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 Sui.

Eric Sui: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sui.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Sui: And today we're going to talk about the big mistake you're going to make with content marketing. What is it Neil?

Neil Patel: Most people focus on traffic, and as you get more traffic you think you're going to get more sales. But what you quickly learn is traffic doesn't equate to sales or leads, or whatever form of monetization you have. It's funny, I was sitting down with my buddy, Mike, who runs Dr. Axe. Dr. Axe went from four million visits a month to over 20 million visits a month. That's a lot of traffic. What do you think happened to their sales?
Their sales didn't go 5x up from content marketing. Sure, their sales went through the roof, but that was through paid advertising, webinars, and other formats. The big thing is, just because you're getting more traffic doesn't mean your sales are going to go up at the same portion. Typically, content marketing doesn't convert as well as paid advertising or other forms of marketing.

Eric Sui: Yeah, so first thing you need to think about is conversion rate optimization, right? A lot of people tend to forget ... okay, just cause you're cranking out more blog content, again, doesn't mean you're necessarily going to convert. So here's one thing you can do. A lot of people forget about content upgrades. It's something Neil and I talk about quite a bit but having a relevant content upgrade, which is an e-book, some kind of downloadable where people have to trade their emails in at the very least, and focus on either ... ideally, if you're downloadable is focused on the category or the topic, your conversion rates are going to be higher. We're talking anywhere from a 5 to 20% conversion rate there. You have to think about these things. You have to have somebody dedicated to it. It's not just about hiring 20 or 30 freelancers or so and just crank out a bunch of content. cause oftentimes that's just, you know, you're getting more traffic, great. But you're not converting it, so what's the point of doing that?

Neil Patel: Yeah. And, if you want more sales, right, cause that's the main thing. If you're just doing content marketing or any form of marketing, the real goal is ROI. You can't just focus on content on anything. So, for example, the other day we published a post called like Nine Essential or Vital WordPress Plugins That You Ought to Use, or Nine Free Vital WordPress Plugins That You Ought to Use. It was something like that. What ended up happening is traffic started to surge. That post alone generates 2 to 3 thousand visitors a day from Google. That's a ton of traffic. No paid advertising would do anything like that. You know how many leads it generates? Zero. And here's the reason and everyone keeps making this mistake over and over again. It's not about producing a lot of content, it's about producing relevant content. If the content that you're writing isn't read by your ideal customers and it's not their paying point, they're not going to sign up for your product, or service, or buy whatever you're selling.

Eric Sui: Just to give you an example. I mean, we have a blog post on Single Grain where we went really high for a video engagement, or video reproduction, or video production, something like that. Not something we do, right? So we don't get any conversions from it at all even though it gets, you know, 4 or 5 thousand visits a month. So you're better off looking at going through your [inaudible 00:03:17], looking at what actually people read and what actually converts, and then doubling down, right? Look at the 10 to 20% of things that actually generate a good kind of result or ROI for you, and then think about doubling down there, right? A lot of people would just kind of continue to go with the motions and we certainly made that mistake, and sometimes we fall back into that. So you've got to think about that over time in terms of what is the goal of your content, and how do you go about creating relevant content that converts?

Neil Patel: Yeah, so if you just follow what Eric and I are saying, you're content marketing is going to be much more effective. And, in general, all you're marketing's going to be much more effective, and you should end up generating more sales. Keep in mind, traffic isn't free. Even if you're not paying for it via ads, it's still costing you money because you're putting time, and effort, and energy to generate those visitors.

Eric Sui: Great, and that's it for today. And, before we go, we have a 90-day free trial of Crazy Egg, which is a heat mapping analytics tool designed to help you grow your business online. If you go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, you can get access. And then also, you can enter to win a 1-year annual subscription of Crazy Egg, which is worth more than $3,000. So that's it for today. And we'll see you tomorrow.

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