Brad Weimert: Neil Patel, thank you so much for carving out time, man.
Neil Patel: Thanks for having me.
Brad Weimert: For sure. So, I think everybody certainly in the marketing community knows you as a long-time analytical, successful marketer. For those that don’t know you, can you give me the fast-forward version of how you got to now because you started a business at 16?
Neil Patel: Started in business 16. I’m 38 now, so 22 years. I spent the majority of my career in marketing, the marketing software or ad agencies. And my current startup is called NP Digital. It’s a marketing agency and we help people grow the traffic globally. And it’s probably not really a startup anymore but I still call it a startup.
Brad Weimert: Do you feel like you operate it like a startup?
Neil Patel: No. We have quite a bit of headcount. I think it started moving slower once we started getting to like 300, 400 people, and then it got 500, 600, 700, etcetera. It started getting worse and worse.
Brad Weimert: It sounds like a good nightmare to me.
Neil Patel: That’s about it. I still love it and I enjoy it but you start worrying about different things like, “Oh wait, we had to have these security procedures in place. We had to have this in place for lawsuits and this insurance policy.” It’s like there’s just so much stuff or opening up in a new country. Well, we have to open up bank accounts. We have to open up corporations. Oh, we have to run this because we have banking partners. Okay, cool. Do they allow this? Is it what’s in our contract? Do they require certain types of insurance and liabilities, etcetera? The list goes on and on.
Brad Weimert: So, I want to talk about the perils of running a company that has hundreds of employees and how your role has changed. But for a quick rundown, so started at 16. This is the track record that the Internet gave me, which presumably you planted there for me to find.
Neil Patel: No, no, no, no. Probably not but go continue. I’m curious to see what the internet told you.
Brad Weimert: They told me Advice Monkey at 16.
Neil Patel: Yeah. It failed miserably.
Brad Weimert: It failed miserably?
Neil Patel: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: Crazy Egg, which is heatmaps.
Neil Patel: Before that was an ad agency called ACS. It got hit hard during the 2008 crisis. It was doing millions in revenue, but it got hit hard during the 2008 crisis, then Crazy Egg.
Brad Weimert: And Kissmetrics.
Neil Patel: Crazy Egg did really well. Kissmetrics, not so much. They ran out of money a few times. I don’t know who owns it now but, you know, fire sales.
Brad Weimert: And then I’ve got NP Digital and Ubersuggest.
Neil Patel: NP Digital, yeah. And then Ubersuggest, I think may have come before NP Digital. I venture I merged it in. We have AnswerThePublic as well we bought that one. We’re about to close on another deal in two weeks. It’ll be a creative agency but we actually buy quite a bit. We buy way more than we talked about.
Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. So, I want to talk about acquisition but before we do, I want to ask you as somebody that is presumably very good at marketing and has a reputation for being very good at marketing, why do you want to have an agency as opposed to selling your own sh*t?
Neil Patel: Yeah, I love it. Okay. So, like, let’s say you sell your own stuff, right? You’re on like e-books or course, what are you going to get? $5,000? $10,000 max per course product? I can sell deals for $10 million in just one deal. It scales quite a bit. Or I actually said that the wrong way. Financially, it can scale better. Headcount-wise, not really. It’s a really manual, tedious process. But the main reason I have agency isn’t even the financial reasons. When I started the agency, it had nothing to do with finance. Yeah, it’s been successful. And with that, comes money but I was just pissed off running these software companies and getting crappy marketing services when I would hire people. So, I’m like, I’m just going to start it myself and create a better agency. That’s how it came about.
Brad Weimert: So, my observation in business has been that almost all agencies are crappy and the ones that are very good are few and far between and tend to do some sort of revenue share/percentage of lift. And outside of that sliver, they just do their own thing. Am I flawed in my approach there mentally?
