The Ultimate Back to Back Business Growth Strategy Session (2 Hours of Marketing Advice!)

Hello. Welcome.

How's it going?

Good, how are you?

Good.

Wow, the empty desk.

What empty desk?

People work from home?

People are— yeah, people are working remote. People are like in the conference room.

I love how you put like goldfishies and pretzels out.

Yeah, here you go. This is yours too.

I don't eat goldfishies, but I can eat cauliflower.

All right.

Oh yeah, that's right.

Although goldfishies sound the best, to be honest.

Goldfishies are the best. Um, I think we're streaming now. We need to wait for Noah to come in.

He's like being—

um, yeah. Hello everyone! Guess we gotta move this closer. Can you guys hear us?

It's like so delayed.

It is delayed. Yeah, it's like a 10-second delay.

Yeah, that's huge.

Today I'm working on a new client's Thought it a bit different. Oh, here it is. I wonder if you can let me—

is there a—

I like the power of this joint, you know?

Uh, could you give it to me underneath? Yeah, I put in a bunch of topics.

Damn it, can't like—

I can't find power. So legit? Cauliflower pretzels?

Are they good?

Mmm, you wanna try some?

Nope, that means they're not good. That means they're not good. Snack Nation, guys! Snack Nation!

I don't know why I keep eating them.

Because you have nothing else to eat. Do you want tea or anything? Guys, we're just waiting for, uh, we are live right now. We're waiting for, um, Noah to come in to help us, um, because we actually got to record the podcast too. But, uh, yeah, we're live for the next 2 hours. Um, Dynamic Designs Limited says, hi Eric and Neil, love your podcast, audio is good. Anand says, hi Eric and Neil. Chris, any recommendation on what automated systems to have in place if you're just starting an agency such as HubSpot, Infusionsoft, etc.?

What's your Wi-Fi password?

Single 36— how do you not have it? Single 3630 with a capital S.

Single?

Single 3630, like a suite number, capital S. Don't jack my Wi-Fi, guys. And I'm gonna go live on Instagram. Is it this way? It's this way, right?

Yeah, we might not be able to see both of you though if you do that way.

That's fine. Yeah, we just need Eric in it.

Go live.

Podcast ideas are in here, so if you want to look at them. Okay.

Live. Oh, actually I might be able to get both.

I got a little bit of both of us.

Just like the size of your head.

Which one? Neil's golden head.

Mine's small.

Yeah, if you lean in close, it'll be everybody. Eric leaning in, it's me, I'm lazy.

These are really delicious, you wanna try some?

I've had them before, they're good.

He's not actually saying they're good.

It's an acquired taste. I haven't quite acquired the taste yet. You wanna try one?

It's delicious.

No, no, I'm out. There's a couple people that I'm on a fast till 12:30, so I want to eat these, but I can't. I've been eating like garbage the last few days.

Let me just get the wow!

I haven't had one of those in years.

It's good, right?

Yeah.

Better than that, right? It's not even a question. Janice says glad to have you in the live stream. I listen to your podcast every Sunday. Hongquan says what up? Ash Winnie says, first time I see you on live show, it feels amazing. Mike says, yo Neil, doubt you remember, but haven't forgotten about that image quote I said I was going to make you. There you go, someone's offering you free stuff.

Appreciate it, Mike.

Simran asks, when is the event in LA happening? Maybe we'll give you an update on that today because we might talk about live events in the podcast, but Just to give you a preview, probably sometime in June.

Yeah.

Are we ready?

Um, yeah, you guys got your topics all set up?

Are you good on the topics? I'll modify them, it'll take me like 5 minutes.

Alright.

You modify, I'll just sit here and talk to people.

Cool.

Yeah, that works.

Check, check, check. We fixed the mic too.

Alright, so those are armed. Changing the input to input 1.

You guys keep asking questions too. Neil's busy. Okay, so HubSpot, Infusionsoft, etc. I would go Drip, that's what we use, but Neil likes ConvertKit. Which they're doing $15 million a year now.

ConvertKit?

Yeah.

Nah.

Yeah, they just— Nathan just tweeted the other day, they're at $15 million now. Amy says hello from Petaluma, California.

You wanna tell you what ConvertKit's really at?

What?

Don't they have their bare metrics?

Yeah. Yeah.

That has lost value.

Yeah.

I check it at least like once every other month.

Joseph says, make my brain hurt.

Maybe they are.

Yeah, they hit 15.

Good for them.

There you go. What kind of SEO tool does Neil use on his website? I'll sell it for him. Ubersuggest. He uses Ubersuggest.

Thank you, Eric.

I knew you would move the tools one up.

You know I look at the Libsyn stats so often.

I do too.

The good thing is I thought it was going to trend like down significantly, but it hasn't.

Yeah.

By the way guys, to throw our next event, we need 2 million downloads a month.

Yeah.

Every million, we'll throw a live event. Are you ready?

No, every double. So from 2 to 4, 4 to—

Yeah, there you have it. And then the event will double in size too, to a certain amount. Can't have it be too big.

Yeah.

We're gonna start it and keep adding more.

Yeah. Ready when you are.

Yeah, just making sure all these are good to go.

Dude, what does need a growth marketer do?

So literally every person I talk to at TNC, everyone's looking to hire a growth marketer, right? They just don't know what to do. Literally, like Sayed, all these other people.

Sayed is looking to hire a growth marketer?

Mm-hmm.

Why?

Everybody is. Like literally you go around a table during like any meal, it's like, need a growth marketer, need a growth marketer. Guys, if you're a really good growth marketer, let us know. Introduce you to some people. Get you some good paying jobs.

How's TSE?

Dude, I went on a boat for Sunday and then I left. I left. I got back yesterday morning or yesterday afternoon.

So it was like quick.

I didn't get to see Mike. Mike's like— Mike was like, you didn't see Neil's other half.

It's okay, I don't see Mike often either.

Yeah. Nah, that's sharp.

I think we're waiting on some tech.

Mike, I got a present for you.

Not Mike.

You got Mike.

No, that's how you miss Mike.

Just waiting on some tech here.

Don't worry guys, we're gonna start in like 2 minutes. Sit tight. Go take a pee break if you need—

oops.

Go take a, um, go get some coffee.

Did you say go take a pee break?

Oops.

Or poops.

Oh, I said oops. No, because I hit my, my ear over here. Oh, also, if you guys have some topic ideas, drop them into the chat too because we can actually choose. We could crowdsource some topic ideas.

Can I pull this or am I going to break it?

You can pull it. Pull it. Yeah. Just don't hit the monitor back there. I'm just going to restart my machine. I'm getting some glitches here. Oh.

You did this last time and I forgot about it.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I'm just going to restart everything. OK.

Cool, guys. Give us 2 minutes and we'll get going. You sure you don't want like another snack?

No, no. I'm good.

I'll get you something else from Snack Nation.

OK.

Be right back.

No, I'm good.

I don't need anything.

So your name's Noah, right?

That's right.

Just making sure.

Yeah, no, you got it.

So how long have you been working for Eric?

It's been like a year and a half already.

Guys, guys, watch this. I'm gonna teach you how to poach employees. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

There's no camera over there.

It's not on yet?

Yeah, it's not on.

The camera's coming out of there.

But yeah, no, it's been a lot of fun. So we've been— it's been good to just see the growth, you know, little by little.

The growth in what, the company?

Yeah.

I didn't know if you meant growth in that or growth in views. I know you have both.

A little bit of both, yeah. It's been a very slow climb with the views. It's been good. It's been really good to just see a lot of like the, the regulars coming back in, you know, and just like growing the audience and the community and stuff. Okay, now we're talking.

It's like you're on a flight right now.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm ready.

Alright, let's get this queued up.

I saw J. Cron. How's he doing? I saw a lot of people. I didn't get to say hi to him, he was talking to someone. Do any of your clients use HubSpot CMS? Yes. I can't figure out how to make the H1 and title tag for search different. I don't think we can help you there, Poof. I don't— I use HubSpot for ClickFlow, but we don't really use it a lot, so.

I use it as a CRM instead of a CMS.

Yes, I use it for CRM, that's right. How did you get into digital growth marketing, Eric? You went to school for econ and history.

Oh wow. Okay.

Remember that.

Now I've got some action here. Cool.

Good? Simran, if you have teenage kids— actually, you know who's about to have a kid? Who?

Me?

Anyway, so look, I never knew what I wanted to do when I was a teenager. I didn't even know what I wanted to do when I was 20 years old. I didn't even know what I wanted to do until I was like 24 maybe. And you know what I did? I was reading a lot of blogs and I was reading Neil's blog, Quick Sprout, that he no longer is part of. But yeah, reading a lot, learning a lot. Failing a lot. Yeah, just go out and try stuff. Don't try to— I would say don't be like an Asian, like a Chinese parent where they try to make you become a doctor, lawyer, engineer. Because, you know, a lot of people are like that right now that I know and they don't like their jobs. And guess what? Wasted all the money on tuition. Wasted all the money pursuing a path they don't like. So any plans on Single Grain to expand to Canada? No. But you know what?

No, no, let me rephrase the answer for—

let me answer for Eric.

Potentially, if you're in Canada or you want to be a client, let him know.

If you got a billion-dollar budget, I'm in. Are we ready?

Yeah, let's do it.

Alright, cool.

Rolling.

Rolling? So I don't need a clap or anything, right?

No, we're just gonna do the countdown. 1, 2, 3.

Okay.

And we'll go from there. 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 7 new marketing tools that will help you dominate in 2019. So number 1 is the new and revamped Ubersuggest, which I'm actually gonna let Neil speak to. What's new about Ubersuggest?

We now have a traffic analyzer. In there you can actually go put in a URL, and when you put in a URL it tells you All the traffic that your competitors are getting from Google, their top pages, their backlinks, it pretty much has everything that you want to see without paying for it.

Great. Well, number 2 is you.

Oh, thanks. Number 2, I'm trying to think of like a brand new tool that's come out in the last few months.

You can repeat because people don't know about a lot of tools we talk about.

That's true because I'm like, I don't know of any crazy new tools that have come out in the last few months.

Do you?

There's not really too many. So a tool that most people aren't using, although it's old, but no one's using this feature, it's called MeetEdgar. And what I love about MeetEdgar is in social media, it's getting harder and harder to get more traffic. Most people aren't going to see your content. Their algorithms are getting tougher. So make sure you use tools like MeetEdgar to keep scheduling your content and it shares it multiple and multiple times. It'll just increase the odds that you're getting traffic from your content.

Great. Number 3, I'm gonna give a shout out to Exit Intel. So it's similar to Bounce Exchange. Bounce Exchange, they will charge a couple of— what were you paying for Bounce Exchange? $4,000 or $5,000 a month?

Free.

Free. Okay, but usually it's $4,000 or $5,000 a month, I think, and maybe they have like a $2,500 version. Exit Intel is another kind of done-for-you pop-up service, for lack of a better term, but they will actually design the offer for you and And they will actually have like a customer success manager helping you with that. So it's basically a competitor to Bounce Exchange, but cheaper.

It's funny, I got an email from Bounce Exchange, they're like, oh, thanks for mentioning us on our podcast. Like, we do more than exit intent. They're like, do you wanna do a follow-up call so we can show you the new features? I was like, alright, why not?

So what did they add?

Oh, I don't know, I didn't do the call yet.

Oh, okay, great. So Neil, maybe we'll talk about that in another episode.

Yeah, 'cause I just thought it was an exit intent software. I guess they do more now. Next tool for you guys, LeadQuizzes. I've been using this a lot in 2019. It's been crushing it for me, in which if you're gonna collect email addresses, might as well drive people through a quiz lead flow. And when you drive them through a quiz lead flow, you can collect all the other information you want about that business. So now you'll know if the lead that you're collecting is even qualified.

