Content Marketing Doesn’t Work The Way You Think | Ep. #676

In episode #676, Eric and Neil Discuss the two schools of thought on content marketing. Tune in to hear how your conversions rates can be affected.

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES

  • [00:27] Today’s Topic: Content Marketing Doesn’t Work The Way You Think
  • [00:37] There are two schools of thought on content marketing: The first is: Write a lot of content and you will get rankings, traffic, and generate a ton of sales.
  • [01:02] Someone will not convert the same way if they visit your home page vs. your blog post, because the intent is to read, not to buy.
  • [01:20] You just have to keep in mind how conversions work.
  • [01:38] The second school of thought is that quality wins over quantity every time.
  • [01:50] Backlinko writes infrequent, high-quality content.
  • [02:07] HubSpot posts the most content, but their quality isn’t as good.
  • [02:44] However, they still do extremely well in rankings, conversions, etc.
  • [03:08] Backlinko is worth less than HubSpot.
  • [03:40] Guest contributors can bring in new audience members and get you more conversions.
  • [04:01] It’s all about finding high-ranking keywords and flooding the marketplace, which is what HubSpot does well.
  • [04:20] It’s all about creating a framework/system for posts and guest posts.
  • [04:35] Read the post from Tomasz Tunguz of Red Point Ventures about how content marketing compounds.
  • [04:48] You will have hits and misses, but the more you post, the more likely you are to be successful.
  • [05:00] Content marketing will boost your site authority.
  • [05:20] That’s it for today!
  • [05:26] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!

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The post Content Marketing Doesn’t Work The Way You Think | Ep. #676 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.

Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

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

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about why content marketing doesn't work the way that you think. Neil you want to take it away?

Neil Patel: Yeah. So most of you guys believe that ... there's two notions to content marketing. The first one is, you write a lot of content, you're going to get rankings, you get a ton of traffic, and you're going to generate a shit ton of sales. So, if your website has a conversion rate of one percent and you generate an extra hundred visitors through content marketing, you're going to also generate one sale. Now, let me ask you a question. Eric knows the answer to this. If someone comes to your blog post versus your home page, are they going to convert the same?

Eric Siu: Nope.

Neil Patel: Why not?

Eric Siu: Because, if they came there, the intent is to read something, it's not to buy.

Neil Patel: Correct. Now, this doesn't mean you can't generate conversions from your content. You can add an opt-in, sidebars, header opt-ins, content upgrades, the list keeps going on and on. And, we're not saying you shouldn't do content marketing. You just have to keep in mind your conversion rates from the content marketing will not be the same as the conversion rates for people going to your home page, product pages, things like that.
The next thing that most people don't realize with content marketing is, they believe quality wins the race. The highest quality content, you're going to do well, people are going to love you, you're going to build a loyal audience. Now, one person who's really well known for writing quality content in our space is?

Eric Siu: Backlinko.

Neil Patel: Yes. Brian Dean. He doesn't write content often. He'll write it maybe once a month, I think. Right?

Eric Siu: Less than that now.

Neil Patel: So, it's something rare like that. He's generating traffic and he's growing. His content's good. Now who's the biggest NR space traffic-wise?

Eric Siu: God, I don't know.

Neil Patel: HubSpot by far.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: They beat out Moz, they beat out SEMrush. If you look at Alexa, you look at all the data.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: HubSpot beats everyone out.

Eric Siu: Yup.

Neil Patel: Now, let's be quite frank. You know, I know Don Mesh. I know people on the marketing team. I don't know Don Mesh well. And, if you think about HubSpot, what do you think about their content quality?

Eric Siu: It's not nearly as good as what Backlinko has put together.

Neil Patel: Forget Backlinko. Compared to a lot of people in this space, what do you think about their content quality?

Eric Siu: It's not as good.

Neil Patel: Yeah, Eric's nice. A lot of it's shit. Right? I'm blunt.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: But that doesn't mean their dumb at marketing. I still think their smart. Because, if you look at a lot of their content, they still do extremely well. Yes, they have good piece of content, but they also have a lot of crap on there. Like, they'll write posts on how to edit a video, cause they just know they can get a ton of traffic from it and they don't care if it's related to their core product. But, quantity in the marketing space, especially content marketing space is what wins. HubSpot is worth four plus billion dollars? Backlinko isn't even worth ... I don't know what the rate is ... but, probably not even ten million. And I'm not saying Brian's doing a bad job. I love him to death. He's a really good friend, but this just goes to show that quantity wins. Even if you compare HubSpot and my Neil Patel blog. They're crushing me. Why? Because they're just doing so much more in quantity. They don't care as much about the quality.

Eric Siu: Yeah, a hundred percent. So Neil talked about, actually a couple of episodes ago, we talked about how you can literally, once you get the fly wheel going. Like, if you're Backlinko, for example, or if you're a Neil, there's a ton of people who want to guest blog post for you. And, here's the thing. HubSpot, the guest contributor program, it is a big deal for them. So they have a lot of ... I mean, we've written for them in the past. They're always continually asking us to do more partnerships with them. They're very aggressive about it and they used to have really high quality content. At one point, they decided to make a strategic shift, and you can see to Neil's point, it's more about quantity now. It's more about occupying Mindshare, it's about taking keywords that have a high volume, and then eventually figuring out what to do with them. You can re-target them later. You can take them further down your funnel.
So, I also like using another example. There's a friend of mine who was an editor for a site that gets about seven to eight million visits a month. And I was like, "Okay. What's the secret?" He said, "Honestly, it's about creating a framework, a system where a lot of people can write for you and you're just publishing quantity. We're publishing 23 articles a day or so, and it's just stacking up, over time it's just compounding." And I recommend reading this post from this venture capitalist, Redpoint Ventures, Tomasz Tunguz, he wrote about how content marketing compounds, and he has a graph that shows over time how it continues to stack.
So, yeah, you're going to have some home runs and you're going to have some duds but, you know, if you have a higher frequency, you're more likely to hit those home runs. The first is, publishing once a month or once every other month or so.

Neil Patel: Yeah. So you pretty much got everything from my end. Right? If you're going to do content marketing, you still should because it boosts authority of your overall site and all your pages rank higher. So, in general, it's still a great thing to do. We're not advocating that you shouldn't do it, but A, Keep in mind that conversions won't happen the same, percentage-wise, as they do on your home page or product page. And B, quantity really wins the race when it comes to content marketing.

Eric Siu: All right. That's it for today. Go check out our marketing tools to grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow. By the way you have to go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. So go there. See you.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.

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