Neil Patel: No. I think a lot of agencies like I was trying to find a text message as we talk because I have a good friend who is a client. They have a good-sized business. And he’s like just super honest with me, right, because we’re friends. And so, I was like happier, doing well, blah, blah, blah. And we were talking about the Canada team because we’re working with my Canada team right now and he’s like, “Generally, our experience with NPD,” which is my ad agency, NP Digital, “has been the best of all agencies we worked with. Surely one of the big reasons you’re doing well.” And then he mentioned some other agencies which I don’t want to read because it’s not necessarily the brightest or it’s not necessarily the nicest words. But it’s funny he’s not saying that because he’s trying to butter up to me. We were just texting and I was just asking for honest feedback like I buy some of his protein products. His company’s called Legion Athletics and I buy his protein products like protein bars, etcetera, because I travel a lot like you. You know, sometimes I forget to eat, gobble one of those down and his stuff tends to be clean. And it’s not just for getting like buffed as you can tell looking at me. I’m not a buffed guy but it just keeps you healthy, right, like supplements, etcetera. And that was the issue. We faced what a lot of people face, crappy experience working with agencies.
And it comes down to people and everyone’s like, “Yay, you need good people.” They say that but they don’t really try to focus on hiring good people. They just optimize for profit. And most agencies, at least the big ones, are run by accountants. They’re not run by marketers. And that’s what makes the big ones get really bad names because they’re optimizing for profitability and earnings, instead of results for clients.
Brad Weimert: Well, on the flip side of that is that you and I both know in the sort of Internet marketing community, this litany of agencies that are the exact opposite, which are marketers, but they’re small and most of them will always be small. And I think it’s become a trendy business model to pursue on the front end.
Neil Patel: It has.
Brad Weimert: Who are you pursuing and how are you different?
Neil Patel: Yeah. A lot of those agencies run by marketers are good but they are too small at scale. So, like, for example, with some of my own companies when we’re working with agencies, if they don’t have enough of the global footprint, it wouldn’t work because our customers like with Crazy Egg, less than 50% of the revenue comes from the United States. Majority of the revenue comes from overseas. So, if you’re not finding people in different regions and languages who can help, you kind of SOL, right? You’re sh*t outta luck. So, it’s hard to find good agencies run by marketers at scale with a global footprint. And that’s what we ended up building. I think we’re in 19 countries now, 16, 19. My team says 19. Last I counted was 16, but they were no better than me.
Brad Weimert: Who’s your target market in the agency?
Neil Patel: Large corporations, not like a company doing like seven figures or eight figures, ideally in the 9, if not 10 or 11 figures in revenue.
Brad Weimert: Okay. So, this is a fundamentally different approach too. Had you gone after that target market with the other companies you had?
Neil Patel: I have in the past. Yes.
Brad Weimert: How did you approach that and why did you choose that? Because the enterprise-level sales is not common for certainly startups or small businesses.
Neil Patel: It’s not common but it’s where my relationships are. I’m an enterprise guy. I’ve always been a pick up the phone, dial, and try to close.
Brad Weimert: What’s the sale cycle like for those? So, I grew up in almost door-to-door sales. Right. And I’m used to a quick sales cycle.
Neil Patel: Yeah. My sales cycle enterprise side, 60 to 90 days if we’re lucky.
Brad Weimert: Wow.
Neil Patel: Six months to a year if we’re unlucky. Depends on the customer.
Brad Weimert: Sure.
Neil Patel: And then when you get them, you’re not getting a big contract typically out the door. They’re testing you in a region with a big brand, and it’ll be small. So, I’ll give you a prime example of this. I got an email this morning. So, the email this morning was I’ll mention the parent company, not the actual brand but are you familiar with Diageo, the alcohol brand?
Brad Weimert: Sure.
Neil Patel: I’m probably mispronouncing it. Okay. We’re doing marketing for them and a really tiny market. And it’s not for that much money. And what I mean, it’s not for that much money unless you’re trying to look up where it is. There you go. It’s around $135,000 for it looks like from three, so three months. $135,000 for three months. All right. But it’s a test run. But if we do well, we’ll get more brands, bigger regions, and that’ll be really assuming we can perform. It’ll be easy for us to turn into a multi-million dollar deal. Takes time, though.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. If you were to build. So, why are you an enterprise guy? How did you get into that? Because, I mean, most entrepreneurs, when they start something, it’s not like, “Oh, I’m going to start this new company and let me go after Coke.”