Great. What are we on, number 5?

Correct.

Is that your hair?

No, I have no hair.

Oh.

Anyway, number 5. Number 5 is Whole.io or Segment. So you got 2 options here. These are known as CDPs or customer data platforms. The issue right now is, let's look at, you know, if you look at Neil, he's probably using so many disparate tools, different sources. Maybe he's using Salesforce as a CRM. Maybe he's using these email service providers, ConvertKit. He's getting data from so many different sources, Facebook ads too. But you have to have one source of truth. So using something like Whole.io or Segment.io, or maybe it's .com now, they allow you to combine everything and then basically you are able to segment them better and then tailor your messaging towards people that behave a certain way. That's gonna allow you to have much more targeted kind of outreach. There's so much more you can do with it. I do want to talk about Whole later because that's something we're actually trying out right now.

Number 6, ClickFlow. Google's looking at user signals more than anything else. SEO is becoming harder and harder each year. You want to make sure that people are clicking on your results over the competition. ClickFlow will help you do that by A/B testing your title tag and meta description tag.

Great. Number 7, right?

Last but not least. Alright, Eric, what do you have for us?

Last but not least, I'm going to give you— I'm debating between the 2 right now, but I do think—

What are the 2?

I'll give you 2. I'll give you a bonus, alright? So Outgrow, because Neil called me out. Outgrow, this This tool is from a guy named Randy Reyes, and what Outgrow allows you to do is it allows you to create calculators on your site. So let's say, you know, my site is a marketing site, right? Maybe I want to make an ROI calculator. Outgrow will allow you to easily make very functional calculators, and that's going to allow you to drive more leads. They can do a lot more than that. It's very similar to when you think about LeadQuizzes, they help you make quizzes to generate leads, right? This is going to allow you to make very functional tools to help you generate leads as well. So it just depends on the business that you're in. And then the other thing I'll say, the bonus right here, so this is, let's call this number 8 then. Number 8 is Datanize. So Datanize we've talked about, they were purchased by ZoomInfo, I believe.

Were they?

I didn't know ZoomInfo was purchased.

They were purchased by ZoomInfo. There's a funny story behind that one too, maybe we can talk about it another time if you guys actually watch us live. But so Datanize allows you, it's basically a web, they go around scraping the web to see what type of technologies are being added to certain websites, what websites are dropping technologies. If you see a website drop HubSpot, for example, and you're a HubSpot competitor, you can reach out to those people. Or if you want to find all the sites on the internet that are using Shopify technologies that have a certain Alexa rank, which means they have certain traffic, you can do that too. And the cool thing is, once you use something like Whole.io, you can combine it with— or Segment— you combine it with DataNice, right? You combine it with your Facebook audiences, you combine it with the email service provider, you combine it with all the disparate sources of data that you have, and then you just got this machine. And you're going to be able to step in front of other people, in front of your competition, and it's going to become a lot more powerful. So that is it for today. But guys, we are still— we haven't actually promoted this pretty heavily at all, but the live event, singlegrain.com/dtla to sign up for application. We are doing the event in downtown LA. We are now— Neil and I just talked to the event organizers yesterday. We're slating this for a June date.

June.

a June event in downtown LA, just for you all to know. So that is it for today, and I'll read and review the next one because I don't have it open right now, but we'll see you tomorrow.

Great. I forgot, I was like just like there with you and I'm like, oh yeah.

What do you mean?

They'll edit me out. I'm like talking during the podcast.

I don't mind.

Yeah, but why even edit it out? No, it's fine. I think it's fine.

Editing that out is a waste of time. I don't care, do you care?

I don't care.

Sounds great though.

See guys, in other words, what we're saying is when you're doing your marketing and you have like bloopers or small stuff like this, everyone wants it to be perfect, but being perfect doesn't matter because it's not really going to affect your revenue or your growth or your traffic. So let the bloopers be and just focus on growth.

True.

Dude, wow, we got a lot more reviews each time.

Do we? Uh-huh.

What are they at now?

What was it last time? 7:35. Last time was like 7:16.

Um, I'm gonna do it.

Oh, let's do this one, this one, and then 10 minutes. Oh, oh damn, I'm at 12%. That sucks. All right, we are ready.

All right. Cool. And Neil, if you do want to use the headphones, they're better now.

No, I just— I hate headphones.

Got it. Okay.

My ears are oddly shaped. Anytime I wear headphones for too long, it hurts my ears.

Okay.

Ready?

Uh-huh.

I guess this one's me.

Alright, and let's do it. So we are rolling in 3, 2—

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about a simple hack to combine Facebook ads with Google ads. So I was looking through Twitter yesterday—

Whoa, let's stop a little bit.

Yes.

What do you mean by combining Facebook ads with Google ads?

I'm about to explain that right now.

Alright.

I was looking through Twitter yesterday and one of our mutual friends, Rand Fishkin, tweeted something and I thought we'd share it here. And in the image, maybe I can pull it up.

Probably not.

I probably can't pull it up right now. So basically, here's how it works. It's— if you're spending money on Google Ads already and you're spending money on Facebook, what if you can take some of the unique modifiers or like when you're running ads on Google, for example, The URL will have GCID at the end, right? Which just means this click's coming from Google, and it's like identifying that this click is coming from Google, right? So you can basically take that that little let's call it a parameter. You can take that parameter and you can put it into Facebook when you're targeting and when you're retargeting people that have visited your website. You can target people all the people that have come through Google Ads, right? And what you're doing is You're targeting the level of intent. So if someone searched for digital marketing agency and they come to Neil's site, guess what? He can target those people that have clicked an ad for a lower funnel keyword like digital marketing agency or digital marketing agency case study or pricing. And then what happens is, well, guess what? You're using— you're targeting people that have interacted with you on Google, but now they interacted with you on Facebook. So that's another touchpoint right there.

Yeah, in essence, what you want to do is you want to get people to touch you throughout the whole web. In marketing, they say—

Yes, you do.

Rule of 7, in which if someone connects with your brand 7 times, they're much more likely to convert, remember your brand, build some loyalty to it. And you can do this more with just than Google and Facebook. You can do it with LinkedIn, you can do it with Twitter ads, and the list keeps going on and on. The whole key is whenever someone engages with you on one platform, and especially if they don't convert, but they've engaged with you and they showed some interest, it could be they were there for a few minutes, they went to a few pages, whatever it may be, you can then start pushing them on other social channels, get them to connect with you, and that'll help you keep building that connection, that engagement, that relationship with that individual, so eventually when they're ready, they'll convert into a customer.

Yeah, and the idea is that you're spending this money anyway, so why don't you try to get the most out of the money? Because these are— this is high-intent traffic, and this is, you know, middle of the funnel to bottom of the funnel for the most part. And to Neil's point, the rule of 7, I've been saying like this might even be like a rule of 14 now where they have to see you way more because the attention is just— it's so split, right? Actually, some of the people I'm seeing on the live right now, these are people I've interacted with in the past, right? Like this, our buddy over here, Han Kwan, says, how does Neil have such a perfectly shaped head? So like, you know, it's— that's like another micro-interaction right there. Like Han's gonna remember that. You know what I mean? Do you want to answer that question real quick?

I was born with it.

There you go. See, some things are very simple to answer. So do you have anything else you want to add to this? I think this is just something to try if you're doing both Google Ads and Facebook. A lot of people aren't thinking like this.

Yeah, you're not always going to find people converting right away. People need time. Sometimes they want to do their homework, competitive research, whatever it may be. Interact with them not just on Google and Facebook and combine them, but do that with all the social sites out there, all the platforms. And what you'll find is when you spread your marketing dollars on multiple platforms, your overall cost to acquire a user will start going down. One of our mutual friends used to work at Expedia and we had really interesting data in which when they started running things like television adverts, their cost to acquire a customer when they combined television, radio, TV, they all started going down by 10%, 15%, 20% throughout all of the channels because people were seeing them everywhere.

Yeah, that only— it doesn't just apply to paid, but like if you look at everything you're doing, like let's use Neil as an example. All the money he's spending on content marketing, all the— just that alone helps decrease costs too, right? So you gotta think about— we keep talking about omnichannel, we keep talking about content sprouting, whatever you wanna call it, it is important. Anything else you wanna add before I wrap it up?

That's it.

Alright. So guys and gals, we are doing a live event in downtown LA. We broke the million downloads in a 30-day period, so thank you so much for that. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla. We aren't really promoting it that heavily right now. Again, we are going to cap the attendance. We're aiming for June in downtown LA. I do want to start reading the reviews again, so if you guys would be so kind to leave a review. Someone actually left a review for 1 star and they said they want to be different. And I appreciate that, but maybe not so many of those because actually that's going to hurt. So Jack W.S.C.H. says, short, sweet, and packed with great info. You guys do an awesome job of packing in a ton of great info and tips into bite-sized podcasts. Love it. And also thanks to Neil for the Ubersuggest tool. Literally one of my favorite tools to use.

Thank you, Jack.

Alright, that's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.

Sweet.

Mike, you can leave reviews on iTunes. You can leave reviews on Google Play or Stitcher. Just wherever you listen. Yeah, Mike. Google Play will allow you to do it. Mike says we look like regular guys. I am a regular guy. No, he says that the mess-ups are relatable. Thank you for that. Okay.

Yeah.

Ready?

It's funny. I was actually asked yesterday. I was on interview and some lady is like, she's like, you impact so many lives. She's like, I just want to say. I'm like, not really, I'm just a normal person. I'm like, teachers impact more people than us.

Well, technically we're teachers.

Yeah, but like people who are educating like 5-year-olds or firefighters or policemen. I'm like, I look at what we're doing, I don't mean it in an offensive way to us, but just like we're not making that big of an impact compared to like some of the other people out there in this world.

I think they're making more of an impact at a personal level. I think we're making it more at scale. And maybe we should ask the audience that. If you guys think we are making it, if it's If you think we're teachers in a different way, leave a comment. Or if you think we're not teachers at all, leave a comment too, because we can get the real-time feedback here.

Yeah, either way, I think what we're doing is great, but, you know, I don't feel—

I agree with you.

We don't deserve a pat on our back. There's so many other people who work harder than us.

I agree. Ready? Let's do it. Alright, let's do it.

3, 2, 1.

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about 7 unconventional ways to generate more leads. So, I guess I'll go first because I've been talking about this and I don't think I've been— I've drilled it in enough. Having a customer data platform like hull.io, H-U-L-L dot I-O, or Segment is going to allow you to do so many things that you were— that you basically are frankly ninja. Like, if you talk about doing this stuff like 5, 10 years ago, it would have seemed unreasonable. But being able to say, okay, I want to be able to find people on my website that have visited from enterprise companies only. And I want to find all their email addresses and I want to drop them into a sales sequence and retarget those people. You can all do that if you have all your customer data from disparate sources combined into one source. And then you can, you hook it in and then you're able to basically create all these different formulas. Yes, it's a little techie, it's a little complicated, but if you're able to do that, let's say Neil's traffic is getting above 7 figures visits a month. If you're able to do that, you're going to be able to generate so many more opportunities that other people can't. And you're gonna be able to really utilize the data that you have because I think we're just scratching the surface. Like even what we have, we're at about 240,000 visits a month right now, which is decent. It's still a lot of data to use.

Yeah.

So when you're collecting leads, I mentioned this in one of the past podcast episodes, and this is a few episodes ago, leads is all about quality. You wanna make sure that you're getting all the information you need. And it's not just about collecting like 20 form fields. It's about doing it in a way where people don't feel like you're collecting it. So I love using tools like LeadQuizzes, which would be number 2 for us. And what LeadQuizzes does, it makes capturing a lead more like a quiz. More people are encouraged to go through, makes it easier, your visitor-to-lead rate increases, and on top of that, you're collecting all the data that you want. I'm really heavy on this. I do this as my exit popup.

