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 if it's worth spending 200 bucks per blog post. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Neil Patel: Well, not always. What happens if the blog post is a shit blog post?

Eric Siu: Well, that's your fault for not vetting them. Yeah. Well, Neil, how much do you spend on average per blog post right now?

Neil Patel: I don't know. It ranges quite a bit. It depends on the industry, it depends on the blog. But what I found is, it's not about how much you pay. It's about, is it on the right topic? Is it on the right keywords? Do the keywords have buyer intent in them? And, is it related to the product or service that you're offering? And you can't be pushing or shilling, being like, "Hey," in the blog post, "you have to sign up for my product. It's the best thing ever." It has to educate and flow into people signing up to your product or service.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and here's the thing. I think, if we look at Neil's blog post over time, a lot of the stuff that he's written, they are ultra long form. Even some of the stuff he's spent thirty thousand dollars plus designing a guide, having it well written. And, when you Google these keywords, let's say like, affiliate marketing, for example, he tends to rank well because that's the area that he stays in. But he's also producing something that's world class. And, I'm telling you right now, he spending well over 200 bucks for these blog posts.
So, if ranking for these head tail, even these long tail keywords is important to your business, which I assume for most of you probably would be helpful, well then, spending 200 bucks per blog post is helpful. And I'll tell you, for us, we spending at least 200 bucks per blog post on the Single Grain blog and our traffic is continuing to scale up. And from there, we're able to build out. Should we build out different topic clusters, or Hub-and-Spoke models? That way we can continue to work off of that. So you start with some kind of foundation first, and then you're able to build on it. And that's what we're doing with perhaps blog posts and then going off into video, going off into podcasts, going off into webinars.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and when you first bought Single Grain out, how many visitors were you getting per month?

Eric Siu: Four thousand.

Neil Patel: And now you're at over a hundred.

Eric Siu: Over a hundred thousand.

Neil Patel: That's a huge difference.

Eric Siu: Blog posts are worth it. But, what most people don't realize is, when you write content and your traffic goes up exponentially, they assume that their revenue's going to go up exponentially. I've very rarely ever seen the revenue go up nowhere near the same scale. The reason being is, most people who are writing blog posts, they're picking topics that don't have buyer intent. And, even if they do have buyer intent, it's not like somebody's landing on one of your services page. So don't just assume that more traffic is going to equate to more revenue. Sure, it does in the long run, assuming you're picking the right topics, you're writing with the right keywords in mind, but it's not as simple as traffic goes up 10X and revenue goes up 3X. In many cases, from blog posts, traffic goes up 10X, revenue may go up to double, right? But you have to keep that in mind and that's a huge thing that most people forget.
And it's really important. Once you start getting your blog post on, then what you do is, every quarter or maybe every half year or so, you open up a tool like Ahrefs. Look at the keywords that you're ranking well for. Look at all the pages that you have. Look at the ones that maybe you have high intent for but, you're ranking for that keyword but maybe you should adjust the content on that page. Or maybe, if you don't have any kind of exit intent popup that's related to that specific keyword, maybe you should be making adjustments. So, baking in a little CRO to what you're doing, auditing via Ahrefs, looking at your Google Analytics as well, but making sure that you're making the most of what you have already. Cause, if you're spending this money for content, the idea is you probably want to make more money, right? So why would you neglect conversion optimization? You probably wouldn't. So take a look at it, build in the framework for that.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and once you spend money on blog posts and you have a good foundation, your traffic's going up, yeah you should still continue it, but don't forget about your existing blog post. Even if they're Evergreen, they still need to be updated. And, what you'll find is, after six months of writing content, it tends to be a higher ROI to focus on your older posts that are already written and already published, re-fixing them up to get more traffic. We've talked about strategies to do this, in which going to Google Console, looking at your most popular posts, looking at the keywords you're getting impressions for, integrating them within your content, that really is amazing strategy to get double or triple the traffic out of your old blog post. Plus Eric has a tool that makes this all easier.

Eric Siu: Yeah, it's called Click Flow. Just go to ClickFlow.io to check it out and it might make sense for your business, it might not. We'll just have to find out.
That's it. It is worth spending money on a blog post. Don't look for a direct ROI right now. Keep in mind, if you spend the money once for that blog post, it keeps generating traffic each and every single month. So, if you're not seeing a positive ROI right away, that's okay because, a year from now, you can generate one. And then two years from now, it's extra profit. Three years from now, it's even more profit, right? Cause it's not like you have to keep spending money on those old blog posts.

Neil Patel: Yeah, Google Tomas Tungusz. Google that and Google Compound Content Marketing, and you'll find that blog post. And he, basically ... This is a guy that's a venture capitalist. He used to work at Google and he's got these different graphs about the compounding effects of content marketing, compound interest. Check it out. This is what Neil's talking about. If you guys like graphs, it's cool.
Anyway, that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to checkout our marketing tools for you to grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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