Neil Patel: No. So, my background is never like enterprise like Coke. My background was enterprise getting bigger size deals, like starting in 100,000, 200,000, and then climb up from there. And then eventually when you climb up, you end up dealing with bigger enterprise brands. My first real company was an ad agency. So, I would go to conferences, network. You can’t really service people for $10,000 a year. You need bigger contracts. And that’s why what I mean by I was the enterprise guy from day one is that’s how you make the money in my space. And most B2B stuff, a lot of the money is enterprise. SMB is great, but the churn is just so bad in SMB.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, but the complexity in the enterprise is orders of magnitude.
Neil Patel: Not really.
Brad Weimert: You don’t think?
Neil Patel: No.
Brad Weimert: I mean, just layers of sales pitch, you’ve got multiple contact points.
Neil Patel: Sure. So, I’ll give you a prime example. You may think doing your hair is really easy. I look at your hair is really complex. You’ve got to get it up, stay up, maybe use a flat iron. I don’t know what you use, if anything, or gel. It takes work. I don’t have hair. So, for me, what you have is a lot of work. My background is enterprise. Dealing on the flip side with SMB, I know SMB, don’t get me wrong, or like I’ll give you a better example of a consumer. I’ve never been a consumer entrepreneur. You tell me, “Hey, do dropshipping.” Well, I’ve never done dropshipping. This is going to be a pain in the butt. I don’t know how to do this. It’s like I grew up doing enterprise that I’m the B2B entrepreneur tend to stick with enterprise. So, you’re never actually going to get it and you know it. It’s not that hard. It just seems hard from the outside because people haven’t done it before but on the flip side, if I go look at what you or other people are doing, it’ll seem hard to me because I’ve never done it.
Brad Weimert: That’s fair. That’s fair, though, just the number of touch points is different and the sales cycle is different. And so, a brand new company that’s bootstrapping doesn’t have the runway.
Neil Patel: We weren’t bootstrapped.
Brad Weimert: So, there we go. Okay. First ad agency wasn’t bootstrapped.
Neil Patel: First one was. It was much smaller. It’s like a few million in revenue.
Brad Weimert: So, first one was bootstrapped. You worked your way through and you started to reach out to enterprise and started to close enterprise sales, and that began the journey of building the enterprise rolodex. And as you continue your role, you leaned into enterprise-heavy.
Neil Patel: Yes. And then the current one was not bootstrapped. The current one was well-funded from day one.
Brad Weimert: Got it. External parties then?
Neil Patel: We raised around $5 million from myself.
Brad Weimert: Got it.
Neil Patel: Three to five, somewhere in there. I was pulling money in, taking it out, putting it in but it’s probably closer to five than three. I ended up getting all my money out. It wasn’t even funding. It was just a loan. But there is no recourse. It’s my own money.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, so funded by you. Got it. Kind of bootstrapped but it’s not really fair to call it bootstrapped if you have a huge injection on the front end.
Neil Patel: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: That makes sense.
Neil Patel: This also we have really fast growth. I injected a lot of money.
Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about that before we dive into marketing because we got a whole bunch of specifics that I think you can add a tremendous amount of value on that are relevant today but hundreds of employees. So, how big were the previous companies in terms of headcount? Because this is a huge scale.
Neil Patel: Yeah. They’ve ranged all over the board but typically smaller in headcount. This one has 750-ish. It’ll get to like 1,000 pretty quickly is my guess within the next few years.
Brad Weimert: I think that you called that a pain in the butt. Would you do it again?
Neil Patel: Yeah, I don’t mind it. It’s a lot of work but I do like it.
Brad Weimert: What are the mechanics? When you think about scaling with people, how do you do that in a way that’s actually clean and repeatable?
Neil Patel: Oh, really easy. You hire people who have done it before in your space so you don’t have to deal with it. That’s how I did it, hence the $5 million. That’s not the answer that people want to hear but that’s the truth.
Brad Weimert: So, I think that the reason is not the answer people want to hear is because it doesn’t tell the full story, right? So, do you look at the going rate in the place that you’re trying to hire? Do you go above that rate? Do you buy other agencies? Do you poach people from agencies? How do you find the people that have done it before?
Neil Patel: Yeah. We typically poach from other agencies and we’ll offer them a better comp package.
Brad Weimert: And what’s the outreach like? Where do you find them?
Neil Patel: LinkedIn.
Brad Weimert: Just direct messages? Connection request?
Neil Patel: Yes.
