In episode #675, Neil breaks down his long and short-term strategies for success. Tune in to hear what keeps Neil in business.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: Neil Patel’s Personal Marketing Strategy
- [00:50] Neil used to have an ad agency 16 years ago. The way they grew the business was through cold-calling clients.
- [01:13] Once blogging became a thing, he decided to use it to generate leads.
- [01:42] Right now, Neil still spends a lot of time and money on content marketing.
- [02:00] They get 2 million visits per month thanks to content.
- [02:20] If you don’t keep releasing more and more new content, your numbers won’t go up.
- [02:37] They are now buying and merging other businesses.
- [03:08] They spend 80% of their money on giving away free marketing tools.
- [03:24] Giving away free stuff is the best way to generate traffic.
- [03:45] Neil thinks creating tools are a good long-term plan.
- [04:48] Over the next few years, after continuing to give away tools and grow the business, Neil will semi-retire, leaving his team in charge.
- [05:15] He has already wound down public speaking engagements.
- [06:01] That’s all for today!
- [06:11] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post Neil Patel’s Personal Marketing Strategy | Ep. #675 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
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 Su.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today is actually part 2 of a two part series, the first one was about my personal marketing strategy and what the short term and the long term vision is. And today we're going to be going through Neil's long term and short term vision. So I guess not vision, but in terms of marketing strategy. So what are you, I mean how did you start? When did it actually start to work for you in terms of marketing strategy? Because I think it's good for people to know what it looked like.
Neil Patel: Yeah, it was years and years ago. So I used to have an ad agency years ago called ACS.
Eric Siu: How many years ago?
Neil Patel: 16.
Eric Siu: Wow.
Neil Patel: And the way we grew ACS was I either started cold calling at the beginning to get generate clients, and I hated it. So then eventually like blogging came out, and I remember I met Matt Mullenweg right when he started WordPress. And I was like, "Oh, we should try blogging and see if we can generate leads without spending money". Because we didn't have the money to spend on paper click. And yeah, that's how we got our start, and blogging worked. It just generated leads and I did it wrong at first. I created a blog called [Pronat [inaudible 00:01:31] Advertising. I don't know why I didn't put the blog on the corporate site.
Eric Siu: So what are you doing now around your marketing strategy? What do you foresee for like the next year?
Neil Patel: Yeah, so right now, we still spend a lot of time and energy on content marketing because it is what generates almost 100% of our leads. Word of mouth generates some, but we get so much traffic. Like, we can get easily 100 plus leads in any given day, even if it's a Saturday.
Eric Siu: Really.
Neil Patel: And millions of visits a month.
Eric Siu: Right.
Neil Patel: Yeah. So between all of our marketing blogs, we're about two million visits a month. Uniques.
Eric Siu: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Neil Patel: So when we look at the traffic, just content marketing generates so much, but when we analyze the numbers of how much time and energy we have to spend on content marketing, there's a really shitty aspect to it. It works, we won't stop doing it, but with content marketing, if you don't keep releasing more and more new content, you won't continually do well. It's not scalable.
Eric Siu: Yeah. And so what are you doing now to kind of counteract that?
Neil Patel: We're literally spending ... Well, there's two approaches. One is we're buying other businesses in our space and merging them in. We've slowed down on that because we can't find any more to buy, or at least people have ridiculous offers or valuations. But we tried buying Search Engine Watch. And now the Search Engine Watch guys, they didn't really care to entertain a conversation, but they spent too much buying the business. They barely make any money and let's say give them a million or two million dollars, they wouldn't give a shit about it. Right, so they just won't sell.
But when we look at our strategy now, we're spending I would say 80% plus of our money on building free software and tools for marketers so that way we can generate the most amount of leads. And even if the software's not the best, I know this sounds bad. It'll still generate more traffic and leads than anything else because giving away shit for free that people charge for, is the easiest way to get traffic. You don't have to do jack shit in marketing.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and so what's ... That sounds good. I mean literally two episodes ago, we talked about the genius of HubSpots marketing, so check that out to kind of elaborate on what Neil's talking about right now. But what do you think the long term marketing strategy is for you?
