, over time you should be able to produce better work because you're only focusing on that one client type. But what really makes you the money with your agency early on, if you niche down, is you can take those case studies and then go after all the other competitors in the space and lock them down as a client as well.

To Neil's point, I think the experience that you get when you niche down, naturally you're starting to work on it more so you understand the industry more. I will tell you, like, let's say we work with a lot of software companies, right? They do look at the breadth of experience that we have and they ask like, who else have we worked with in this space? And to Neil's point, the case studies certainly go a long way. The sales cycles are shorter. The lifetime value of the customers are a lot higher. And it's because they feel more confident in that respect. I think once you get to a certain size and you're growing at a certain rate, I think it's okay to open it up to like, let's open it more general. Let's target smaller. Let's target really big enterprise too. You can kind of, you know, hit the breadth of it. But I think especially when you're, Really early days, I think if you're starting out as one person and you're looking to build your team, I think it's important because there's a lot of big agencies out there like the Omnicoms of the world that are already targeting a lot of people. So, you know, how can you differentiate yourself? The way you differentiate yourself is by niching down, at least in the beginning. And whatever you choose to do in the future, if you want to make the agency a lot bigger, you have to open it up because, you know, markets are markets. But I think Nitching down to me doesn't mean just focusing on one. I think most people think it's just you can everything and you focus on one thing. Nitching down from what I've learned from kind of other agencies' owners is you're probably focusing on 3 to 4 niches that you're good at. Maybe like, you know, you have to have multiple team members, but start with one first. Maybe it'll open up to 4. So once things really start cranking, then you can open up to more and more and more, and then you have a, you know, well-oiled machine going for you. That's kind of my take on it. You know, you start small first, niche down, and then you can expand. Just like how, you know, Apple, you know, started with a computer first, then added, you know, iPods, iPhones, and then iPads too, and watches. So take your time and it'll work.

Yeah, and if you look at Apple as a huge company, they don't go after healthcare, cars, and everything at once. They pick something, get it right, and then they expand after they get it right. Because they know no matter how, what size you are, small or large, and all of us as small businesses, At least we're all small compared to the Apples of the world. We should learn from them and go small and perfect what you're doing and then expand from there. If you're in a rare situation where you have abundance of everything, by all means, you don't have to niche down, but I still recommend picking a sector or a category at first.

All right, so that is it for today. And before we go, don't forget to go to marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E. And the event is happening in Malibu. Neil and I will be there. See us in person. It's going to be great. Again, marketingschool.io/live, and we'll see you tomorrow. Let me save these questions for next time. So live people right now, Joseph Michael, I'm going to save your questions. Close to the mic.

Oh yeah, like similar to Eric.

I'm like right on it. I'm like this. Eric, how I met Neil Patel. I met Neil Patel online. It's basically like online dating. But no, I read his blog and reached out to him, and that's how we started talking. What's a— should we save Joseph Michaels? Could you break down the work your agency performs in-house versus what aspects of the business you outsource?

We do everything in-house. I'm assuming you do too. We don't really outsource anything.

What is the method?

And the reason being, Joseph, if you have an agency, what you'll find is you can try outsourcing, but things start breaking down and you won't do as well and produce as good results. It's just easier to bring things in-house. Sometimes you outsource some things like writing here and there or whatnot, but in In general, you want to try to do as much as possible in-house.

Yep. Kevin King, transcriptions to videos, I use Rev. That's rev.com. You can use Amazon, has a transcription tool. It's very cheap right now. We just haven't gotten around to it yet. It's, it's, but it's way cheaper.

Is it way cheaper than Rev?

Way cheaper.

Really? I'll have to try this out.

Yeah, you look into it. Let me know how it goes.

Well, we use it for languages.

We have?

Rev Automated, and it's been great.

How much is it?

Way better quality than Amazon.

Really?

Yeah. 10 cents a minute. Because Amazon transcription services, if I'm not mistaken, they use machine learning. They don't use humans. Yeah. And we did that for like thousands and thousands, not even thousands, I think millions of terms, and it didn't work out as well as we wanted. Yeah. But I never knew that Amazon has a manual translation process. So we've only used their automated.

It's automated.

Yeah, it's automated.

But Rev has an automated one that's a little bit better.

Yeah. Yeah, check out the Rev automated one over Amazon.

Any LinkedIn questions before we go?

How many people are live?

I don't know. 40 on YouTube.

We had 40 concurrent.

We had like 250 sessions on YouTube. Yeah. And LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, the most we had was about 30.

30, I guess. Cool. Is it better to use email traditional or email campaign to promote a product?

You can do either one. If you're doing email, like emails in general, it's better to use it than not use it at all. But when you're using emails, consider adding it to your drip so that way you're constantly promoting. And then you can do segmentation or leveraging marketing automation, which if someone buys this product, then send them offers for these other products because they're related and they would be ideal upsells.

Yeah. Final, I'll answer the final question here. So it appears that YouTube analyzes voice content and videos for copyright issues. Do you think that plays into SEO also? I would say probably don't even think about that that much.

It does, but they prefer the manual uploaded SRT files. So try to do that first.

Yep. Okay guys, that is it for today. Have a good weekend. Be safe, have fun, and get a lot of sun.

Thanks for attending and watching.

Goodbye.