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 you shouldn't over think shit. Neil?

Neil Patel: In marketing, everyone starts creating all these complex funnels, this is the new thing everyone's doing. They're like "Oh, check out my funnel. People come in on the front end, then I have this offer, then I sent this email sequence. And then if they don't convert I do this." And it just keep going and going.
And what I found is when you get so complex with your funnel and your marketing, more shit just breaks. Yes, there are those few instances of these amazing marketers who have it down right, and it's working well, and they're growing fast and making a ton of money. But most people when I see them doing complex marketing campaigns, they're just failing and losing a lot of money, because shit just gets broken.
It's not that the concepts are bad, it's just shit's getting broken. Start off simple, and then expand. Don't try and do everything perfectly at once, that's not how marketing works.
Eric, when you first started marketing Single Grain, what did you start off with? What was your channel?

Eric Siu: SEO.

Neil Patel: Okay, and how did you do SEO?

Eric Siu: We wrote content ... you know what we did a lot of, what really well, guest posting.

Neil Patel: Okay, you did guest posting. After that, what did you do?

Eric Siu: Then we start adding all these complexities, like we tried to do paid ads, and we tried to build this complex marketing funnel.

Neil Patel: And how did the marketing funnel work out?

Eric Siu: It didn't work out, too complex. And the more complex you make it at the beginning, the more difficult it is to take it apart and clean it up later.

Neil Patel: Yes, and then after that you did content marketing, right?

Eric Siu: Mm-hmm (affirmative). SEO was content marketing.

Neil Patel: Yes. After that, you started doing podcasting, am I right in the order?

Eric Siu: So SEO and podcasting started at the same time, and then we layered on content marketing, when blogging.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and then you started getting into videos recently?

Eric Siu: Recently, yeah.

Neil Patel: But in generally you've been doing this for four or five years, and it's not like you're doing 20 different things.

Eric Siu: It doesn't work.

Neil Patel: You're keeping it simple.

Eric Siu: And here's the thing, the entrepreneurial ADD and a lot of you, including myself, wants to do all these different things. I've done this thing too many times where I kept making the same mistake where you realize that you should just focus on the things that you're good at.

Neil Patel: Yeah, you only need one or two marketing channels that do really well to build a decent sized business. And after you're there, you can expand it to more and more, but don't over think shit, don't do too much shit. Just make whatever you want to do first work.
And I consider marketing kind of like spaghetti, you take a few different tactics that you think would work, you throw them against the wall, you see what sticks, and whatever sticks and has the best chance, that's what you should focus on first. Once you max out on it, throw some more spaghetti against the wall, see whatever sticks, and then also do that. So now you have two channels. And then you just keep going and you're adding more and more.
But don't make things too complex. Like with a sales funnel, why would you build a crazy marketing/sales funnel when you haven't even released a simple one to know if it's going to work or not.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and I think if you study marketing. Let's use Neil as an example here. If you look at Neil's stuff, what he's done consistently over the years is content marketing. Even though he lives in the marketing world and he has a lot of marketers talking in his ear saying "Neil you've got to try this thing. Oh my God" Some even may be sometimes making fun of him for not doing this stuff. Neil just stays on the course and keeps doing what he's doing, and if you look at his traffic over time, or look at the stuff he's doing, constantly it's just growing, growing.
It's not like huge hockey stick, it's just steady, steady, steady, boring growth. But the older I get the more I realize that the boring growth is often the most sustainable growth. Easy come, easy go, you stay the course and you're going to have long term sustainable growth.

Neil Patel: Last thing from me, we're doing the podcasts together. We've been doing it for what, almost two years now? Year and a half?

Eric Siu: Almost two years. Year and a half.

Neil Patel: Yeah, how many times did it take, or how many times did you ask me before I said yeah, let's do it.

Eric Siu: By the way, this is actually in Neil's head. I only said the podcasting bits, and Neil interpreted this as let's start a podcast together. But I talked to him about this like "Podcasting's so good, dah, dah, dah," probably 10, 15 times.

Neil Patel: Yeah, you were just like "you should do a podcast."

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: I don't know if you said we should do it together?

Eric Siu: No, I never said we. It became we should a podcast. I was like "Okay."

Neil Patel: Yes. Because you already had one at that time.
And he was telling me "You should do a podcast." He mentioned it to me around, as he said, 10 times, and then eventually I was like "Okay, I'll get into it."
But I'm a big believer you don't have to be the first to enter a new marketing tactic and leverage it before anyone else. Stick with what works, what's boring, like Eric said, and then once new channels are taking off ... Like Snapchat, it's still young. It's still in its infancy, people haven't really figured out how to monetize it yet. Yeah, they could be Snapchat famous and have a ton of followers, but they haven't really figured out how to make money from it yet.

Eric Siu: So wait until one or two people, or three or four, whoever it may be, that blog about it, that are well known, are talking about how to monetize. And once you start seeing hey, this is working for others, then you should jump on that bandwagon and spend time, energy, and money to make it work.
But you don't have to be the first, just go after the boring, ugly stuff first.

Neil Patel: Long, boring growth. Look at Google the Boring Company by Elon Musk, and what Boring is is it's digging a bunch of tunnels around LA so you can travel better. So, anyway, that's this episode. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing tools to get access. And we'll see you tomorrow.

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