Neil Patel: It's going to be tools. So we bought out a company called Ubersuggest in early 2017, eventually integrated it in 2018 into the Neil Patel site. And then it's continued to evolve since then. What we've learned is the moment we took Ubersuggest and just added Google CPC data, and gave it away for free. When our competition queue were told that I owe charges for it, and most people charge for it. The traffic on that tool went up 50%. I kid you not. Just went up 50% overnight. All I had to do is just say, "Hey, check out this tool". We launch it. I didn't even do any marketing. Most of my email lists didn't even open it up. It was just more so people who already used the tool, who were like, "Oh my God, they give away more for free. This is awesome". And that caused it to grow.
And we're just like, wait, why not just give away all the other features that our competition charges for, for free and get like ten times more traffic and just keep getting leads from it.
Eric Siu: Awesome. So what do you think, so we talked about short term, long term, how you started at the beginning. So what do you think is the ultimate and grand vision? Like how do you see this all kind of plugging in together? What's happening in 20, 30 years?
Neil Patel: Sure, so 20, 30 years. I don't know. But the way I look at marketing is over the next few years, I'll keep building more tools, giving them away for free, collect a lot of leads. And then me personally, I probably, my team will still do marketing, but I'm like semi-retired at this point, and I would say like within like three, four years, I'll only be doing business deals and I'll probably be doing less stuff in the marketing space. I've already winded down my public speaking, so like I don't speak as many conferences, and my goal next year is to maybe speak at five to ten max. And then the year after, get down to zero speaking spots.
Eric Siu: How many did you speak at this year?
Neil Patel: I have no idea, but it's ridiculous. Sometimes I'm heading to Brazil today, and I'm doing a few speeches there. I get back next week on Friday and the moment I land, I go home for like six, seven hours, and then I head back to the airport to head to Vietnam for two more speeches.
Eric Siu: Well, there you go. So that's a lot. I mean you can look at your trip and tell us how much percent of your time is on speaking, but I look at mine. I was gone like 37% of the year.
Neil Patel: Wow.
Eric Siu: You're probably more than that. But anyway, that's Neil's personal strategy. You got the short term, what's he's done in the past. The long term, and you have the grand vision as well. Take that, see how it applies to your life, and before you go, go to signalgreen.com/giveaway to get access to marketing tools to grow your business. And we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Su.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today is actually part 2 of a two part series, the first one was about my personal marketing strategy and what the short term and the long term vision is. And today we're going to be going through Neil's long term and short term vision. So I guess not vision, but in terms of marketing strategy. So what are you, I mean how did you start? When did it actually start to work for you in terms of marketing strategy? Because I think it's good for people to know what it looked like.
Neil Patel: Yeah, it was years and years ago. So I used to have an ad agency years ago called ACS.
Eric Siu: How many years ago?
Neil Patel: 16.
Eric Siu: Wow.
Neil Patel: And the way we grew ACS was I either started cold calling at the beginning to get generate clients, and I hated it. So then eventually like blogging came out, and I remember I met Matt Mullenweg right when he started WordPress. And I was like, "Oh, we should try blogging and see if we can generate leads without spending money". Because we didn't have the money to spend on paper click. And yeah, that's how we got our start, and blogging worked. It just generated leads and I did it wrong at first. I created a blog called [Pronat [inaudible 00:01:31] Advertising. I don't know why I didn't put the blog on the corporate site.
Eric Siu: So what are you doing now around your marketing strategy? What do you foresee for like the next year?
Neil Patel: Yeah, so right now, we still spend a lot of time and energy on content marketing because it is what generates almost 100% of our leads. Word of mouth generates some, but we get so much traffic. Like, we can get easily 100 plus leads in any given day, even if it's a Saturday.
