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: Today, we are going to talk about how you can make your content addicting. When I think about content that I keep coming back to time and time again, well, here's some examples. I remember, yesterday, I was flying back from San Francisco, and I saw a bunch of reports from Twitter. Basically, I follow a bunch of lists on Twitter, and I save them to pocket, and then when I'm on the airplane, I'm reading all the stuff that I've saved. I tend to follow custom case studies, so people that have done long-form case studies on companies like Uber or Intercom, for examples, kind of deep dives into those strategies or very specific metrics that they are sharing with others that are not so available to everyone else, so not the cookie-cutter stuff. At least in my stage right now, I'm looking for unique things that stand out, and also from a video perspective too.
A, yes, I like reports. I like custom data. I like custom case studies. Then I also like videos, people that are consistent with their videos that are short and sweet. For example, I like Alex Becker's content. I mean I think that guy's hilarious. A, he's funny, and then he's also very educational as well. He shares metrics too. Those are just a couple things to get this conversation started. Neil, I'm curious to see what you think about addicting content.

Neil Patel: I think addicting content, typically, is evergreen content, one that someone can read three, four, six months, a year or two from now, and it's still valuable. Two, there's some sort of entertainment factor. Three, there's some education factor. Four, there's some sort of actionable factor. When you mix all of those things in together, you can do extremely well. If you want to bonus it up, one more factor that I found that really helps is some visual form of content. I could be video, it could be infographics, but when you combine all those things, the content becomes much more addicting.
A good example of this is how a car engine works. It's a animagraph. It's a animated infograph, that's what that means, and it shows you the pistons moving in a GIF format. It shows you the oil going through the pistons. That content not only is addicting but, because of that, it's generated millions of views, thousands of back links, ranks really well on Google. You have to create content that has those factors. It's not easy. Everyone thinks, oh, your content has to be on a topic that's sexy or everyone wants to learn about, or read about, or some celebrity gossip. Talking about car engines isn't that sexy, yet if you take all of those factors, and you encompass it together, you can create something that's so engaging, that people love, that they want to keep coming back to, that you'll just generate the traffic and the demand.

Eric Siu: Great. Here's another example. Even though Brian Dean ... He has a website called backlinko.com, great SEO blog. He doesn't blog as often, but whenever he does, I always read his content because it's always the same format, and then there's always a unique spin to it, right? He had a topic on the skyscraper technique. He always has some interesting name or some spin on SEO when you would think, in today's day and age, well, SEO is ... It's SEO, not much has changed, but he makes it interesting. The other thing that I really notice that I think you can take home from this is he uses the concept, I believe they're called bucket brigades, which is basically each paragraph might only be two to three sentences max, so it's really easy to follow. It's really digestible. I don't feel like it's a daunting task to read any of his long-form posts, even though they're a couple thousand words. I actually end up reading every single thing that he writes.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and his content's amazing. He doesn't just have a few thousand visits per blog post. You're talking about thousands of social shares, hundreds of comments. His latest blog post that I'm looking at has 792 comments, next one beneath that, 519, beneath that, 654, next one after that, 889. That's a lot of comments, and he does a exceptionally good job.
What I started to do, and I got a lot of feedback from testing and surveying my audience, I found that they love when I integrate text, images, and videos all in one post. It makes it engaging. That way, when people want to skim, they can skim. If they want to just look at the images and get the gist, they can do that, or if they want to listen to the video format, they can do that as well. By tying them all in together, you can do exceptionally well. I'm thinking about also integrating podcast audio clips into my content as well to see, if I combine all of those together, what ends up happening. I've also tested using infographics within the blog post instead of just normal images. I found that to help as well.
You just got to keep testing, tweaking, and serving your audience to figure out what they want because every industry is going to be different. For example, if you're in the nutrition niche, it's going to be totally different what people are looking for from you for a "addicting content" than if you were in the marketing niche. A great way to see what's addicting content within your niche is to go to buzzsumo.com, type in keywords, and you'll see all the most popular blog posts based off the social shares. You can also, on BuzzSumo, do it based off of date range. What I like doing is looking at the last three to six months, and then I like looking at the last few years. By doing that, I can see if there's any changes, because what was popular a few years ago may not be popular anymore when it comes to "addicting content" because the industry may have changed where they prefer a different format.

Eric Siu: Yep. The other thing I'll add too around what Neil is saying with adding videos into blog posts as well, it's also good if you're looking to grow your YouTube channel. It actually helps with your watch time, so that's something to consider as well.
The other thing that when I think about really addicting content, I think about the design too. When I think about really good design ... actually was at SaaStr this week, and I saw that Intercom, one of their platinum sponsors, so they're really plastered across the entire conference, I saw that, well, they had a newspaper, and then they had even their booth as well, just everything is really consistent with their design. When you look at their blog, what keeps me coming back to it to read more about onboarding, nurturing, and other subjects related to that, well, A, it's really well designed. It's custom. Everything's just beautiful. Then, B, it's formatted really well too, so design does matter. Design is one thing that keeps you ... well, it helps you stand out. For me, when I look at their stuff, it's addicting.

Neil Patel: That's pretty much it for this episode. Thank you, guys, for listening. If you want our daily bonus, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

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