But yeah. Actually, I've been meaning to go through that. You guys should go through that. Number 3 for me is personalization. So personalization meaning that, again, if you are able to use a customer data platform, so we'll use Drift as an example here. Drift basically, they realized when Delta Airlines visited their website and then they basically said, hey, we help companies like Delta Airlines. They personalized the chat, but you can also personalize your website too to say, we help companies like Delta Airlines. Actually, if you just, again, we'll go back to the example of Hull, H-U-L-L. If you go to their site hull.io, you can see, I see our logo in the middle and it's talking about how they can help single grain. That to me feels a little warmer and like it feels a little concierge-like.

Yeah. The 4th tool that I have for you guys is MaxMind. So Eric's talking about personalization. One interesting test that we ran, I don't know the conversion numbers off the top of my head, I do know it was more than 10, 11, or 12%, it was something more substantial than that. We started to include city and location within our copy. So when you're collecting a lead, for example, if I'm doing marketing services, I'd be like, hey, I'm Neil Patel, I'm looking to help a business grow. The only question is, will it be yours? That was one of my headlines that I used to use. People would fill out their information. I then ended up changing it to entering your city through MaxMind. So hey, I'm Neil Patel, I'm looking for a business in Las Vegas, Nevada, or Los Angeles, California to grow. Well, the question is, will it be yours? And that one little thing drastically increased our lead numbers.

I remember that. I didn't know it was called MaxMind. Yeah.

We're on number 5.

Number 5. So number 5 is MadKudu. So MadKudu is basically a lead scoring system. It basically uses machine learning to predict how likely someone is to be a high-quality lead, that's one, and how likely they are to convert. You can tie that in again with Drift, you can tie that in with Whole.io, you can tie that in with so many different tools, and it's gonna help you make better decisions in terms of where you wanna put your sales resources and where you wanna put your marketing resources.

Yeah, what are we on now?

Number 6?

Number 6, I love pre-filling people's information for them. So using API services like Clearbit, when someone comes to your site, you can try to help pre-fill some of the fields for people. Make their lives easier and your conversion numbers should go up. Yeah.

Number 7, I mean, I talked about drip, so why not— the funny thing is Neil and I, we both don't use chat right now. But live chat does still work for people.

It's just—

It slows down my site too much.

Yeah. That's why we— I think we both took it off. But look, for some businesses, it makes sense to have live chat. I just think from a services perspective, it does not make sense because you are looking to engage in a really high-level, high-dollar amount type of conversation. And again, we're We're sticklers about the site speed.

You know what I've been testing out recently? So you take a tool like MobileMonkey, you take instead of chat like Drift, you take Facebook type of chat, you collect a lead, and you're getting a Facebook conversation.

And you broadcast to them?

Yeah. So then I'll do an email broadcast when I release a new blog post, push notification, and Facebook Messenger.

The push notifications are subscribers, right?

Yes, I do all 3 at once.

So guys, check out subscribers.com. That's another one of Neil's tools. Anything else you want to add?

No, that's it.

Alright, that is it for today. But guys, we are doing the event, the Live Marketing School event. It's going to happen in June of 2019. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla to fill out your application. We're capping the attendee size, so probably better to get in now than later. And before we go, I do want to read another review. So, um, this person says, horrible podcast, 5 stars. Nick MHC, if you're a professional marketer, you should find a different podcast and not use anything these 2 guys say.

Winky face.

Basically, he wants to keep the tactics for himself, I think, which is smart. So anyway, that is it for today. See you tomorrow.

And thank you for the review.

And thank you for the review. Bye. Let's see. What is the URL of the platform? Do you upload the entire video after or only the edit pieces? Winston, we only— you only get the live video for this afterwards. It's not like we chop it up.

I hear you listening to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, just checking everything out.

Yeah, I like this.

MacKudo, you can tie it in with MailChimp and Constant Contact, I believe.

Worst case, you can do it through Zapier, if I'm not mistaken.

You're right. Uh, alright, ready?

Yes. Hi.

I think she was gonna bring some water.

Do we turn off the AC?

No, you can't really hear it, right?

Yeah, she's gonna bring in some water real quick. Okay.

You want water?

No, you want water.

Oh wow, I feel special. Kinda feel like a concierge here.

That's what I was saying.

And you got more water with that cup. I appreciate it, thank you.

No problem, no problem.

Who sent the note, Noah?

She asked, she asked, does he need more water? I was watching the live feed, so she—

Ready?

What's her name? She's awesome.

Hannah.

Hannah, thank you, Hannah.

Alright, we're 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 gonna talk about how to structure your content marketing team.

How do you structure your content marketing team?

Okay, well, I'll start first. And so you got 2 different perspectives here. Maybe we should talk about our content output first. So yeah, that'd be a good starting point, 'cause you got guys like Gary Vee that are trying to aim for like 80 pieces of content a day. So for us, in terms of weekly volume, we have this podcast which is 7 days a week.

Yeah. Right?

Then we have the Growth Everywhere podcast, which is one new episode on Mondays, that's an interview, so that's 8. And then you include my live videos, which are now part of the podcast, which has actually increased downloads, which you can see. So then that's 4 more pieces of content, so now we're at 12, right? 12 pieces of content, and then our blog, you add our blog.

Wait, how 4? Huh?

How 4? Because it's— I only go live Tuesdays through Fridays.

Oh, so you go live 4 days a week. Uh-huh.

What?

Yeah, I just talk about whatever, but it goes to the Growth Everywhere podcast now, and it's improved the downloads. We should make that an episode. But, and then you have— so that's 12 pieces now, and then you add in our blog, which—

Wait, but how much has it improved the downloads by, percentage?

Like 100%.

Seriously?

Double, yeah.

Good for you.

Yeah, thank you. 3 to 4 blog posts a week, right? So that's— we're now at 16. And then what else do we have? Videos, that's 3 new videos per week, so that's 19. This is not the live videos, this is 19 pieces of content. What else do we have?

All the social.

Social posts too, that's like 4 a day or whatever, right?

You do 4 posts a day?

Yeah, so what was that? 28 plus 16, what is that? 42? 44? Something like that, whatever. Yeah, so 44 a week, something like that.

You do way more content than I do.

But no, you're doing— okay, so let's go through yours now and then we'll talk about the team's. What's your content output?

Podcasts, so one a day, so 7 a week. One blog post a week.

How long is a blog post?

What do you mean?

Word-wise.

I don't go by words, I go by how long it takes me to write. The one I wrote this Saturday took me 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Oh, so you're writing again?

Yeah, I've been writing for a long time, forever. Normally a podcast won't take me more— I mean, a blog post won't take me more than 3 3, 4 hours. The hardest part with the blog post is coming up with ideas, so Grant, Mike, and I will brainstorm and then I come up— like the one I'll probably write this weekend is how to rank number 1 on— or no, how to find the right keywords to rank number 1 on Google for. So what am I at? 7 pieces of content. I release 3 videos a week. So 7, 8, 11, 12.

12. Instagram.

Carlos creates my Instagram content for me. I think he puts like 2 images. So maybe 13? And then any of the posts on the social web is just regurgitated, linking to the blog.

Instagram too, your Instagram is getting a lot better.

Yeah, no, but that Carlos creates no more than like 2 a week.

Oh, got it.

Because if he's posting a video, that's the same video from YouTube or whatever I'm filming.

Just chopped up, yeah, repurposed.

Yeah, so it looks like I'm Creating around 13 pieces of content max a week.

Somewhere around there. Well, now let's talk about the structure. Anything else you want to add from your side?

No.

Cool. So the structure of our team, so we have our head of content. That's the person that's able to kind of quarterback the executional pieces. And then we have our videographer, our producer, right? That's another piece of it.

Noah.

Noah, yes. And then we also have Hannah, who is now— she has just been promoted to full-time, so congratulations to her. But what does Hannah do? She handles social media coordination, right? So all the— she's quarterbacking the social media execution. Then we have an editor too that's been with us for 6 years. Her name is Selena. She's great, and she kind of makes sure that, you know, the blog is running right. So that's a piece of it. And we also have our stable of writers too. So these are writers that we've been working with for years too. So we probably have 4 or 5 consistent. And then there's kind of one level below that is the people that write guest blog posts for us. Is there anybody else I'm missing? That's it, right?

Contractors.

Contractors as in kind of editors for our videos and also designers as well.

You got a big team.

Yeah, but it's like a full-time and contract team.

So I have Pasquale, he's one of my contractors, he shoots all my videos. Podcasting, we're doing it in your office. So I have Pasquale. Grant edits my blog posts before they go live.

That's it. If you notice something, like even with our event that we're putting on, like that's a contractor too. So we have a lot of contractors that we use and it actually works out pretty well.

Carlos, who does my Instagram stuff, he doesn't spend more than an hour a week to create Instagram content, and he's someone who works for us internally.

Yeah.

But we don't really have a big team. If I look at— Grant doesn't spend more than 30 minutes editing my blog posts every single week. So the only real person I have on my content team is Pasquale, who does my videos. But yeah, you can do it. There's multiple ways Eric uses the approach of having people on his team. He has a much bigger team than I do when it comes to content creation, and it makes it scalable, hence he can produce a lot of pieces of content.

And we also want to get more aggressive too. We've been talking about this whole content sprouting thing where we do want to hit like 40, 50 pieces a day and just see what sticks. So there's that.

See, I don't do that because I find that it doesn't drive the volume.

Our traffic continues to grow, and I'm sure yours is too. Like, I think last month was like 20-30% month over month, and then it's still kind of maintaining right now. So if I can maintain that growth rate, like, keep doing it.

For social or for your website traffic?

Website traffic.

What's your website traffic at now?

So we're at 240 now. Last month was like—

240 uniques or visits?

240 uniques, yeah.

That's high. Good for you.

No, no, no, no, no, sorry. No, 200 uniques.

200 uniques, that's high.

Yeah, 240 overall, yeah.

That's how you do it.

But like when we're talking about this, like you go back a year ago in marketing school, it was like 70 or 80. Yeah, your growth rate is compounding, yeah. Anyway, so— Do you have anything else to add?

Well, no, we can talk about setting up the team. You can figure out whatever structure you want for your team. If you think about what Eric and I are both doing, we have one thing in common, we use contractors. It doesn't make sense to have a ton of people on your content marketing team full-time because they're not— there's not enough work for people to do full-time unless you're just cranking out like 12 blog posts a day or anything crazy like that.

I mean, when I first started at Single Grain, we like— when I started the content marketing program here, we literally had one writer that was cranking out all the content. And I think you actually introduced her, Sarah.

Sarah Rickard?

I don't know, that means someone else on my team introduced her to you.

I don't know, it was 6 years ago. But, you know, she would crank out the content. I was like, look, we want 2 to 3 pieces, and then she would just crank that out. And like, literally, that was it. We didn't even have a social media person, and we slowly built up. And I built up a team of contractors before I even decided to build out like a full-time team because I want more flexibility with the full-time team. And then also the collaboration and all that, the culture. So I just love that portion of it.

Well, and you also have to look at what you want to end up doing. So I have less people on my team. I'm creating more of the content myself. But the reason I do that is because my goal is to brand myself more personally and try to share my own stories. While Eric is trying to— he is also building a personal brand, but he's also trying to mainly focus on building the brand for his company and his agency. And at that time, doing it in a more scalable way is much easier, and hiring people helps a lot with that. If your goal is to build a personal brand, having a big team doesn't help as much because in The content's not gonna be as personal versus you creating it yourself.

