Introduction: 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 what an advertorial is. So I'll give my definition first, and then Neil can speak to it.
An advertorial basically is, you know, I think about the affiliate marketers out there that run these ads. So they might make like a micro site, and then on the site ... so the micro site could be like a new blog or something like that, and maybe the blog post will talk about how bed bugs are really damaging, right? And how bed bugs can be a nightmare, and basically share a story, right? Basically in an advertorial it's a story in the beginning and then there's also an Ad that's kind of masked inside, which is why it's being called an advertorial, right? It's like a little editorial piece but there's an Ad in it. So it's kind of like a hybrid between the two.
But what you're looking to do with a good solid editorial piece, is you're looking to draw into people's emotions, right? You're looking to write a good headline that sucks people in, and then you're looking to have a story that engages them. Something that's outrageous, something that's crazy, and then afterwards you can have your Ad in there, right? So going back to the bed bugs example, I might talk about how I lost my dog or something to bed bugs, and how bed bugs ate my dog, or something like that.
I'm giving you a terrible example right now, but I'm trying to paint some kind of picture where it's like, there's no solution to bed bugs until now where I found out about this one product, right? So you see a lot of different affiliate marketers doing this, they're different domains things like that, and it does seem a little dirty, but it's always good to look at things like and think about how you can do it in kind of a cleaner way, right?
Same thing with like black, [inaudible 02:04], how can you do it in a white hat way? And do it in a clean way? Because oftentimes it's the black cap people, or the people that are willing to take risks, they give you these new ideas, and you can always spin it in another way.

Neil Patel: Yes, advertorials, the simplest way to look at it is if you write a really informational, educational blog post, but within there you integrate on why you need to buy this solution, and it's the only and the best solution out there to solve this problem. That's how they generate sales.
Most people that do advertorials, and get amazing conversions from it, typically drive traffic from Facebook. There's not too many other social or Ad platforms out there that convert really well for advertorials other than Facebook. Then I would go into the Tabulars and Outbrains, but those are the main three that people are using right now.
From there, the advertorial pages are usually like false advertising, because most of them have celebrity endorsements, or they have stuff like Huffington Post's logo, even thought it wasn't on Huffington Post, and it looks like a fake news site. But that's how they're driving the conversions.
They work well, you just need to be careful with that, because you don't want to get on the sketchy or the shady end because it can just create problems in the long run.

Eric Siu: Yep, totally agree with that. So think about the long game, don't think about the short game, and that's basically it.
So before we go, we have a special giveaway for you. This is a one year annual subscription to Crazy Egg, which is worth close to $1,200. But before I give you details on the giveaway itself, Neil, what is Crazy Egg?

Neil Patel: Crazy is a visual analytics tool. It shows you why people aren't converting on your website. From heat maps to scroll maps, it has tons of reports out there. It even lets you make changes within the system, so if you want to make design changes, or copy changes to your website, you don't have to be a developer or designer anymore, you can change those things within the Crazy Egg Wizzy Wig editor. You can even run split tests like AB tests to optimize your conversions within Crazy Egg. You can pretty much do everything you need to do, in one solution, to get more sales.

Eric Siu: Alright, so if you want to get in on this, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. The cool thing is we're giving away one of these every single week for the next year, and you can also get multiple entries. So just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more, and we will see you tomorrow.

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