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 how often you really need to blog. So, Neil, what's your take on this?

Neil Patel: Well, there's two camps with this. Some people say quality, some people say quantity. If you look at Hubspot, they're in the quantity game. If you look at like my blog, I'm more in the quality game. If you want to go to extreme, if you look at Backlinko by Brian Dean, he's really in the quality game.
If you look at who's the biggest, though, Hubspot has a $4 billion plus market cap. Yes, they're venture-funded, they have a lot of advantages, Brian from Backlinko's not selling a product. But if you look at traffic-wise, Hubspot's getting at least six or seven million visitors a month. They release their traffic, that's somewhere on their home page or website, unless they changed it. Now, Brian, I don't know what his traffic is, but I'm pretty sure it's under a half a million, 'cause you can use tools like SEMrush to roughly estimate. And I'm not saying Brian's doing a bad job. I think he's doing a amazing job, I love his information, I read his blog more than I read the Hubspot blog. But if you're just looking from traffic's perspective, you want to blog as much as possible, not just three or four times a week, not just once a day, I'm talking about four, five, 10 times a day.
This is the same reason why Business Insider, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Buzzfeed, all these popular blogs are popular. It's because they blog multiple times a day. The key is quantity is king if you're looking just for traffic.

Eric Siu: Yeah. And if you look at a couple things ... So, Neil actually does, he has a fine balance, he definitely does have quality, we're talking three to four thousand words per post, right?

Neil Patel: Yes.

Eric Siu: And then, how often are you doing it?

Neil Patel: Once a day.

Eric Siu: Once a day. So it is actually pretty frequent, but it's not as frequent as a publisher like an entrepreneur magazine, where they're doing like five, 15, 20 pieces a day and have a very strong contributor network. And that's something I want to touch upon. So once you ... For Neil, for example, he probably gets hit up all of the time, like, "Neil, I'd love to guest-write for your blog," is that right?

Neil Patel: Yes, I probably get that like 10, 15 times a day.

Eric Siu: Yeah. So if you look at the entrepreneurs of the world, they've actually, I think, maybe not entrepreneurs specifically, but like Huffington Post, for example, these other types of blogs out there that have contributor networks, sometimes they'll clamp down and remove people, but oftentimes they're trying to get more and more contributors, 'cause they just want more and more content. And they know that most of them are going to be duds, but there are going to be a couple that are home runs. At that point, you're just playing a numbers game. So for them, you see it, right? If you're looking for pure traffic, the volume matters. But then, if you want a good balance, look at what Neil has going on. He's got one coming every day, he's definitely spending a lot of money on it as well, but he gets to control the message himself. The level of quality is much higher than what you see on these ones that are publishing all the time.
Now, if you want to go to the extreme, as like what Neil's mentioning, Backlinko, the last time I talked to him, he gets about 130,000 visits a month, which is fantastic, it's great. But he only has about 30 or so blog posts on his site and they're all super high-quality, right? So it really also depends on what your priorities are in a business. How far are you into it? Are you in the very beginning where you're trying to establish product-market fit? If so, maybe blogging's not your priority in the beginning. But you've got to get a cadence going where you're consistent with it. Neil and I have talked about this in the very beginning, you gotta stay consistent, where it's like a TV show, where people understand, or they know, when your next post is going to come out. And you just keep publishing, you keep optimizing from there, and then you eventually create something that works well for you.
So, just 'cause something works well for Neil, or for myself, doesn't mean it's a blanket statement and it should apply to everyone. You've got to figure out what works for you.

Neil Patel: The strategy that I like using is a bit mixture of both. So, blog as frequently as possible, no less than three times a week if you really want to grow your business. If you don't care how big it is, then go with once a month or whatever approach you can, or whatever time you have. But I like blogging in quantity. Put in a good amount of time per post, try to make them medium in quality if not high in quality. What you'll find out that blogging is hit or miss. Some posts do really well, some posts don't. You can't always control it, there's not always an exact formula, what's working or what's not. But then, once you find that you release a lot of content, you then take the posts that are doing really well. If you're not sure which ones, just go to Google Search console, it'll show you your most popular content.
Just click on the "search analytics" tab. Once you're in there, you're looking at the most popular pages. Take them, rewrite them to include all the key words that Google Search console shows that you're getting traffic from or impressions. As you integrate some of these keywords, and you can't integrate all of them 'cause some of them just won't fit well, but when you integrate them as naturally as possible and you redo your post to make it two to three times more in-depth, what you'll find is that posts sometimes will get two or three times more in traffic.
So I take the quantity approach, then when I find the posts that already do well, I then go and rewrite them, make them more detailed, include more keywords, and that's what's causing my blog to grow so fast.

Eric Siu: Yeah, the final thing I'll add from my side is the concept of being top of mind, where with Marketing School we're doing an episode every single day, and it's publishing across different channels. So the more that you can publish, the more touchpoints you're going to have with people. Neil's talked about the rule of seven or maybe the rule of eight, I believe, but it's having those touchpoints and staying top of mind, where maybe people might not need you initially, in terms of your services or your product or whatever, but eventually because you're popping up all the time, where people are saying, "I see you everywhere, I don't know how you do this all the time," that's when you know you're doing something right, that's when you know you're playing the branding game for the long term.
So, that's it for today, but before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get marketing tools to grow your business and we'll see you tomorrow.

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