Unless, unless you're GaryVee and the primary seed content is video because it's all him.

Yeah, and the video's more like documentary style versus him going—

But 99.999% of people aren't gonna do that. Yeah, so anyway, that is it for today, guys. We are doing a live event. It's gonna happen in June. Go to the application at singlegrain.com/dtla. It is free to come. We are capping the event though. It is going to be recorded for those of you that cannot make it. And I'm going to read one more review. If you like us, leave a review. If you don't, still leave a review. And Kaylin J says, great content, 5 stars, great content. I love getting the nuggets out of every episode. Thank you so much, Kaylin. Please leave a review if you guys would like to, and we will see you tomorrow.

Great. Let's see if there's more questions in here while you sort that out. Great.

AC is loud, guys. You can hear it.

Yeah, I think that on that mic.

Oh, on that mic? Okay, that's fine. Yeah, you guys are okay with that, right? It's not hurting your ears because The main audio for us for the podcast is going through somewhere else, so we're good on that. Nirav says, hell yeah, good teachers.

Yeah, I wonder if we can turn that off.

Yeah. It's a little aggressive.

Might as well. Hey Eric and Neil, do you offer internships in Los Angeles for college students? We both do. If you know—

You do in Los Angeles, I don't, but you should work for Single Grain. It's a great place.

Neil will also take good help too. He's being very nice.

No, no, we love great help and it would be an honor to have you, but we're not in Los Angeles. You're in Los Angeles is what I'm getting at.

Yeah. Oh, look at that. Oh no, I was just looking at him eat. I wasn't looking at that.

It worked? We'll see.

Simran, neither of us escalated the videos, the visits so quickly. If you look at Neil's growth rate over time, he's been in business for, you know, what, 18 years now? It takes a long time to grow traffic. I've been at Single Grain for 6 years. It didn't really start growing until the last like 2 years. Yeah. Well, Single Brain's always been growing, but percentage-wise it's not as fast as—

percentage-wise it's always been good, but the number hasn't been as high.

It's always been like consistent growth. I'm not good at the fast growth, like explosion stuff. I'm good at the boring growth.

Yeah. Okay, you guys ready?

Simran, you can email me. You can, you know what, you can email eric@simran.com. No, no, no. Island A.

He's like trying to figure out if he wants the email or if he wants someone else to get the email.

I just put the email in the chat so you can just put it right there for any internship stuff. Alright, I'm gonna restart and then we are ready to go, yeah?

Yeah.

Alright, let's do it.

Rolling in 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 how to hire a VP of Growth. But what is a VP of Growth, Neil?

A VP of Growth is someone who just tries to make all your numbers go up and to the right, in essence. And it's not necessarily through paid ads or SEO, it could be through anything. It could be optimizing your sales process, optimizing your product, referral programs, SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing. They're using whatever they can to figure out how to grow faster.

Yeah, and the reason we're talking about this is because all the friends that we talk to, mutual friends, they're always looking for a Eric, we need a really good marketer. We need a VP of growth, and everyone's asking us right now. So the question is, how do you go about finding a good VP of growth? I know a lot of good people, and I'm just trying to, you know, the first answer I'll give you to keep it simple. It sounds boring. It sounds lazy. But if you do know people that are connected in the space, you ask for referrals. That's literally what's happening right now. Everyone's asking for referrals, and that's one of the best ways to get hires no matter what, whether it's You're looking for someone to clean your house, you're looking for someone to cook for you, whatever. That's the best way.

So the way I would go about hiring a VP of Growth is go find all your competitors. You probably already know them. Now go on their LinkedIns and see who's working for them that has a growth title, or anyone in your space even if they're not a direct competitor who has a growth title, or anyone who is a VP of Growth of any type of business. You can set them up in buckets, typically 2 buckets, one people who work for your competitors. The second for people in your industry or anyone who's just in growth. And then I would shoot them a message just being like, hey Eric, hope all is well. I just want to introduce myself. My name is Neil Patel. I'm with the company X, Y, and Z, and you tell your story and be like, look, I know you're in marketing, you're VP of growth. Just out of curiosity, do you know anyone who would be interested in a VP of growth position at my And what you'll find is by not being too direct and not saying, hey Eric, can you work for us? You'll get a lot more people who will be like, I don't know anyone, or I do know someone, but hey, I'm actually interested myself, would love to chat with you. And that is probably the best way. Now to give you an idea, and I hate to keep rambling, I'll let Eric go after this.

That's good.

To give you an idea is we're looking for salespeople In one of our offices. And I did a test where we went out there and I posted on my Facebook and LinkedIn. I even did a LinkedIn job listing and we got hundreds and hundreds of likes on our postings, people commenting. We had more people that we ended up hiring— technically, we— I don't know if we even hired one or two people yet from my posting. But what we did already hire, I believe, 3 people from was my co-founder Mike did the strategy I'm just talking about where he went on LinkedIn, hit everyone up who had similar titles in other competing companies, and he just said, hey, do you know of anyone else? And X, Y, and Z, and just had his whole spiel. And I kid you not, we filled up more people from that than any other tactic. And it works not just for VP of Growth or Sales, it works for any job title.

And what's a typical question you would ask this potential candidate?

So if they're a VP of Growth and we're interviewing them, I would tell them all about my business and I would ask them, what would you do to grow the business? Here are my numbers, this is the number we want to hit at the end of the year, how would you get there?

Right.

And it's not even about them saying you can hit it or you can't hit it, you want to get their thought process and figure out What they would go through to get to that number.

Yep. I like that question. The way I start it usually is I'll ask them about their most impressive kind of marketing win. Just to, A, I want to know how they think about what they think is impressive. Are they gonna share metrics and what they've done? Oftentimes they're gonna kind of inflate things, but this gives me a chance to kind of go deeper. Like, okay, so you did this, like tell me what specifically you did. How did you contribute, right? Then I would go, personally, I would go to Later, like what would you do for us later? And then maybe there's a potential homework assignment. Now the danger, the dangerous thing here is, at least in the United States, you actually, unless you pay them, you can't actually get them to, you shouldn't ask them to do actual work for you. Because, right? Of labor laws? Yeah, labor laws, yeah. The other thing I'll say is this, one of our mutual friends runs this one company and actually the last 2 growth guys that he hired are referrals from me. Now, how did I find this guy initially? Well, I was reading— Neil and I will read good marketing posts, right? We look at kind of who's writing good stuff. Well, there's inbound.org, is now defunct, but you got Growth Hackers, you have other sites out there that you can find good stuff on. And this guy kept writing good content. And I was like, man, okay, can I reach out to him? I was like, hey, would you like to write content for us? So he started freelancing for us too while he's working a full-time job as a marketer somewhere else. Eventually, one of my friends needed to hire a director of marketing. Guess what? I referred him, he got that job, and I also referred him to my other friend, and then he ended up getting a job first for the first friend, and then he moved over to the second guy. But that was from one piece of content first. So for those of you looking to get into, you know, becoming this kind of, you know, mini brand to find like a good VP of growth job, create content. But for those of you looking to hire someone, go look at the people that write stuff because you can get their thought process. And a huge bonus for me, and we wanna do more of this, is to make sure that everyone on the team that we're hiring can write well. Because you're writing emails all the time, you're communicating all the time. If you can't articulate yourself, at least through the written word, or at least through content somehow, well then, well, you're gonna be behind other people.

Yeah, so that's how we would go about hiring a VP of Growth.

Alright, so that is it for today. We are doing a live event in downtown LA. It's gonna happen in June. It is invite— that's not invite only. It is an application process, so go to singlegrain.com/dtla. We are going to record it for those of you that cannot make it, and it's not— you're probably better off registering now versus later because it is going to become capped soon. I am going to read one review from our awesome audience. Ashley B67 says, a must listen. It's a 5-star review. This podcast is packed full of actionable content in bite-sized pieces. For a busy entrepreneur wanting to learn and implement, this is the perfect podcast to listen to daily. Thank you, Neil and Eric. Thank you, Ashley, and we'll see the rest of you tomorrow.

Great. Hey Eric, can you push that red button on the top right of the thing that says turn off?

Yeah.

That one. That's some broadcast alert. Yeah. Cool.

How many people are live?

It says peak concurrents 42.

No, I know, but how many people are right now?

I don't know. On our show? I have no idea. Uh, you gotta go on the public page, I think, to see that.

How do I do that?

Um, if you scroll down, and then you can—

This one?

Maybe right-click that out so it's a new window.

Right-click?

Yeah, open it in a new window. Where's that? Oh, maybe—

Copy video URL. Yeah.

That's a good shot. Ah, 28!

That's cool.

Not bad. Oh, look at my hair.

I still need to do a YouTube Live.

You do.

I've been so busy.

We could do simulcast with this. Um, all right, next one?

Yep. Okay, and ready?

How's YouTube treating you?

Good. Rolling.

Some water. Yeah.

And 3, 2, 1.

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 structure your SEO team. So previously, 2 episodes ago, we talked about how to structure your content team. So now we're gonna talk about SEO team. You're going first.

No, no, no, how about you break it down?

I went first last time.

Alright, you always go first.

I like it that way.

It makes it easier on me. So the way I structure my SEO team is region-based. So I create content in the US. I do my own SEO for my own site still. I don't have anyone who really helps me. Yeah, I'm actually a solo person when it comes to SEO for the United States for myself. And then internationally, we have people who duplicate what I'm doing. So we'll have one person in Brazil, we have another person in India for Hinglish for us.

Hinglish?

Yeah, Hindi/English. We have a person for German, we have a person for France, we have a person for Japan, although Japan content hasn't launched yet. But yeah, all the major regions that we target, we have someone that's non-English speaking.

Yeah, so I'm going to speak to this from the context of when I used to work at SEO teams. There's actually 2 companies. So one is, I guess it's now known as Defy Media, and then I think they sold or maybe they went bankrupt. But hey, you know what? They owned a bunch of sites like funnyordie.com, CollegeHumor, Break Media. So I was an SEO strategist there. So the way that was set up was there was an SEO leader and he hires the strategist, the strategist comes up with the ideas to execute on. And we had a tactician too. So the guy that worked under me is now like SEO lead at Twitch. So he like, he went from SEO lead at Yahoo and then he went to Twitch and I think he might actually be somewhere else now. So he's done well for himself. But anyway, so we had SEO lead, SEO strategist, more of like an SEO kind of executor or tactician who was, you know, doing the outreach or maybe working with editorial. And he actually managed editorial or worked with editorial. And that was just kind of collaboration because the editorial team at Break or CollegeHumor, they're just cranking out tons of articles every single day, right? But keep in mind, this doesn't relate to most people because this is a volume play and they're a publisher. But it is kind of good to know kind of what big company SEO looks like. I think we had a couple hundred employees. Do you have a question?

Yeah, well, most of these big companies, what I'm seeing is They have like an SEO lead or SEO manager, and then underneath them they typically have people who are in charge of content, social.

Right.

Someone who could just be like on-page, someone who's just in charge of link building. And it varies. You know, the thing when it comes to structuring an SEO team is you need to look at where are the gaps within your SEO. If you already are a big site like General Motors, you don't really need someone for link building. If you're a brand new site, you're going to need content, links, On-page SEO and social as well.

But you can still build a contractor team, you don't need to hire a bunch of full-time people.

Yeah, that's correct. You can use a lot of contractors to get things off and running. The big thing with structuring an SEO team that I found, and this is the gap that most people miss, and I also do have this on my team, we have someone who updates old content and they're full-time and that's all they do. What you'll find is when you do get good traffic, It'll die down eventually unless you keep updating your old content. It's a big misconception that in marketing and SEO you can set it and forget it. Just because you spent time to get the organic traffic doesn't mean it's going to stay forever. It's just like paid advertising, it may not go away right away but it does go down.

