In Episode #411, Eric and Neil discuss what they do for content promotion. Tune in to learn why your competitors in the same space are actually your allies. You’ll also find out the tools that Eric and Neil have leveraged to promote their content.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 00:27 – Today’s topic: What Neil and Eric Do for Content Promotion
- 00:35 – Neil isn’t currently doing any content promotion but he used to
- 00:47 – Neil suggests finding other bloggers in your space to ask them to promote your blog
- 01:00 – You can pay them and have them send traffic to a landing page that has an ebook, download or giveaway
- 01:14 – Add social sharing icons to your blog post page
- 01:21 – Neil also emails the people who shares his competitor’s article
- 01:25 – Go to BuzzSumo to find who shared your competitor’s post
- 02:17 – Eric uses Wavve to share audio clips on social media
- 02:54 – Eric and Neil promotes their content on LinkedIn by writing 2-3 sentences and adding a link to the actual post
- 03:20 – If you link out to someone on your blog post, email them telling them that you love what they’re doing, that you linked out to them and to check out your blog post
- 03:43 – The response for this is high
- 04:18 – You can repost your blog post on Medium where you can increase your reach
- 04:58 – Eric also targets emails that are cheaper
- 05:04 – Facebook is a good way to build your audience
- 05:22 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool
- 06:04 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway for multiple entries
- 06:20 – That’s it for today’s episode!
3 Key Points:
- Not everyone in your field are your competitors, find a way to mutually benefit from one another, linking out to each other’s blogs.
- LinkedIn drives a lot of traffic, so take advantage of it—promote your content with a link to your page.
- Facebook is always a good place to promote your content and build your audience.
Leave some feedback:
- What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below.
- Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.
Connect with us:
Full Transcript of The Episode
Automated : 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're going to talk about Neil and I do content promotion. So Neil how do you do content promotion?
Neil Patel: I don't really do content promotion, 'cause I have a following. But I will share how I used to do it. The way I do content promotion, actually to some extent I still do it now, but the way I would start off is if I'm starting on a new blog I go find other bloggers or people who are in my space. I know everyone's like oh, but they're competitors they're never going to help me out. There's tons of bloggers in your space who aren't competitors. Ask them if they'll do an email blast promoting your own blog. You can pay them money, and have them send traffic to a landing page that has an E-book, right? Or some sort of download or giveaway, and then every time you release a blog post just blast it out to the list. Have social sharing icons on your blog post page, you'll start getting social traffic.
The other thing I do, is I just email all the people that shared my competitors articles. So I got to Bassimo, type in competitor URL's or their keywords that they're ranking for, find popular posts. They have this button called view shares, click on that, it shows you who shared your competitors posts and then you just reach out to them saying, "Hey John, I noticed you shared x, y, and z post by author a, b and c. I have a similar one coming out called 'This, that and the other' and mine covers 1, 2 and 3 that they didn't cover. Let me know if you want to see it. Cheers Neil." They usually respond back with sure, or yes. Then you respond back with, "Here you go, feel free to share it if you like it. Cheers Neil." That's it, those are the two steps I used to promote my content and it worked really well. Whether I'm starting out from scratch or I already have an audience, those two things are always consistently working.
Eric Siu: So what we do from Instagram, because Neil and I are recording all the time and I have another podcast too, we use this tool called Wavve, there's two v's in there, so w.a.v.v.e. Wavve will make a little, you know you can add an image to something and then it'll have a cool little, I forgot what those graphs are called you know when you can see like an audio file, you know what those are called?
Neil Patel: No.
Eric Siu: Yeah, but anyway you guys get my drift, but yeah Wavve is cool, you might pay like seven bucks a month or something, but it'll make those audio files for you and you just post it to Instagram. You can make an Instagram story as well, so if you have a following there definitely use it. I use it as a post and sometimes I might delete it and just to kind of curate everything, but that's one thing that we do right.
The second thing is you know with all the blog content we have coming out and Neil actually does this too, is we promote whether it's a podcast or it's a blog post or whatever. We write maybe a couple of snippets, some insights here and there on LinkedIn, maybe like two or three paragraphs or so, and then a link to the actual full post. LinkedIn actually gets really good engagement right now, so that's example number two.
