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

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of marketing school. I'm Erie Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today we're going to talk about how much you should spend on content promotion. This one's interesting. This one is a question I asked directly to Larry Kim, who is one of the co-founders of WordStream. He does a lot of content promotion. He's pretty well versed when it comes to the world of paid advertising because his company is focused on paid advertising. My point is I talked to him about it because he had a really good presentation at the Growth Hackers Conference a couple of months ago. He's basically saying that whenever he pushes out a new piece of content, he's trying to find the unicorns out there. A unicorn could be something that has a really high engagement rates.
We're talking probably five, ten percent or so, depending on your industry. He's pushing 50 bucks each time, to each of these. He's investing a little here and investing a little here to see what has a lot of potential. Kind of like when you're playing Limit Texas Holdem and you're going to put in a little money each time because any two cards have potential and it's only limit. It's a fast way to lose money but you just look for one thing to take off and you can go all in on it eventually. That's one way to go about it, just 50 bucks a pop. Neil, what do you do?

Neil Patel: There's two way to think about it, right? With content promotion, you should be spending 50 percent of your time writing your content, 50 percent of your time promoting it. Some people do 20 percent of the time writing it, 80 percent of the time promoting it. You can pick whatever percentage but at least half of it should be on content promotion. You can either do it two ways in which one, you spend the time or two, you spend the money. If you want to shortcut, you can try boosting your posts on Facebook. You can try driving some average traffic to it. You could try driving some Pinterest traffic or some core traffic or even do some Stumbleupon traffic. All works from there, some of it may work better than others, but you can figure out what works for you and if you can actually generate a ROI from it.
The second aspect is, if you don't want to spend the money, you can still promote your content but you're going to have to do it with your time. For example, you can Google all the similar related content. You can go to search.tutor.com, put in an URL of a similar article, find all of those people's email addresses, who treat out your competitor's stuff and you can shoot them a simple email, like, "Hey, so and so, I noticed you shared X, Y, and Z article by author A, B, and C. I have similar article called, 1, 2, and 3. Mine covers this, that, and the other. If you like it, feel free and share it. Thanks." That's it, right? You can try that or, for all the people that you link out to within your post, you can just shoot them an email, like, "Hey, Eric. I have to say that I'm a huge fan of yours, so much so, that I even linked out to you from my latest blog post. Feel free and check it out here. Cheers. Neil. P.S. If you shared it, it wouldn't just make my day, it would make my year." Either spend money or spend time promoting your content.

Eric Siu: Yeah, I think if you're starting out, I remember the early days. I would just reach out to people, actually Neil was one of the early guys that I reached out to, to see if he would promote my stuff. This was back when growth everywhere was actually ... My Twitter handle is ericgosiu.com. He would actually tweet my stuff out. I would just actually reach out to a lot of different people and just make sure your content is good. You're doing a lot of hand to hand combat in the beginning. Even when you start to push some money towards it, even if you spend 30 bucks a month, you can spend a dollar a day on Facebook to make it work for you. If you want to look for framework, because we all like frameworks, you could just Google a dollar a day.
This is a strategy from Dennis Yu of Blitz Metrics. This is something he talks about frequently. Actually, from one of my properties, I spent a dollar a day on it. It actually works because after I started doing that my Google traffic went up. I'm not going to say that's the only signal but, hey, it worked out for me so I'm continuing to spend that dollar a day. For the post that we have over at Single Grain, whenever we post something new, we spend about 25 to 30 bucks or so. We're looking for something to take off.
Sometimes it doesn't even have to be that way. Just look at your analytics. Look at your Facebook insights. Maybe you can invest in the ones that are truly standing out from an organic perspective and then crank up the budget from there. Content promotion, I think it's really important. A lot of people tend to forget about it. They just publish and they say content marketing doesn't work. Well, content marketing doesn't work for you because you're not promoting it. You're not entitled to get visitors just because you've spent time on producing something. You actually need to spend the time on actually selling it, too. It's almost the same thing as when you create a new product or service. People are like, "I create this new product. It's great but ... " The ones that fail are often the people that fail to sell themselves. Same thing here, your content needs to go out there. You need to collect some sales for your content to grow. Neil, do you have anything else to add?

Neil Patel: Nope.

Eric Siu: All right. That's it for today. Before we go, we have a one-year annual subscription of Crazy Aid, which is a heap mapping analytics tool. If you want to get in on this, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. We're doing one give away every single day for the next year. You can actually get multiple entries. Go senglegrain.com/giveaway to learn more. We will see you tomorrow.

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