Yeah, what's the title? Because HubSpot does the same thing. I forgot their title. What's the title of your repurposer?

I don't know, I have to find out from Grant.

He's in charge of it.

But I think that's really important. One of my friends, They grew their traffic about 100,000 visits a month to about a million visits a month. And what they do, and actually we're actually trying this with Marketing School right now, is we will take— let's say this is every day, right? We might have someone write a blog post. This episode might become 800 or 1,000 words, and then we might check 90 days later to see if something's doing really well. And then the idea is that you expand it into, you know, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 words or so. That's literally all that he does. With his content, and he doesn't pay a lot for the 800 to 1,000 words. He just buys it in bulk. If it does well, he expands it. I just don't know what to call those yet. You don't want to call them content repurposers. That sounds kind of like, you know—

Yeah, no.

Content refreshers. I think that's what the title is.

Yeah, and what's funny is you used to post our marketing school videos on YouTube, right? You stopped doing that.

Yeah, we did.

Good for you.

Yeah.

It hurts your overall channel. I don't know if you knew that.

It does.

Yeah.

If you post too much and you're not getting engagement on certain things, because you have to remember that was audio-based, you're gonna end up getting crushed.

Which is interesting because— well, side tangent real quick. When I traveled to Japan, a lot of the people that listened to Marketing School watched on YouTube. So different habits in different countries. Take that for what it is.

You had Sujin in your office?

Yeah.

When?

A couple of weeks ago?

He didn't hit me up.

I'm local now. Anything else you want to add to this? I'll add to it. I mean, look, Neil's right. I mean, it depends on the stage that you're at, right? So in the beginning stages, heavy content, you are going to have to think about links. But if you are a General Motors or a Ford, you already have a ton of links pointing to your site already. The good thing about that is now you can just write content and it's going to start to rank much easier. That's kind of the whole idea behind this whole whole content marketing thing. It's not like all your content's gonna drive a bunch of leads for you, but it is gonna collect the links, which allows your middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type of pages to actually rank so you can actually drive more conversions. That's the whole idea, and people kind of miss that point even in 2019.

Cool, yeah, nothing else to add on my end.

All right, so live event, look, Marketing School Live, downtown LA, it's gonna happen in June. Application process, go to singlegrain.com/dtla to get in on the application. It is gonna be a free event, but we do We are planning to cap the event, and it will be recorded for those of you that cannot make it. And it's going to be live as well, just like how we're live right now. And I'm going to read one more review here. Swimmer 10 says, love daily releases, 5 stars. Thanks for releasing new podcasts every day. I love that they are to the point. Many podcasters drag things out with unneeded discussion mixed into the value, where you guys get to the points quickly. I wanted to recommend sharing a podcast or two around Writing content/blogs for boring industries and best practices for getting views. For example, I can only gain so much interest/blog views around access control systems, quote unquote, for the physical security technology industry. See, bet you guys started snoozing just from that line. Thanks guys. Yeah, I have no idea what to make of that, so thank you for that review and we'll see you all tomorrow.

And great.

Your YouTube growth is awesome.

Yeah, it's accelerating because what?

What's that?

Our YouTube growth?

What about it?

He said it's awesome.

Oh, thank you, thank you.

Oh, you're in charge of the YouTube growth?

Yeah. Good for you. Yeah, it's been slow and steady, you know.

As long as it keeps going up.

Yeah. A lot of experimenting here and there.

Sign up for a Rev.com account.

Do you have Rev? I have Rev.

Do you upload the SRT files to YouTube?

Uh, not the day it comes out usually.

You have to upload it right before it comes out. If you do that, your rankings on YouTube will go up.

Oh.

Because they do it based off the text and they won't use their own text transcription. Upload at the same time the video comes out. YouTube's first 24 hours, so in the first 24 hours, if you're screwed and you don't do something right, you're done after that.

Doesn't matter.

Thank you.

Are we recording?

No, we're not.

Come on in.

We were talking about you on the podcast. I heard it and I felt like I was famous for a second.

You were famous? Yeah.

Sorry, I was smiling.

Thank you.

Do you want one?

We want my buddy to just—

All right guys, great job.

There's 4 of them.

Oh, okay.

I think, right?

Right now?

Yeah.

There you go. Sweet.

Thank you. Sponsored by Earth Bar. Do you get them for free?

Hmm? Do you guys want lunch?

I just saw smoothies, but if you're strange, you don't want to—

No, no.

I'm good.

No. I'm good with this.

This is gonna be my lunch.

Oh, that's so good.

You're so thin.

Go for it. No, no. Okay.

And I have a quick question for you. I know this is a big favor. Any way you can give me a cup and only half this? Because I won't end up drinking it all.

Oh, there you go.

I don't want to waste it, you know what I mean?

No, no, no, actually, here, should I just have the other half of yours? Yes, do that. Does that work?

Yeah, that's fine.

All right.

I'm like, I would do it, but my cup has water in there, so I can't pour it in there.

Yeah, we'll cut it.

Okay.

Okay, thanks.

All the little challenges.

Uh, let's see, we're looking to hire an in-house marketer. We've tried Upwork, LinkedIn. I mean, just do what we did, Sebastian. Sebastian from Chicology. Oh, you know what? I'll give you a story about Upwork before we move on to the next one. I did freelance consulting, freelance SEO work when I was like 25 years old on Upwork. And then this guy offered me like, I think, $150,000 or $200,000 to move to Philly, but Philly sucks. And then he offered me like profit share. I still don't care. Um, and then—

That was a good paying job, it was high paying.

I don't wanna go to Philly.

It was high paying.

You pay me nothing, you pay me $55, I'll stay in LA.

What?

How much was he offering?

$150 to $200.

No, you had another one that was like $300.

That was in Texas.

Here, wait, come back, come back, come back.

He'll trade you. He wants to give you more.

More?

Yeah.

Oh my god, that's how you guys are all so thin.

He's like even worse.

I want the straw. 'Cause then it's more convenient.

Okay.

Oh, look at those chunks.

Wow, I love the chunks.

Yeah, that's good detox right there. Yeah.

Hopefully I don't make too much of a mess.

Yeah.

All right, you guys need anything else?

Give him a napkin.

He needs a napkin. I'll grab a napkin. I don't have napkins here.

I made a mess.

There's a microfiber cloth.

No, no, you want a knife?

What do you have a knife in here for?

Someone gave me a Cutco knife with my name on it, but I don't cook.

Dude, I want to see that.

That's really cute.

You want it? Alright.

Guys, here's a quick lesson on gifts.

I want the Cutco knife.

Do you really not want it? I don't want it.

I'll take it.

This is my baby gift for you.

Thank you. Dude, I'm so down. I want that.

Alright, I'm giving it to you.

Is that your Cutco knife?

Yeah.

It's now my Cutco knife.

I thought Cutco was like the people that went door to door. They do go door to door.

This is it. Oh.

But it's— they're really nice knives.

They're actually good?

And he's gonna take it though.

Yeah, happy wife, happy life, you know? We all love our Cutco. She's gonna be like, ah, I got a free knife.

I'm like, yep.

Yep. Thanks, Eric. And now every time he uses it, he's gonna be like—

Yeah, it's gonna be an impression every time. Yeah. All right, so, um, what were you saying? Oh yeah, so Sebastian, just story on that. And then that guy reached out to me actually a couple weeks ago He's like, see, like, you know, if we worked together, we would have built a much bigger company. And it's more like, no, no, I would have helped you build a much bigger company, bro. So anyway, actually they're doing really well now. So Upwork, don't sleep on Upwork. LinkedIn is great too, and LinkedIn's improved quite a bit. And like we said, like going to find people that are really good marketers but also really good writers, that's kind of the holy grail if you can do that. All right, so Yeah, Hongguan, you're right, Philly sucks. Uh, next one. Sorry for anyone that lives in Philly, it's just cold. Plus the Eagles suck. Um, all right, next one.

They won the Super Bowl.

No, they didn't.

That was last year. The Patriots won again this year.

No, I know, I'm saying, but Eagles won the Super Bowl.

Oh yeah, LA didn't win, but I'm not— I'm not— they're not that bad.

Okay, we're 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 talk about 7 hacks to boost your conversion rate.

So let's get started. Number 1, Eric's like looking at me and I'm like, because normally Eric goes first, so today I'm guessing I have to go first.

I can go first, here, I'll go first. So number 1 to boost your conversion rate, we talked about personalization. So personalization If you can somehow find a way to enrich, using the Clearbit API to enrich the traffic that's coming to your website, you can actually personalize saying, hey, we like helping companies like Delta Airlines, or we like helping companies like Coca-Cola, for example. And if you're able to personalize, well, guess what? Gee from Drift, he's known as the mad scientist, really good marketer, he did a personalization thing and their conversion rates actually shot up about 30%.

Number 2, if you want to improve your conversion rates, one thing that you could end up trying out is adding the city within your copy. So when we added the city within our copy, we noticed a huge increase in conversion lift. It was over double digits, so over 10%. For example, our headline was, do you want to increase your— or I believe our headline was, I want to help grow a business. My only question is, will it be yours? We changed it to, I want to help grow a business in, and then we entered your city, Los Angeles, California. My only question is, will it be yours? By personalizing your copy with the city, and we use MaxMind for that, we got a huge boost in conversions.

Great. What is this, number 3?

Uh-huh.

Number 3, don't sleep on site speed. There's a reason why Neil and I no longer have chat on our site. It's because it really screws up our site speed. And site speed, if you haven't looked at the study before with Amazon, I think they were talking about how For each second or each millisecond they lose, it's like a 7-figure amount, but obviously they're a multi-billion-dollar company. So something to consider, it's really important.

Number 4, everyone thinks about conversion optimization as just people on your website and how you can boost conversions. One thing we like doing is for all the people that don't check out or go to a lead capture page, you know, after they browse a few other pages and they don't fill in a lead, or, you know, buying a product, let's say it's e-commerce, we'll do remarketing videos for YouTube and Facebook, and we'll show them what it would be like if they converted, and the pitch is opposite. So if our web copy was logical, then our video copy was emotional. It's pretty much the opposite, and we found that to drastically boost our conversion. It's our highest ROI from any paid channel, is just remarketing from checkout or checkout pages or lead pages when they did not fully convert. And lead pages, you can do something really cool in which if they type in a few fields but not all of them, you can cookie them If they don't get there, then you can not cookie them.

I'm going to change mine just because you said something about retargeting. So dynamic retargeting, number 5. So let's go back to the Coca-Cola or the personalization example. If Coca-Cola visits your website, guess what you can do? You can actually use— combine it with a tool like Clearbit, find a bunch of emails from everyone that's on the marketing team at Coca-Cola. You can run a Facebook dynamic ad Have their logo in it. We help companies like Coca-Cola. Boom. And then they're seeing ads everywhere, right? But maybe not just as lazy as that, maybe you're adding value and you can find that maybe they visited your section on SEO, then you can send them SEO content. Here, here's really helpful SEO content for Coca-Cola, right? And then you can have like SEO plus Coca-Cola. Maybe not like that, maybe you probably still have to use the logo, but I'm getting a little too ahead of myself, but dynamic retargeting.

Number 6, everyone thinks about conversion optimization as A/B testing and analytics and looking at Google and figuring out where people are dropping off, but are you talking to people? The easiest way to boost your conversion rate is to just talk to your audience. Whether it's on the phone or SurveyMonkey, if you can get enough responses, I'm talking about 30+, and you start seeing commonalities of what issues people have with your site and why they're not converting, and you make those changes, that will drive you the biggest conversion lifts over anything else that Eric and I are telling you. It's based off of feedback and Real data. Remember, Google Analytics tells you only so much. Finding real valuable feedback from people will give you a world of difference when it comes to your conversion rates.

