Neil Patel says he'd build a business from scratch using content marketing, the cheapest way to compete. He points to Dr. Axe, who built a $100 million business through relentless content creation. In cannabis, where paid ads are restricted, Patel emphasizes SEO and brand queries to signal credibility to Google.
For Neil, if you woke up broke and with a clean slate, how would you restart your business?
I wouldn't restart my business. So don't get me wrong, the money's good, the life's not bad. I think I could have done well in like finance, like investment banking or private equity or anything like that. But here's the thing about entrepreneurship, it's a lot of tough hours. I don't mind it because I really do love it. But the reason I say I wouldn't do it again is if I had kids or something like that, I would want them to have a life where they enjoyed it. Travel the world, go do whatever, go save some lives. Life isn't all about making money. When I grew up, my parents told me money makes you happy. Even though they're the ones who said, save money, you don't need a lot to be happy. They're the ones who said, the world revolves around money, go and make it. And of course in an ethical way, but just keep at it. So I wouldn't start over. If you told me, hey, you have to answer that question and start over, I would do something around content marketing. It's the cheapest way to compete with these multi-billion-dollar companies. Go create content on anything you're passionate about and you can crush it. For example, one of my friends Mike runs a site called Dr. Axe. Dr. Axe is a chiropractor, talks about nutrition and health. Gets over 20 million visits to his website. He's not the richest person in the world. As you guys all know, chiropractors don't make a lot of money and they all have debt. When he started out, wasn't doing that well, but kept at it with content marketing. Now he has a business that does over $100 million a year that's not venture funded, all because of content marketing. Most of the companies that I know that have skyrocketed in growth, in large cases, not those odd ones like the Ubers or the Dollar Shave Club, A lot of them did it through content marketing. There's a repeatable formula with it.
Great. Next question. Oh, I like this one. When it comes to businesses in the cannabis industry, they are very restricted in terms of paid advertising. For example, Google and Facebook, etc. So they rely heavily on SEO. Are the methods/strategies to maximizing SEO efforts any different in that industry compared to everything else? So I'll answer that because we have a client in the cannabis space. Yeah, their office is pretty cool. They have money counting machines and weed everywhere and security guards. They actually rely heavily on SEO, but I'll tell you what else. Neil and I talk about this a lot on the podcast. They're based in San Francisco. Their ads are plastered everywhere. We're talking billboards, we're talking on buses, things like that. Neil and I talk about the power of brand all the time when it comes to SEO, brand queries being really exceptional when it comes to driving things. I'll let Neil elaborate on that.
Yeah, so the big thing that people forget about online marketing, Google's trying to separate the crap from the good stuff. There's a quote from Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, who said something like, and I'm going to butcher the quote, brands are a great way to separate like the junk from the cesspool or the good players from the cesspool or whatever. I don't know what he ended up saying. But the point he was trying to make is Google looks at how popular a brand is Because if a brand is really popular and people keep typing in a brand name, EX being your domain name, that means you should rank higher because you've built up credibility.
Great. And Neil, what do you and I do all the time? We look at what?
Google Trends. Google Trends shows you the popularity of your brand. Go to google.com/trends, type in your brand name. Hopefully your chart just keeps going up and to the right.
Great. We're doing Marketing School Live here in the Cross Campus building in downtown LA. And it's a chance for us to get to meet our fans, over 6 million downloads. That was after, what, a little over a year? Yeah.