Neil Patel: Did you talk about E-mailing people out that you link to? So if you link out to people within your blog post, shoot an E-mail to them and say, "Hey so and so, love what you're doing. I love what you're doing so much that I even linked out to you in my latest blog post. Feel free and check it out. Cheers Neil. PS: It wouldn't just make my day, it would make my year if you shared this article."
Eric Siu: Yeah, and that actually works really well. When I used to do everything manually that's what I did and the response rate was extremely high. I actually did it with Neil's partner, Heyton, in the past whenever I wrote something new on like one of my old blogs, and you'd actually share it, because I'd always include him and Neil in it as ego bait. Yeah just Google ego bait and you'll see what that means. You can't just write crap, it has to be something that's actually good.
Neil Patel: Dude, I didn't even read your stuff that you're asking me to share.
Eric Siu: Automatically share it.
Neil Patel: I just shared it.
Eric Siu: I was just like yes.
Neil Patel: I do that with a lot of people.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and people remember that too, like I'll always remember that. So the other thing, I mean there's so many other things you can do right? Like you can take a blog post and just repost it to Medium, and Medium has a canonical feature on it. The good thing about Medium is you can increase your reach there, that's something that I've done kind of one and off but we need somethings that more dedicated. So if you actually know somebody that's really good at content promotion, good at social media, send them my way. Neil's probably going to need someone like that eventually, I suspect, but maybe not right now. But anyway yeah if you know anybody send them our way.
The other thing we do is we do Facebook advertising right? So we'll drive people to a piece of content or even could be a piece of, could be like a video for a 10 second view. Then we'll re target people, we'll set like manual conversion, manual bidding for conversions. We're trying to target E-mails that are cheaper and do it that way. So Facebook has always been good to us, it's been a good way to build audiences.
I could just go on and on with tactics but I think that's enough from my side. So, before we go we have a one year annual subscription to Crazy Egg that we would like to bring to you. It's worth close to 12 hundred dollars and before I give you the details on how you can actually win this, Neil what is Crazy Egg?
Neil Patel: Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool, it shows you why people are not converting on your website. There's tons of visual reports within Crazy Egg like heat maps, that will show you why people click, or why they don't click on certain elements. Or if they're scrolling along, or if they're not scrolling and not seeing your call to actions, and your form fields. Or why they're dropping off your check out pages. The beautiful part about it is once you spot the issues within Crazy Egg, you can also make changes to your website using Crazy Egg, 'cause it has a whizzy wig editor. So you can make all the design and copy changes you need to make without having to be a designer or being a developer. You can run split test to make sure that those changes are helping increase your leads, your sales and your revenue.
Eric Siu: So if you want to get in on this just got singlegrain.com/giveaway and we're giving away one of these every single week for the next year, so limited quantities. But the cool thing is you can actually get multiple entries on this, so just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more and we will see you tomorrow.
Automated : 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. 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 Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today we're going to talk about Neil and I do content promotion. So Neil how do you do content promotion?
Neil Patel: I don't really do content promotion, 'cause I have a following. But I will share how I used to do it. The way I do content promotion, actually to some extent I still do it now, but the way I would start off is if I'm starting on a new blog I go find other bloggers or people who are in my space. I know everyone's like oh, but they're competitors they're never going to help me out. There's tons of bloggers in your space who aren't competitors. Ask them if they'll do an email blast promoting your own blog. You can pay them money, and have them send traffic to a landing page that has an E-book, right? Or some sort of download or giveaway, and then every time you release a blog post just blast it out to the list. Have social sharing icons on your blog post page, you'll start getting social traffic.
The other thing I do, is I just email all the people that shared my competitors articles. So I got to Bassimo, type in competitor URL's or their keywords that they're ranking for, find popular posts. They have this button called view shares, click on that, it shows you who shared your competitors posts and then you just reach out to them saying, "Hey John, I noticed you shared x, y, and z post by author a, b and c. I have a similar one coming out called 'This, that and the other' and mine covers 1, 2 and 3 that they didn't cover. Let me know if you want to see it. Cheers Neil." They usually respond back with sure, or yes. Then you respond back with, "Here you go, feel free to share it if you like it. Cheers Neil." That's it, those are the two steps I used to promote my content and it worked really well. Whether I'm starting out from scratch or I already have an audience, those two things are always consistently working.