For those of you that are watching video right now, I'm actually having a testing process or a process where you can review and actually debate whether the merits of actually running a test.

Guess what?

So you can play planning poker, right? You can— this is usually for Scrum meetings, but like, you know, I'm showing you right now over here, you have numbers like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 21. Basically, a number like a 1 means the test is probably really easy to implement. So you see a little skateboard at the bottom, right? Drop it. Now, so what will basically happen is Neil might be holding a set of cards. I'll be holding a set of cards. Like, okay, how hard do you guys think this test is to run? Neil might say 1, and I might, I might flip my green card over and say 21, right? And the 2 people that have the biggest discrepancy need to debate over it.

Okay.

So Neil might say, I think it's a 1 because this, and I think it's a 21 because this. Then we'll do the— we'll play the poker session again, and then we'll flip over a new set of cards. But the idea here is that you actually have a process for it, and you have a process for planning, you have a process for A/B testing. It's gonna take you further than just saying, oh, you know, I got this gut feeling, and you know, I'm the highest paid person in the room, or highest paid opinion. What is that, HIPPO? But it allows you to be a little more scientific about it. Anything else? Was that number 7? That's number 7. Alright guys, live event, Marketing School Live in downtown LA, singlegrade.com/dtla to apply for it. We are going to be recording it live as well. We're aiming for a June date. We have talked to the event organizer, so we're very excited about it. In fact, we're very pumped. I don't think Neil and I would usually be pumped about doing a live event, but we actually are.

This is going to be fun. Eric and I talked about this over the last 3 or 4 days. We've talked about it at least 1 or 2 times a day.

Yeah, in fact, he called me like 3 times yesterday. Because you're so excited. So anyway, guys, I think we're out of reviews to read for the day, so leave more reviews so we can call out your name. We actually had someone tweet at us to thank us for calling out his name. So if you'd like a shoutout, leave a review, and whether it's good or bad, we will read it. That's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Dude, why'd you take away the goldfishies from him?

I thought you were— oh, like— I thought you were getting him to put it away.

No, so he can eat it.

He loves it. Oh, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. Yeah, I thought I thought he was taking me.

He thought I was trying to throw him away.

Yeah, because you keep throwing stuff away. No, no, that was empty.

The rest I'm just giving to him for him to eat.

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you were just like get these out of my face.

That's what I was doing. No, I thought you were being tempted by them.

I knew you were gonna eat the goldfishes because you you crushed them last time.

Oh yeah, last time I was hungry.

Now now I'm.

Oh, he can't eat goldfish.

I can't. Oh, Neil can't. That's bad.

Good for his religion.

You can't eat it? I can eat the blue one.

I can't, I'm lactose.

Oh yeah. There's cheese in them. We were thinking about changing our Single Grain logo to a goldfish. Were you really? No.

I don't know, some people could. That'd be cool.

Kind of got the same, you know, just gotta put little fins on it.

Planning poker, not affiliated. Buy on Amazon.

Out.

All right, what's the next one?

How to plan if your marketing fails.

Didn't we? We've done this so many times.

Yeah, but we've done a lot of things so many times.

Yeah, that's your business.

How about your business about to fail? What are you gonna do? How's the Instagram looking? You don't go look at it.

Oh yeah, just careful with that.

Oh, it's off.

Oh.

That's fine.

Was it even on?

Yeah, it was. Well, it says live video ended. 29 viewers, not bad.

Yeah, I think it, it, it has a limit for like 30 minutes and then you gotta Okay, fine, we'll do another round.

What's up with all the Pokémon and Mario? I still don't understand this.

What do you not understand? What's there to— what's there not to understand? It's the whole gaming thing.

Oh yeah.

Uh-oh, it's gonna fall. Like that?

Yeah, perfect.

I can't get both of us.

Just get you.

No, I'm gonna get you. The bald-headed god.

It is your audience, you know they want to see you.

Nope.

Okay, that's so much easier doing these Mm-hmm.

Plus you got this stuff too.

Snacks. Yeah.

The location is more convenient for me than the other one.

The last one was a bitch for me.

Oh, I know this one's more convenient for you.

Dude, the last one I was doing like the math. I'm like, fuck. I mean, freak. I was like, it's like 2 hours of driving each time, each way. So that's 4 hours gone.

How 2 hours each way? There's no way it's 2 hours.

2 hours total. Each time, right? And the time you have to spend preparing to go too, like what if I just wanna like, you know, chill. So, anyway.

Okay, you guys ready?

Ready.

Alright. Rolling, 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, well, If your business is about to fail, what do you do? You want me to start?

Yeah.

Sure.

So, by the way guys, Single Grain, when I took it over, was about to fail. And it was about to fail even more after the first year, dropped all the way down to 1 employee. So I know a couple things about about to fail. So one thing I did, and actually this has been articulated really well by Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures, founded Sun Microsystems, I believe, right?

You know him?

Yeah. Yeah. So look, I'll talk about what I did and I'll talk about—

He's Indian, of course I know him.

He's an Indian god. Yeah. So he— look, or what I did was I was basically mapping out, okay, what is the worst-case scenario? Like if this worst-case scenario happens, what do I need to do exactly? And I also had a normal scenario too. And I also had like a best-case scenario, right? So basically what I did was I said, look, if this worst-case scenario happens, I would have to cut all costs at this level. And I would have to maybe, frankly, I would have to lay off people, which we did have to lay off people unfortunately. And you know, there's like a, it's basically like an if this then that statement, right? So if this happens, then you're gonna do this. So you basically have contingency set up and you have, you have to have like a baseline too where, you know, if everything completely goes to crap, the market collapses, and then you know, you're losing clients, you're losing customers left and right, you have to have— Contingency plans, right? How are you going to cut your personal costs? How are you going to cut costs for the business where it's all, all the spending that you have is only for essential spending, not all nonessential spending. Let's say we're talking about like administrative spending. Probably a lot of your marketing costs are going to have to decrease quite a bit and you just got to focus on you hunkering down and doing sales. Um, and that's literally what I did to have to bring it back from the brink of death. Um, I'm talking about Single Grain here. And what I'll say about Khosla, Vedant Khosla, before I turn it over to Neil, is he has a blog, khoslaventures.com. That's K-H-O-S-L-A-A. Wait, K-H-O-S-L-A. Yeah, that's right. Khosla Ventures. And he's got blog posts there. And there's one called If/Then Planning. If/Then Planning. He's got really good posts on recruiting as well, gene engineering and all that. He's really thought it through. But if you read that, there's actually a video interview too on like what certain companies did to kind of help prevent disasters from happening, and I really recommend reading that.

If your business is about to fail, go look at your numbers. What's the thing that helped get your business to profitability, to growth early on? What did you do? What was the main things that people were paying for? So a lot of times businesses fail because they try to do too many things, and what I say is when your business is about to fail, go back to the basics. So if sales is what got you there, then go and pick up the phone as Eric mentioned and start selling. If your costs are too bloated because you tried doing too many things, it's hard, but you got to start cutting costs right away. You need to look at what helped you get to where you are, the good times at least, and try to replicate that. And go back to the basics. When things are about to fail, a lot of people try to do too many different things. They're like, oh, let's try all these things to try to get it back. Well, no, just go back to what was working before. And I know that sounds really simple, but it really is in many cases a simple solution. It's just that as entrepreneurs, we try to do way too many things. We try to get too crazy and too advanced, but hey, sometimes the ugly stuff that has helped us get to where we are today That's the stuff you need to be focusing on.

Yeah, I mean, so look, all the new projects that you're working on, all the new R&D stuff, you're probably gonna have to pause it. I like working on a lot of things. Neil works on too much.

Yeah, dude, Eric used to work on like everything under the sun. Old people's homes, uh, things related to like outdoors, all these other businesses. And I'm like, how many things is this guy doing? And the difference was he was spending his time. Like, I have a lot of But I don't spend my time on any of it. And now look at Eric. What are you spending your time on?

Marketing-related stuff like Single Grain.

And what else?

ClickFlow.

Okay, the same company pretty much.

What else? Single Grain, ClickFlow, we got the podcast creation stuff, content creation.

That doesn't count, that's all Single Grain.

Yeah.

Next. Exactly, Eric's focusing.

Yeah.

And that's the thing, he had this ADD where he was trying to do everything And his numbers also weren't as good back then. And his expenses were really high because he was burning money in all these places. You cut back, you go back to the basics, you'll do a lot better.

Anything else you want to add?

That's it from my end.

That's it from my end too. So guys, singlegrain.com/detla, the live event, Marketing School Live is happening. We've talked to the organizers already. There's an application process. We are going to record it as well, but we need you to apply if you're interested. We're just constantly repeating it right now. We literally aren't even really promoting this to our list right now, so we're trying to keep it small.

Yeah, and it's not even that we're trying to keep it small, we promised everyone on the podcast, the listeners, the people who've been there from the beginning, that we're going to do it for you guys. So we don't want to blast it to our list and make it where people who are listening to the podcast can't get in because of course we can't hold 1,000 people or anything crazy like that. So we want to make sure people who are listening to the podcast have have the first chance of getting in and attending it. And of course, as we mentioned, it's going to be free. We'll provide the food, the venue, and everything. You don't have to spend a dollar. All you have to do is just show up.

And the food's going to be Japanese food, there's going to be fusion, there's going to be tacos too. It's going to be very LA.

And there'll also be vegetarian, vegan. We'll have all the options as well.

Alright, that's it for today.

Goodbye. Lots of goldfish everywhere for everybody.

Yeah, we should work out a deal with them too. Yeah, so many people are willing.

Mountains of goldfish.

All right, what's the next one?

Should you diversify your business?

Go. I'm gonna move these over here. Grab a handful now.

Let me just have—

because while he eats it, while he's talking, and I just hear crunchy, crunchy, crunchy.

Let's see what people are saying in the comments. Island says, what do you think about paid free marketers Slack groups? Too much noise. The only helpful Slack group that's paid is Traffic Think Tank. That's all I'll say.

What? Think Tank?

Goldfish.

Traffic Think Tank. It's ran by Matt Matthew Barbee from HubSpot, another agency guy named Nick Eubanks, Good SEO. Now there's another guy that runs it, but literally our mutual friend Brandon Snapper, he went to their conference which is only like $50. He's like, best conference I've been to this entire year. He's like, they only charge $50.

And it's— what is it called?

Traffic Think Tank. So they share like the most kind of game-changing marketing stuff. They have really good speakers that come on. You pay like $119 a month.

Is it a membership?

It's a membership Slack, but it's actually really good. And you can, if you want to find talent there, by the way, if you guys are looking to report— report— recruit good SEOs and content people, go there. I love it so much that I got—

Are you a member?

I am. I got 2 of the people on our team accounts too.

And have you learned anything cool from it?

I have.

Like what?

I forgot already, but I have.

It can't have been that good if you forgot.

No.

I actually saved some of the Sebastian says both Neil and Eric are so generous slash givers. Thank you for that, Sebastian.

Appreciate the kind words.

No, trust me, it's good. I'll send you a video. It's like oh, that's amazing, but I forgot.

I just signed up for the Authority Hacker group.

Oh, join Traffic Think Tank.

Did you see the Authority Hacker ad? Oh, it was like this one thing that helped us like increase our Facebook traffic. One WordPress plugin that helped increase our traffic by like. 50% or something.

So I'm like, fine. So you signed up?

Yeah, and then I realized when I started responding as a comment, they told it to me for free, so I didn't need to buy the course. But I'm not one to refund, so I didn't care.

