Announcer: 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 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: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about how to sell millions without ever opening your mouth. Let me kick it off. Here, you can do content marketing with blogs. You start with blogs first. You're not really opening your mouth. You're writing a lot of stuff, and you're starting to bring people to the point of sale, again, marketing, and then you're starting to get more organic traffic, people are hearing about you, they're sharing your stuff, they're getting on your email list. This is how you start to build an audience first, and, before you know it, they're going to start to ask you, "Hey, when are you going to sell us something?" Because you built that audience, I've heard from other people where they build an audience, and then they sell us a $25,000 thing or whatever, and that person was just like, "I've just been on your list for so long, you've added so much value." That's how you sell a lot without ever opening your mouth in the first place. You start to establish something through a blog, for example, and that's how you grow.

Neil Patel: Blogging is one of the most powerful tools out there. It's just pure education. If you go out there and you're selling people, what are you doing? You're convincing them to go buy from you.
On the flip side, let's say you're reading Single Grain or NeilPatel.com, and we're just giving you a ton of free marketing advice, and you follow our advice for six months, a year, you start getting results, and you're happy. What ends up happening? You're going to be like, "Oh, my God. Eric's amazing. Neil's amazing. Look at the results I've gotten from following their information." Eventually, you're going to be like, "If this is the results I got from just following their information, what else do they offer? Do they have some software? Do they have some products? Do they have some services?" You'll end up researching and then you'll end up buying.
I was interviewing someone who, named Amanda. She used to work at iProspect. When I was interviewing her, she was telling me a story on how one of her largest clients was RIM or BlackBerry, and there was this lady that she would end up dealing with at RIM or BlackBerry with the on-page, SEO, and digital marketing and all that kind of stuff, and this lady would be like, "Oh, my God. We gotta follow whatever Neil says. It's real easy. Anything he says, we need to end up doing." This lady from BlackBerry was reading my blog all the time. She loved the information, and she was telling another company that they were paying that, "Hey, we need to follow this advice." What's funny enough, if I had a page on my website saying, "I offer those services," you bet she probably would have came to me and spent the money with me instead of that other company.
The point I'm trying to make is you educate, you help people out first, they're much more likely to come back to you and spend money, and that's the easiest way to sell. It's not by being a smooth talker or a sleazy car salesman. It's by helping first and not asking for the sale.

Eric Siu: I think, for both of us, it's just much ... I consider myself an introvert. Neil, I think you're more of an introvert, too. Building the audience first, much easier said than done, but when you build an audience, it's much easier to build around and people just start coming at you. This is why Neil gets to speak at all these big conferences and then this is why people reach out to him for doing business, as well. They start to trust you. The fact that you're listening to this right now, that you've listened to likely hours of us talking all the time and nerding out on this stuff means that you start to understand how we are, you start to build a relationship with us, and we're kind of building a relationship at scale.
Yes, we are opening our mouths right now, but keep in mind, Neil started with blog content first, and then he started to build off of that. You start with that foundation first, and if you don't ever open your mouth, fine, you can run ads, you can build an email funnel, you can build a chat funnel, all this different stuff, but, eventually, you are going to have to open your mouth, but we're saying that you can start without ever opening your mouth just by blogging first and doing this kind of stuff. That's worked well for us, and then expanding from there.

Neil Patel: Now, let's get into a few tips on how you can actually get that blog traffic. We'll keep it simple. We know we covered tons of blog marketing or content marketing tips in past episodes, but let's cover three in this episode. I'll start off with the first.
If you're trying to figure out how to become popular blogger and get a audience, so that way, eventually, you can end up selling millions, the first thing you want to do is go to BuzzSumo, type in keywords within your industry. It'll show you all the articles that are popular. Go write better versions of that content. Go back to BuzzSumo once you have that article written, and go to that original article and click on the view shares button. It'll show you all the people who shared that content. You want to hit each of them up and send them a simple email, like, "Hey, Eric. I noticed you shared article A, B, and C by author 1, 2, and 3. I have a similar article that's coming out. Mine's called X, Y, and Z. Let me know if you want to check it out. Cheers, Neil."
In most cases, people will respond with, "Sure. Love to see it." Then you send them a link and they'll share it as long as your content's a lot better, because if the original article was popular on the social web and it was 10 Advanced Ways to Do Yoga as a Beginner, and yours is 101 Advanced Ways to Do Yoga as a Beginner, people are going to be like, "Oh, wow, I like the original. This one's more in depth with more content, more images. It's super thorough with step-by-step instructions. Yeah, I would love to share this."

Eric Siu: Number two is ... This is a tried and true SEO tactic, guest posting. Neil and I, at least for me, I don't really do a lot of it anymore. I still do a little bit of it. Guest posting is basically ... You might go to HubSpot, for example, or Entrepreneur Magazine, for example, and then get an article written on there. You give them the content. They all want more free ... They all want more free content on their site. Good thing for you is you get a link coming back to your site. As of today, link building is still important. You can write all the content you want in the world. You can for sure follow the Skyscraper Technique. Reach out to these people. Link to that content, but you still need to keep link building ongoing.
I can tell you, in the early days, when I first saw or came aboard Single Grain, what happened was we didn't have a strong link profile. We did a lot of guest posting, a lot of content production, and that's what helped us create that higher domain authority, and that's what got us more search traffic. From there, we started to piggyback off that, started to build an email list, started to build more of a following, and started to build a true foundation. Just keep that in mind that links are still important.

Neil Patel: Number three, my buddy, Mike, from [Dr. Axe 00:06:34], uses this one. They get over 20 million visits a month. Kid you not, over 20 million visits a month. What they did is they went to SEMrush.com, put in all their competitor URLs, it showed them all the most popular pages that their competitors are getting traffic from. They rewrote all those articles and just created better versions of it.
Here's a little twist on this strategy. You can then go and take all those competitor articles that are really popular, put them into ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S.com, see which sites have or which pages have the most back links. You want to look for the ones that have the least amount of back links and have enough views where it's still worth you writing on. You're taking the most popular articles that don't have a lot of back links and writing better versions of those articles because the chances are you can rank much easier for those on Google, and you can get tons and tons of search traffic just like they are.

Eric Siu: All right. That's it for today, but before we go, we want to tell you about a episode of Problem Solvers, which is on the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. This one is about the Hello Fresh company. The CEO talks about customer retention, talks about marketing cohorts, and they just recently filed to go public, so it's a really cool episode. Just go to SingleGrain.com/fresh. We will see you tomorrow.

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