In this interview‑style video, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss practical, long‑term content marketing tactics that drive traffic without requiring massive daily output. Siu opens with the concept of content decay, likening neglected content to an untended garden and citing Wikipedia, Yelp, and TripAdvisor as examples of sites that stay fresh through constant user‑generated updates. He recommends regularly auditing top‑performing posts (using the free ClickFlow "content decay" tool) and adding new paragraphs or sections every few months to preserve the SEO value of the 80/20 traffic drivers. The conversation then shifts to how high volumes of SEO traffic can be leveraged beyond rankings. Siu explains that visitor IP data can be enriched (e.g., identifying corporate IPs like Coca‑Cola) and fed into a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to automatically populate sales sequences, turning organic traffic into a low‑overhead sales engine. Siu contrasts SEO with social/video content: for SEO, focus on fewer, ultra‑high‑quality pieces (home runs); for social/video, produce more frequent, good‑enough content (singles) because algorithmic preferences are less predictable. He underscores the power of consistency, citing the daily "Marketing School" podcast that has never missed an episode in four years, and how that relentless cadence compounds audience growth much like SEO does over an 18‑24‑month horizon. He also shares a growth hack used for his "Leveling Up" podcast: daily up‑voting on Product Hunt’s podcast section to dominate the rankings, a tactic that eventually led Product Hunt to remove the feature. Finally, Siu plugs his "Leveling Up" book and website, encouraging viewers to learn more. Overall, the video delivers a mix of strategic mindset (treat content as a garden, think long‑term), concrete tools (ClickFlow, CDPs), platform‑specific tactics (UGC sites, Product Hunt), and the importance of consistency in both SEO and podcasting.
Chapters
What tends to happen over time is if you don't tend to your garden, right, things start to get unruly, right? You know, the kale starts to go everywhere, the carrots, and I don't have a garden, I'm just making things up. But, you know, the point is content tends to decay over time if you're not upgrading it. So one example of this is Wikipedia. So Wikipedia, they had this page on Abraham Lincoln over the years, like it first started out with 5,000 words, there was 8,000 words, and now it's like, you know, 15,000 or 20,000 words or so. Point is people are constantly updating the content over time, and Google likes freshness, right? We just use Google as the main search engine. But also, if you take a look at Yelp or you take a look at TripAdvisor, you have a lot of UGC, user-generated content. They're constantly updating it for the website. That's how they get stronger and stronger. It just kind of defends their kind of organic search moat. So what you could do is you can use whatever analytics tool platform you have and just look at your top posts over time and see if they're losing traffic, right? We actually have a tool that's out there for free. If you just Google ClickFlow content decay, it's totally free and it'll actually monitor like when you're losing like, you know, 20%, 80% of your traffic. The whole idea here is that if you have like a top 10 or top 20 list of posts, because 80/20 rule, the top 20 would drive the 80% of traffic. You don't want to lose that traffic. So what you're doing ideally is maybe you're adding, you know, maybe a paragraph or even more content to these, you know, every couple months and you're tending to your garden. People just like create content. The problem right now with SEO is like, Create a million-plus blog posts a day and we're just going to leave it, right? It's like you don't buy a car and then you drive it for 2 weeks and you're done, right? It's just like you want to make the most of it.
Let's say you create a ton of social content.
You have a lot of videos.
You have a lot of concepts too from your training programs and everything. What's to say you can't have a lot of it out there for free in long-form format and then people will find it? Algorithms will find it, people, and then you'll get the traffic from it. And then from there, okay, from the SEO, right, you're writing long-form content. A lot of people miss out on the fact that if you have a lot of traffic come to your website, you have a lot of data, right? And what does that mean exactly? That means I can enrich data, IP addresses visiting my website. So let me know if I'm getting too far in the weeds here. Not at all. So if they're coming to my website, if I see like Coca-Cola's IP address or NASDAQ or whatever, I can enrich those IP addresses And then I can automatically dump them into a sales sequence and start reaching out to them. So I don't even need a sales team at this point. If it's a smaller company and I just use a tool like this, this is called the customer data platform. A lot of people, they don't, they don't know how to combine these things. If I get a lot of SEO traffic coming to my website or just a lot of traffic in general, I can use a CDP, a customer data platform that will have all my data sources talk together and boom, guess what? All of a sudden I have a sales machine. I'm personalizing things without having to add a lot of overhead.
And so with SEO, my opinion, I think if you're in a really competitive niche is you go for super high quality and, you know, maybe not as much frequency. I think on the social side, when we're talking about video as well, you are okay with a lower bar, maybe good quality, but you want to go for higher output because you don't know what the algorithms are going to favor. So you want more at-bats here. You want to hit more, aim for more singles. And I think when you're When you're on the SEO side, we're going for that. You want to aim for more home runs. The reason we decided to make Marketing School daily, and we didn't want to make it an interview podcast, is because nobody was doing it that way. So who else is going to do it daily? And the thing is, we have never missed one episode for 4 years. You know, it doesn't matter. Like, there's been times where I'm sick. Neil almost never gets sick, but we power through it anyway. I might have a fever or whatever. Actually, I don't think I had a fever for a long time. But, you know, case in point, the main point is, You know, we power through it. So the consistency alone, we just see it continue to build and build and build. It stacks. I think even without hitting our email lists, the podcast would have continued to grow. And what I would say is, because you're so consistent, people can't help but to, to talk about it, right? It's even the people that hate it too. And then just over time, you know, it's the same thing as SEO. SEO takes, to me, You know, if you're starting from scratch, it's like an 18 to 24 month journey. Um, I basically saw the same thing with podcasts too. So it just takes time to, to compound. So I don't really necessarily have a hack for you. I might say, oh, you try this and try this engagement pods or whatever, but I've tried all the, the low quality stuff in the past. It just doesn't work. And plus it doesn't feel right. And generally the barometer for me now is if it doesn't feel right, just don't do it. It's, it's really, I'm just good at the long-term stuff.
That's what it is.
Like I've tried paid media, I've tried contests, I've tried all these things, just doesn't work. But there is one other thing. If those of you that want to hack, when I was struggling with the Leveling Up podcast, Product Hunt had this podcast section and you could actually upvote podcasts. So what I would do every day is I would throw up Marketing School and I would throw up Leveling Up and then I just had my team go upvote it. Fire them up. Yeah. And then we'd be number 1 and number 2. Every single day. And then they took it off. I'm pretty sure they took it off because of us, but that's what happened. I get it. Don't forget to check out the next video over there.
Okay.
Over there. And before we go, open a new tab, levelingup.com to learn more about the book. We may or may not have other goodies tied to this book. All right. levelingup.com in a new tab. You can check out the next video first in a new tab and we'll see you later.