Traffic Anything.

Well, I'll check it out.

The thing is, we're too busy for it, which is why I got some other accounts, because there's just so much value that it's like overflowing. It's kind of like this podcast.

And all it is is just a Slack group and nothing else?

It's a Slack group, but then they have like monthly webinars and meetups and everything. Oh, the meetups are like once a year at the conference.

How many members?

Here, I'll show you right now. Guys, we're not affiliated with Traffic Think Tank, by the way, but like— so like, look it up. So all these people were messaging me because I was interested in like— look, there's 415 people in this content marketing room right here. Agency, I don't know how many people are.

How about all? Jump to—

where's all?

General? 536.

So they have probably 1,000 members?

I don't know, it's super active though.

Look at this.

What do they charge, $100 a month?

$119. You can get it— you can get it.

Per year or per month?

Per month.

It's expensive, but it's worth it.

It's just Slack.

Yeah, but it's the best Slack group I've ever seen. Like, if we want— hey guys, if you want us to do a Slack group, let us know.

Eric and I are opposite ends of the spectrum. He's trying to do like 50 different tactics or 50 different monetization methods.

See what sticks.

And I'm just like, nothing.

Um, so Neil owns Costla Ventures and Eric also owns— Neil definitely does not own Costla Ventures, at least not yet.

Oh, and I don't think I'll ever So Vinod Khosla was the founder of Sun Microsystems. He has substantially more money than me.

He's a billionaire.

Yeah, he's much better off and a lot smarter than I am.

Ready?

Yeah. Cool.

What's another title? Let's see.

Oh, I guess not quite ready yet. Love the prize. Where do they hold the event?

They hold—

Simran, they hold the event in Philadelphia.

Really?

Yeah. The place you said sex? Yep, yep. And then after he entered the event, I was like, oh, I should have told my friend to go to that event, the guy that tried to hire me. He's like, thanks, Eric. And I was like, oh yeah. Anyway, Sebastian says, I'm about to sign up for Travel Think Tank but slightly hesitating because so many apps/things that accrue. I think I agree with that, and if you're really busy right now, I would not join it because there's just— it's Flowing with value, like it's so much value that we're better off handing it off to people.

Yeah.

Um.

Yeah. What's more good titles?

We have some.

Yeah, I want ones that hit though. None of these will hit.

Well, what what is hit defined by? Like twenty thousand per?

No, like forty.

Have we even had one that's done? But that's over a course of time.

The book one did the best.

What book one?

Uh, how to something generate money from books without reading it.

Oh.

It's in our sheet. If you go to your sheet.

Yeah, but I want to see the downloads.

You want to log in to listen? I can tell you right now. I have it on my computer.

We're in.

Destinations, content.

I'm already searching.

Got it.

Bahamangrath everywhere.

Oh my God, this isn't working. Is it called book?

It's either book or read in the title.

Try read. Read.

Yeah, I'm seeing it's 21,000 is the highest one.

No, I found it.

Who is 1215?

Sorry guys, just coming up with some titles right now. This is how we actually do it. Bless you.

Thank you. It's because they don't have unique downloads since November 1st. Like, Ellipse doesn't have the stats.

Far back enough.

Yeah.

You get what I mean?

Mm-hmm.

That sucks, but what could you do?

Guys, drop some title ideas in too.

How SEO is dying and what you should do instead. That got released 1/22, 33,000 downloads. See, like, how often do you really need to blog? Like, I released 5/21.

Do you know we rank for Tai Lopez scam?

Do we?

On Google?

Mm-hmm.

Nah.

Do we?

Let's check it out.

No, we don't rank.

Hey, hey, how about how PPC is dying?

How paid advertising is dying.

There you go. Lesson right here: look at your data, come up with ideas.

What else? How often do you need a really long? How often do you need a post on Facebook?

There's actually volume for Neil Patel scam too. How often? There's also volume for Neil Patel net worth. Eleven hundred searches a month. I looked yesterday.

Is there another?

Huh?

I don't keep track of any of this. The craziest—

see the trend though? It's like all SEO stuff. Most of the stuff hovers around 18,000 to 19,000 downloads.

We need to get our download count up to like triple.

And to do that, we'll throw a live event.

If you—

we get there.

I know the guy that will throw a live event. 7 dead simple social media marketing tactics that still How about, so you got, how often do you really need to go live? How often do you really need to go live? Won't be popular, no one cares about live. SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO.

Okay, I got another one.

Do you even need to—

It's interesting because you put your sweater on but then it got warmer.

Yeah, just if I'm not moving around.

Do you even need a blog anymore?

Thank you.

That'll get us to 319.

That's not bad.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

I gotta crank more because I have travel coming, you have baby coming.

Yeah, I know.

I can also crank more next week as Yeah.

Can you?

So I'm in Vegas till the sixth. Oh wait, are you in Vegas?

No. Let's see.

So the best would probably be like the seventh.

Oh, you're in Vegas.

Yeah, I'm back on the seventh, so we can I can block out some time on the seventh.

Mm-hmm.

I could do seventh early.

Does that work for you?

Yeah.

I can do 7th early morning.

Okay, what time?

It'll have to be early because I fly to Austin.

Later than that—

How early?

Like, when do you guys start work? 9?

Yep. 9 AM? Let's do 9.

Alright, let's keep recording. We can at least get a handful more.

Nope, I don't even know why I marked them all as done.

There you go. Alright. Thank you.

Alright, here we go. Here we go, guys. Sorry for the intermission. Oh, okay, you'll see me eating.

Okay.

Ready?

3, 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 gonna talk about how paid advertising is actually dying.

And you guys are probably wondering, like, what do you mean it's dying? Google and Facebook keep making more and more revenue. It's not going away, their revenue isn't dying, but it's dying for businesses because the cost of paid advertising is getting so expensive, it's hard for businesses to generate an ROI.

It's whoever spends more gets to acquire more customers.

That's correct. And now you're seeing all these companies just acquiring customers and not worrying about if their customers are going to be profitable. All these companies are raising hundreds of millions in venture capital Just to keep trying to grow and acquire users and they're not worrying about profitability. And yeah, that's making Google and Facebook a lot of money, but that's also jacking up the cost. It's making it harder for you guys and even us.

Yeah, well, here's the other thing too. When you have a bunch of venture capital flying— venture cash flying into these businesses and they become so lazy because of all the cash that they have, they end up not really building a business. And what happens is when a downturn happens or when they really— when their business model actually starts to collapse, well, guess what happens? The fact that they relied so much on paid advertising means they haven't really built a business. And if you are thinking about profitability in the beginning, or at least think about operating a business and using the cash flow to grow your business, it becomes a different story because you are a lot scrappier. And then you are thinking about the things, doing the right things the right way instead of trying to, you know, think 20 steps ahead and just using money to cover everything, right? Because you overhire, you You overspend and then that actually leads to you losing your shirt.

Yeah, so here's the thing with paid advertising. It's going to become harder and harder, it's going to become more expensive. You need to start thinking about upsells and downsells. This doesn't mean you should shy away from paid advertising. You should add in the upsells and downsells so that way you can keep surviving, but don't rely on it as your only channel. Companies were built off of paid advertising and now it's really hard to do that. You got to diversify your marketing channels, take an omnichannel approach which Eric and I talk about all the time. But instead, what I want you guys to do is really add in the upsells and downsells and at the same time try all the other channels out there from SEO to content marketing to paid to social media marketing, you know, whatever it may be, inbound marketing, leveraging push notifications. And if you do that, you'll be better off because nowadays, I'm not trying to be negative But one channel isn't going to drive you the results that you want.

You know, the reality is that the United States is actually behind China right now in terms of how— especially in terms of consumer monetization. US is still ahead in terms of B2B. But if you look at how— there's a post, there's a video actually from Andreessen Horowitz, which is a venture capital firm, and Connie Chan did this one presentation about how the different— the business models differ. And if you look at how— if you look at the United States, the biggest companies, you got Google, you got Facebook, you got Amazon. Guess what? Amazon's actually the third largest advertising platform out there. Most people don't know that. And then you obviously have Facebook and Google, but they're all advertising attention-based platforms. Whereas you look at— when you look at like the big companies in China, you got Tencent, you got Baidu, you have Alibaba. There's a lot of these microtransactions happening, they're monetizing in different ways. So, you know, that is on the way here because, well, again, the United States is behind, right? Even the podcasting market, just to go on a tangent for a little bit, in the United States, the podcasting market is only $314 million. Now, if you go to China, it's $3 billion. It's because they're monetizing in different ways, and they know that paid advertising isn't the solution for the long term. Because what's going to happen is, Again, you look at Facebook, YouTube, why do we talk about live right now? Why are we even live right now? It's because it keeps you on the platform longer so they can run more ads. The incentives aren't matched towards maximizing kind of, you know, doing good things for human beings in the long term. It's just to maximize and take more attention. Netflix is an attention-based business too, so yeah.

Yeah, so I think that's pretty much it for this episode. Thank you for watching. Make sure you leave more reviews on our iTunes.

iTunes channel?

What do they call it?

iTunes—

iTunes channel? iTunes? Yeah, iTunes, Google Play.

I don't think it's called iTunes. Google Play, iTunes, yeah, it's not called iTunes channel, but make sure you leave more reviews on Marketing School on iTunes, Google Play, and does Spotify have reviews?

I don't know if Spotify has reviews, does it?

I don't think so.

You don't know?

No, but hey, listen to us on Spotify because we're growing fast on Spotify, probably the fastest.

SingleGrain.com/DTLA.

Marketing School Live. Make sure you put in the application. It is gonna be— we're gonna record it live as well. It'd be good to see you in person. We're gonna have food there. Look, Neil and I are working really hard right now to make sure it's an amazing event, and if it goes well, depending on if we double again or double again after that, you know, there might be more live events. So with that being said, see you tomorrow.

Yeah, love the awkward silence. It's always a good one.

Ready?

Yeah.

Both ready? I'm ready.

Yeah. All right, here we go. 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 talk about how often you actually need to post So how often do you post, Eric? I'll tell you what, even before I say that, I was actually reading a social study yesterday about the median numbers of engagements, like the engagement rates on Facebook, and it's like 0.09%. So—

It's all going down, and it has year over year. Even content marketing, if you look at how many social shares people are getting per post now.

BuzzSumo did a study, yeah. Look, Instagram, here's the other thing I want to point out too. If you look at Instagram, kind of the median engagement rate is about 1.5% right now. If you're in education, it's a little higher than that, like 3-4% or so. Just depends on the niche that you're in. But again, these are attention-based platforms, and wherever the attention goes, that means the attention has to decrease somewhere else, right? Facebook is now more pay-to-play. So for us, in terms of posts that we're putting per day, I believe— and Noah or Hannah, you can correct me if I'm wrong, maybe you can type it in the chat too— I think we're putting 2 posts up per day on social, and we're not even really promoting it.

That's why you're getting crushed. You shouldn't be posting that much. The more you post, the harder it is.

Hey, what are you doing?

I— we try not to post more than one per day per region, if that. Because the more you end up posting, and if they don't get enough views, for all the people that are ignoring your content, they'll start to stop seeing it. So if you post too much, you're spreading your audience thin. So you're better off posting less frequently, making sure it is a hit, whatever you post, and Boosting it every single time.

Here's another question. How much traffic are you getting from Facebook going back to your site?

I'll tell you right now.

Take a guess.

I'm loading it.

Okay, you have a million followers, right? I'm gonna guess that you're getting like 10,000 from Facebook.

Per month?

Yes. 10,000 to 15,000.

Audience, referrals.

Tell me I'm right.

I'm loading it right now. What period?

30-day period.

30-day period, alright. Let's look at the last 30 days.