Eric Siu: Really.
Neil Patel: And millions of visits a month.
Eric Siu: Right.
Neil Patel: Yeah. So between all of our marketing blogs, we're about two million visits a month. Uniques.
Eric Siu: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Neil Patel: So when we look at the traffic, just content marketing generates so much, but when we analyze the numbers of how much time and energy we have to spend on content marketing, there's a really shitty aspect to it. It works, we won't stop doing it, but with content marketing, if you don't keep releasing more and more new content, you won't continually do well. It's not scalable.
Eric Siu: Yeah. And so what are you doing now to kind of counteract that?
Neil Patel: We're literally spending ... Well, there's two approaches. One is we're buying other businesses in our space and merging them in. We've slowed down on that because we can't find any more to buy, or at least people have ridiculous offers or valuations. But we tried buying Search Engine Watch. And now the Search Engine Watch guys, they didn't really care to entertain a conversation, but they spent too much buying the business. They barely make any money and let's say give them a million or two million dollars, they wouldn't give a shit about it. Right, so they just won't sell.
But when we look at our strategy now, we're spending I would say 80% plus of our money on building free software and tools for marketers so that way we can generate the most amount of leads. And even if the software's not the best, I know this sounds bad. It'll still generate more traffic and leads than anything else because giving away shit for free that people charge for, is the easiest way to get traffic. You don't have to do jack shit in marketing.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and so what's ... That sounds good. I mean literally two episodes ago, we talked about the genius of HubSpots marketing, so check that out to kind of elaborate on what Neil's talking about right now. But what do you think the long term marketing strategy is for you?
Neil Patel: It's going to be tools. So we bought out a company called Ubersuggest in early 2017, eventually integrated it in 2018 into the Neil Patel site. And then it's continued to evolve since then. What we've learned is the moment we took Ubersuggest and just added Google CPC data, and gave it away for free. When our competition queue were told that I owe charges for it, and most people charge for it. The traffic on that tool went up 50%. I kid you not. Just went up 50% overnight. All I had to do is just say, "Hey, check out this tool". We launch it. I didn't even do any marketing. Most of my email lists didn't even open it up. It was just more so people who already used the tool, who were like, "Oh my God, they give away more for free. This is awesome". And that caused it to grow.
And we're just like, wait, why not just give away all the other features that our competition charges for, for free and get like ten times more traffic and just keep getting leads from it.
Eric Siu: Awesome. So what do you think, so we talked about short term, long term, how you started at the beginning. So what do you think is the ultimate and grand vision? Like how do you see this all kind of plugging in together? What's happening in 20, 30 years?
Neil Patel: Sure, so 20, 30 years. I don't know. But the way I look at marketing is over the next few years, I'll keep building more tools, giving them away for free, collect a lot of leads. And then me personally, I probably, my team will still do marketing, but I'm like semi-retired at this point, and I would say like within like three, four years, I'll only be doing business deals and I'll probably be doing less stuff in the marketing space. I've already winded down my public speaking, so like I don't speak as many conferences, and my goal next year is to maybe speak at five to ten max. And then the year after, get down to zero speaking spots.
Eric Siu: How many did you speak at this year?
Neil Patel: I have no idea, but it's ridiculous. Sometimes I'm heading to Brazil today, and I'm doing a few speeches there. I get back next week on Friday and the moment I land, I go home for like six, seven hours, and then I head back to the airport to head to Vietnam for two more speeches.
Eric Siu: Well, there you go. So that's a lot. I mean you can look at your trip and tell us how much percent of your time is on speaking, but I look at mine. I was gone like 37% of the year.
Neil Patel: Wow.
Eric Siu: You're probably more than that. But anyway, that's Neil's personal strategy. You got the short term, what's he's done in the past. The long term, and you have the grand vision as well. Take that, see how it applies to your life, and before you go, go to signalgreen.com/giveaway to get access to marketing tools to grow your business. And we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