Eric Siu: So what we do from Instagram, because Neil and I are recording all the time and I have another podcast too, we use this tool called Wavve, there's two v's in there, so w.a.v.v.e. Wavve will make a little, you know you can add an image to something and then it'll have a cool little, I forgot what those graphs are called you know when you can see like an audio file, you know what those are called?
Neil Patel: No.
Eric Siu: Yeah, but anyway you guys get my drift, but yeah Wavve is cool, you might pay like seven bucks a month or something, but it'll make those audio files for you and you just post it to Instagram. You can make an Instagram story as well, so if you have a following there definitely use it. I use it as a post and sometimes I might delete it and just to kind of curate everything, but that's one thing that we do right.
The second thing is you know with all the blog content we have coming out and Neil actually does this too, is we promote whether it's a podcast or it's a blog post or whatever. We write maybe a couple of snippets, some insights here and there on LinkedIn, maybe like two or three paragraphs or so, and then a link to the actual full post. LinkedIn actually gets really good engagement right now, so that's example number two.
Neil Patel: Did you talk about E-mailing people out that you link to? So if you link out to people within your blog post, shoot an E-mail to them and say, "Hey so and so, love what you're doing. I love what you're doing so much that I even linked out to you in my latest blog post. Feel free and check it out. Cheers Neil. PS: It wouldn't just make my day, it would make my year if you shared this article."
Eric Siu: Yeah, and that actually works really well. When I used to do everything manually that's what I did and the response rate was extremely high. I actually did it with Neil's partner, Heyton, in the past whenever I wrote something new on like one of my old blogs, and you'd actually share it, because I'd always include him and Neil in it as ego bait. Yeah just Google ego bait and you'll see what that means. You can't just write crap, it has to be something that's actually good.
Neil Patel: Dude, I didn't even read your stuff that you're asking me to share.
Eric Siu: Automatically share it.
Neil Patel: I just shared it.
Eric Siu: I was just like yes.
Neil Patel: I do that with a lot of people.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and people remember that too, like I'll always remember that. So the other thing, I mean there's so many other things you can do right? Like you can take a blog post and just repost it to Medium, and Medium has a canonical feature on it. The good thing about Medium is you can increase your reach there, that's something that I've done kind of one and off but we need somethings that more dedicated. So if you actually know somebody that's really good at content promotion, good at social media, send them my way. Neil's probably going to need someone like that eventually, I suspect, but maybe not right now. But anyway yeah if you know anybody send them our way.
The other thing we do is we do Facebook advertising right? So we'll drive people to a piece of content or even could be a piece of, could be like a video for a 10 second view. Then we'll re target people, we'll set like manual conversion, manual bidding for conversions. We're trying to target E-mails that are cheaper and do it that way. So Facebook has always been good to us, it's been a good way to build audiences.
I could just go on and on with tactics but I think that's enough from my side. So, before we go we have a one year annual subscription to Crazy Egg that we would like to bring to you. It's worth close to 12 hundred dollars and before I give you the details on how you can actually win this, Neil what is Crazy Egg?
Neil Patel: Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool, it shows you why people are not converting on your website. There's tons of visual reports within Crazy Egg like heat maps, that will show you why people click, or why they don't click on certain elements. Or if they're scrolling along, or if they're not scrolling and not seeing your call to actions, and your form fields. Or why they're dropping off your check out pages. The beautiful part about it is once you spot the issues within Crazy Egg, you can also make changes to your website using Crazy Egg, 'cause it has a whizzy wig editor. So you can make all the design and copy changes you need to make without having to be a designer or being a developer. You can run split test to make sure that those changes are helping increase your leads, your sales and your revenue.
Eric Siu: So if you want to get in on this just got singlegrain.com/giveaway and we're giving away one of these every single week for the next year, so limited quantities. But the cool thing is you can actually get multiple entries on this, so just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more and we will see you tomorrow.
Automated : 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. 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.