Dun dun dun.

Source, is it source?

Come on, garbage.

Oh, it looks like it's really garbage.

Garbage!

Oh, I'm looking at the wrong audience. I'm like, there's no way I have 800 in the last 30 days. I was looking at the Ubersuggest app analytics.

Maybe you do.

Alright, we'll find out soon enough. It's loading. Dude, oh my— I get so many.

So anyway, while he loads—

16,000, it looks like? 16,100, close.

Oh, garbage for the volume it gets.

No, that's mobile Facebook. Still a lot— it's still really low. 26,000. Facebook.com is 10,239 uniques. Mobile, m.facebook, which is their mobile version, is 16,000.

Yeah, so I said 26,000. So, well, what is the lesson here, Neil? You're posting one time a day. Are you boosting it?

Some of them. And then there's also l.facebook, so let's say 30,000 in total is what it looks like from Facebook.

Okay, which is not bad. I think most people would kill for that traffic, but—

My YouTube sucks too. YouTube is 7,781.

We should talk about optimizing YouTube later too, but so, okay, what are you doing? Are you boosting the post right now?

Some of them I boost, some of them I don't. For traffic, the 30,000 is split over 4 posts in a month. So I'm getting 30,000 for 4 posts.

No, which is not bad. But he also has a million followers. Now what I'll say, what we do, we do do— when I go live on Tuesdays through Fridays, we simulcast to YouTube and Facebook. And what we've been trying, because we have this Agency Accelerator program, is we're boosting the live videos to the custom audiences under the Agency Accelerator.

And how's that working out?

It's actually getting applications.

That's good. That's a Frank Kern model. He goes live a lot and that's how he generates a lot of sales. Is that where you got it from?

I did.

Yeah, it works well for him. But in general on YouTube, you know, 30,000 is not a lot for how many fans I have. A lot of them are in different regions, so I'm not posting more than to half a million fans. 'Cause only half a million of them are English speaking. Maybe a bit less than that, maybe 400 and something thousand. But still, I'm only getting 30,000 visitors a month for— 30,000 uniques for 400 or 500,000 fans that are English.

Alright, anything else to add?

No, that's it.

Alright, that's it for today. SingleGrain.com/DTLA for the application for Marketing School Live. It's gonna be a great event. I'll tell you what, I'm even reaching out to people right now that work with Kylie Jenner, for example, and they're out there like, how, when is it going to happen, right? So it's going to be a great group of people. Apply, fill out your information, and look, it's going to be live for those of you that cannot attend. We're going to record it, but those of you that can, you're going to be able to break bread. Also, I forgot to mention, Neil and I, we are doing a private VIP dinner as well. That's probably going to be capped at 20-ish, 25-ish people. So message us, eric@singlebrain.com, if you're interested in that. It's not gonna be cheap though, so FYI.

I should just give them the price.

Yeah, ready? We can do one more, I think, or 2 more.

Okay, stopping. Okay, and ready?

Yep.

Yeah. 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 are going to talk about the craziest content marketing tactic ever. What could it possibly be?

So what's the craziest one that you've ever done?

I don't know, you wrote this title.

My craziest one is I stopped doing content marketing that often, and more so what I started doing is creating software and leveraging that as content marketing instead of text-based content.

So product-led growth.

Product-led growth, but that's my new version of content marketing. It works better than actually creating text-based content.

I think so, but why do you think that's the reason?

You're giving much more value. Content has diminished in value. If you look at the last like 6, 7, 8 years, we've been doing content marketing for a long time, maybe even closer to 10 years. It used to be so valuable, but back then there was very little blogs. Now there's over a billion plus.

I think the lesson here too is the barrier to entry, right? 10 years ago, it was like if you're doing like 4,000, 2,000, even 1,000-word posts, like you're like seen as amazing. Now everybody's doing it because like people like Neil are popularizing it. And then video too, like there's so many more entrants coming into the game. So what do you do? Like the next step is most people don't know how to build products. So why not go build a product? Because product requires you to have good UX skills, good design skills. You got to have a good product manager. Like, like that's hard to build. And so that's why everyone talks about it from OpenView Ventures. You talk about it too.

Yeah, and I know you guys all think like, oh, craziest content marketing tactic. Like, what is the content? Craziest content marketing tactic is to do the next form of content marketing. Most will say that's video. I believe it's products. Because video, even everyone's doing it. Look, I'm doing it, Eric's doing it, Gary Vee popularized it. There's— when you look at video marketing, give it another year or two and it'll be played out as well. Yeah, I like—

I mean, for— so I agree with that. I mean, product-led growth. I mean, when we look at ClickFlow, like, that's one of my, like, proud moments of joy. And I'm just super excited about it all the time. So that definitely works, that leads to kind of, you know, multi-six-figure contracts. At least up to now, it's led to a couple of them, which is great for the agency, which was not intended to be that way, but it has been content marketing for the agency. And what I will say too is, just to give you another thing that you can use, content marketing tactic. I keep talking about the content sprouting approach, which is basically omnichannel marketing. So the idea here is, you know, those of you that are watching, we have a seed, right? So when you seed a piece of content like this, this YouTube Live, this YouTube Live has gone on for 2 hours. This can easily become 20 videos if we actually make them nice videos, and those can actually become 20 different blog posts. So you seed and you sprout into all those different blog posts, and then what you do is you pollinate it, right? Which means you promote it. And then what do you do after you pollinate it, Neil? You harvest it. Which means you monetize it, right? And then you become a full-on farmer and you can come work for Single Grain. So those are just a couple ways that you could kind of go about it. You got product-led growth and you got the content sprouting technique, which is basically just omnichannel marketing.

Yeah, and the way we look at content marketing internally is just, it also doesn't provide the same ROI that it used to. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. You still have to do it. You have no choice. And eventually you want to get into video. But you got to figure out what's right for your business. It could be tools, it could be something else like a calculator. You just got to figure out what's the next evolution of it. To give you an idea, my Ubersuggest tool by bare minimum is growing at least 10% month over month in traffic without me doing any marketing really.

Great.

Anything else to add?

No.

Alright. Singlegrain.com/dtla for the Marketing School Live event. It's going to happen in June. We're going to have food for you if you do show up. If you don't show up, it's going to be recorded It's going to be great. It's going to be— it's going to have all the LA character. It's going to be nice and warm in LA, and I can't wait to see you. Go there to apply, and see you tomorrow. Time for one more. Oh, battery died on that.

Let's do it. It's only 12:55. We have 5 more minutes.

Yep. Okay. And— 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 7 dead simple social media marketing tactics that still work today.

Yes, Neil.

So, alright, I'll go first this time. I'm giving Eric a break. Normally he goes first. Number 1, post your content over and over again on social media. What I mean by this is, especially social sites like Twitter, you can take that same piece of content, share it 3 times within the first 24 hours. I kid you not, you'll get at least double the amount of traffic than if you didn't do that.

The other thing I'll say on my side is, you know, people have talked about these engagement pods and they don't like— I wouldn't recommend joining an engagement pod because those things are Look, you know, Instagram's cracking down on it. A lot of these, it's really easy to see like if people are using like an engagement pod, which means you join like a group chat and everyone just kind of upvotes each other at the same time. But if you can get like, let's say your email list, let's say Neil publishes a video on YouTube. Well, he can publish to his email list and then a bunch of people will view it in the first 24 hours or 48 hours or so. That's gonna help with his YouTube rankings or the watch time on that video, which helps just overall, right? That's one way of getting engagement up. But he could also share a post that you put on LinkedIn to get engagement up higher there as well. So basically what I'm saying is, how can you make more— the most of the channels that you have already, or maybe even friends that you know, to get you that kickstart in terms of engagement? Because that's how these platforms work.

Number 3, take your content, like your text-based content, put the first few paragraphs on LinkedIn, and then put a click to continue link so you can upload content as a post on LinkedIn, you'll get 3 to 4 times more traffic from LinkedIn doing that than just sharing your own piece of content.

What do we have, number 4?

Yeah.

Number 4, I would take inspiration from the guys that do it really well. So if you look at Grant Cardone and you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, they are very prolific with their content. And what they do really well is they'll take a piece, like Grant Cardone might go live and he goes live for an hour or 2, and that video gets chopped up into, it gets repurposed into a Instagram video, which is perfect. It's a 60-second Instagram video, it's done really well, there's text. It's formatted natively for that platform, which is kind of what Neil was alluding to, but I'm just talking about this in the context of Instagram. And if you're able to do that, if you're able to get— look, the inspiration's all out there, people are doing it well, why can't you just copy them or draw inspiration from them? It makes your life a lot easier.

Yeah, what are we on right now? Number 5?

Number 5.

If you look at social sites, you'll notice that we talk about sharing content in the first 24 hours multiple times, taking your content on LinkedIn and then adding it as a post, as well as just sharing it on your LinkedIn page. But another thing that you could end up doing that a lot of people don't do is take your content that you're putting on your blog a week later after you've published it, take that whole piece of content, and upload the whole thing on Facebook, LinkedIn again, any other social site that'll take all the text-based content. What you'll find is you'll get a ton of engagement on these social sites because they don't want to drive people off their sites. And you'll notice that as your engagement count increases, then when you post your own content that links out to your own site, those posts that link out to your own site will get much more views and clicks due to the fact that your engagement rate on content that just keeps people on Facebook is doing much better.

Number 6, going to the basics. So actually a couple episodes ago, Neil and I, we just looked at our analytics in LipSense to see what type of topics do really well. And that gave us inspiration for, well, what other topics should we create? Now that's the same thing for your social media stuff too. So if you look at your engagement, so if you look at— you can look at TubeBuddy, you can look at your analytics there, or you can even look at what ranks well. You can even look at Social Blade too. So TubeBuddy's a YouTube tool, Social Blade allows you to check How your channel's performing over time. You get a sense of how things are doing. You could look at your YouTube analytics too. And that's gonna be a guiding star for you because you're no longer operating on gut. You're operating based on data. And the data says that your audience loves SEO. I'll give you an example. So we look at Lipsyn, our top performing podcast episodes are related to SEO. The majority of them are related to SEO. Which is why we talk about SEO because, well, Even though like we talk about SEO, we talk about content, we find ourselves talking more about SEO and content because that resonates more with our audience, right? And that's not to say we don't cover the other stuff, we do test the other stuff, but if you find things that are working well, look at your analytics and that's going to help you execute on the right type of social posts for— to grow your social media profiles and get your engagement rate higher.

Last but not least, when you're uploading content to these social sites and you're writing a few paragraphs above the post and, you know, trying to try traffic back to your site or even engagement on your videos or whatever it may be, you're still adding text. Make sure you keep your paragraphs instead of being long, like short one sentences, because some social sites like LinkedIn have like a see more link. When people click on that, it boosts the engagement and then it causes your post to go more viral. So short sentences that encourage people to click see more or view more will get you more reach than if you just list out big Big chunks of paragraphs.

Alright, so that is it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla to apply for the live event in downtown Los Angeles. It's Marketing School Live. It's gonna happen in June. There's gonna be food for you. We're gonna record it live for those of you that can't make it. Register now because seats are limited, and it's free, by the way. So that's it for today, and we will see you all tomorrow.

Cool.

Alright, YouTubers, thanks for watching live. Neil and I actually need to head to another meeting right now because time is— timing is tough. Greetings from Lithuania, thanks for watching from Lithuania. Han Guan says, can't wait to be a farmer. We can't wait for you to be one either. Faizen says, awesome job.

Yeah, they can see you playing with my knife. My Eric Siu knife.

Guys, if you want an Eric Siu knife, get us to 2 million downloads. And we'll think about how we can distribute those. All right, uh, so let me stop this.

Okay, saving that.