Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile 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: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about how we both spend our marketing dollars, and it's different. We both have different strategies, and the spend is also very different, as well. Neil, where do you want to start?

Neil Patel: Go for it. Where do you spend your money, Eric?

Eric Siu: Let's see. Where do we spend our money? Do we count salaries here?

Neil Patel: No. Let's not count salaries.

Eric Siu: Salaries on the marketing team, no?

Neil Patel: No.

Eric Siu: Okay.

Neil Patel: If you want to, go for it.

Eric Siu: Well, let's start the with the actual simple marketing cost for. We are probably spending about 10 or 15 grand a month on content. This is actually blog content, so writers that we have, guest posts that we're doing, and then, I think, some salaries, as well. It's probably around 10 to 15.

Neil Patel: That's not bad.

Eric Siu: It's not as bad as you. What are you at for content?

Neil Patel: 4,500 a month for videos and then, content, I'm moving to a strategy where I'm going to only write once a week, so, technically, free. Podcasting, what does this cost us? 700 each a month.

Eric Siu: We have to add in ... Yeah, 700, 700, 800?

Neil Patel: Yeah. I don't really have a marketing team. That's it. That's going to be all my marketing costs.

Eric Siu: We spend the same on video because this is a video person, right?

Neil Patel: Yeah, video person is 4,500.

Eric Siu: We're spending basically the same there. What else do we have? Well, I spend some money on ads, as well. We just started wrapping up. Retargeting, we spend about ... We don't spend that much. We spend 3-4 grand, really nothing.

Neil Patel: I spend majority of my marketing dollars building tools and just giving shit away for free. That probably costs me around 80 grand a month right now to 100, somewhere in that range.

Eric Siu: We build tools. We're not buying tools right now. That just takes a lot of time, I would say. That takes up 40% of my time right now.

Neil Patel: That's actually a good point. We're spending most of our marketing dollars actually not even on building tools. It's just buying all our competitors because we found it's cheaper to just buy them and merge them into our company than it is to pay for the marketing.

Eric Siu: We talked about that in ... I think it was two episodes ago, two episodes ago. You're making money now. What's next?

Neil Patel: That wasn't two episodes ago. That was ...

Eric Siu: Three episodes ago.

Neil Patel: Three episodes ago, but, in general, I'm spending most of my marketing dollars on just buying up all the competition that's not doing that well financially, merging them in. The second most is building free tools and then giving them away because its the most consistent traffic channel. You're not really relying on Google Search or any of that. Once people find out you have free tools, you just naturally get traffic, and you don't have to do much marketing, and then the rest is on content marketing and SEO.

Eric Siu: I think if we're to add in salaries, just add another 25 grand on top for the stuff that's getting this stuff moving. I think you're probably around the same, maybe a little less.

Neil Patel: No. Most of that is including salaries.

Eric Siu: Is it? Your blog manager ... What else do you have?

Neil Patel: All [crosstalk 00:03:18]-

Eric Siu: Video editing, [crosstalk 00:03:19]-

Neil Patel: That's the 4,500. My blog manager [crosstalk 00:03:22]-

Eric Siu: [crosstalk 00:03:22]

Neil Patel: Nope. I don't do a redesign on my blog, only maybe once every few years.

Eric Siu: Epic content?

Neil Patel: No. I stopped doing epic content. I would say there's one guy, David, who helps run the process, editing and everything like that. That costs me ... I think it's 2,000 bucks a month.

Eric Siu: Then what about the translations?

Neil Patel: I don't pay for that.

Eric Siu: There's just someone doing it?

Neil Patel: Yeah.

Eric Siu: There you go. That's also a good lesson, too. If you're able to build up brand equity, like Neil can, you can get a lot of stuff sometimes on the cheap.

Neil Patel: Technically, I don't pay for most things. Most people do shit for me for free. Sounds bad, but ...

Eric Siu: Again, that goes back to the brand equity portion. That takes time if you want to build something up like that. Do we have anything else to add around this? I think we gave people a good breakdown.

Neil Patel: That's it. One strategy I use, for all of you guys out there who don't have a ton of capital to start with, I'll find people to partner with, and I'll also put their name on it, and it goes back to a bit of brand equity, and that allows me to get a ton of stuff for free because I'm helping both other people's name. In addition to that, another strategy you can do is you can just hit people up. Let's say we used to do this at Kissmetrics before I bought the blog, and we used to do it, saying, "Hey, do you want to guest post on our blog?" It made the whole content marketing free because, even though we didn't have an audience, people would just blog for free, and the content wasn't as amazing, but as our traffic grew, we were able to outreach into bigger authors and more well known people who had social influences and get them to guest post. Eventually, it led us to create a blog that had over a million visitors a month without spending a dollar paying writers.

Eric Siu: That's a good one. On your blog, just even having a simple, "Write for us," link or maybe put it in the header, it does work. We get a ton of requests for that. As your site builds [inaudible 00:05:08] have a ton of these content marketers, SEO people reaching out to you because you are on their list, and it's your job to set a criteria for people where it's like, "Okay. This is what I'm looking for. Please follow these instructions exactly," and then, from there, you're going to be able to funnel out the great people and then work with them, and you're going to be able to build out your free content team.
That is it for today, but before we go, go check out our marketing tools that will grow your business. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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