Brad Weimert: Love it.
Neil Patel: Lot of manual grinding to reach out to these people because like our CEO ran one of our competitors and I think there he managed like 4,000 employees or something like that. So, I was like, “Cool.” He’s looking like this. He’s like, “Oh, you guys are small. This is a cake log.”
Brad Weimert: Got it. I love that. Okay. Well, let’s talk about…
Neil Patel: And then he was like, “Oh, you’re not publicly traded. I don’t have to deal with earnings calls and all this kind of stuff, and dealing with executives at the parent company, making sure we’re doing what we need to do to hit numbers.” And he’s like, “This is pretty chill.” And I was like, “Sounds good. It’s chill for you. Go for it.”
Brad Weimert: Were you the CEO at one point there?
Neil Patel: No. I’m never the CEO. I’m a terrible CEO. I’m not in operations. I’m good at operations with small teams, sub 50. I’m terrible at operations with massive teams.
Brad Weimert: How did you find out? So, you’re not good at operations for the current 700 mark?
Neil Patel: No. I’ve known it for a while.
Brad Weimert: How did you find out? How did you find out that you are a bad CEO?
Neil Patel: One, I’ve never been a CEO but, two, I’ve never been good at operations. Even with some of my older companies as we’ve grown them in headcount, I start breaking apart. Not like mental breakdowns or anything. I’m talking about like I’m just not good at dealing with people problem, scaling, etcetera. I’m really good in a box and what I mean by that is like, “Oh, you want to scale? Let me figure out how to scale on the marketing end.” That’s what I’m really good at and that’s it. I’ve got a business strategy but what I’m really good at is just scaling on getting traffic, leads, and sales. So, I stick with what I know.
Brad Weimert: And so, which by the way, I think there are kind of two trajectories that entrepreneurs go on. One is they try to get better in general holistically and be a better CEO. And the other is that they try to hire out the things that they’re not good at. And I see very few people in my ecosystem that really lean into the ladder. Most people feel like they’re supposed to, as they grow with the company, step into the new role that has presented itself.
Neil Patel: I typically believe that the person who takes a company from 1 to 10, which I’m really good at, is not the person to take it from 10 to 100 or 100 to 500, etcetera.
Brad Weimert: What’s the ambition with NP Digital?
Neil Patel: Just be a larger global ad agency. We’re having fun doing it. I don’t really have any crazy ambitions or anything like that. I’m just enjoying life.
Brad Weimert: So, you produce a bunch of content out in the world. How has content production changed for you in the last let’s start with the last two years since AI launched, really launched?
Neil Patel: So, I’ve used AI to help with content production. It hasn’t worked out great so I tend to do a lot of stuff manually and I’ve been enjoying it. I still create content in most cases the same way I did four or five years ago. There’s not much of a difference. Like, I set my alarm around 5 a.m., and usually, I’m up before then and I will crank out a tweet. I’ll crank out a LinkedIn post, etcetera, in the morning. And then we do enough tweets, we do enough LinkedIn posts. We’ll see what hits, and then we’ll use that to create videos for Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etcetera.
Brad Weimert: Has that approach been the same the whole time?
Neil Patel: It’s been very similar, whether it’s Twitter or another platform, it’s similar concepts. You see what’s working based on the day, and then you apply it to the rest.
Brad Weimert: The content production today is, I mean, you say that it’s similar but what people are putting out seems to be very different today than it was five years ago.
Neil Patel: Yeah. It’s similar for me. A lot of people are now putting out regurgitated information that sucks because they’re using AI. That’s a real problem. It’s not going to do well but everyone thinks, “Ah, it’ll do well.” I’m like, “Well, everyone’s already read that ten times over.” So, you just pretty much have a new spin on it and then you spin it as just words organized in different ways with similar concepts. There’s nothing new here. Good luck getting traffic, getting traction.
Brad Weimert: So, what’s the key to as somebody that tests all this stuff and you started with I test with text and then produce video content based on what performs with text, what are the elements of something that structural elements of a video that you think is going to pop?
Neil Patel: It’s hit or miss. That’s the real truth. But structurally, you need a good hook, can’t give the answer right away, and you give the answer at the end. So, that way they stay engaged, right? And you better hope your answer is really good so that way they’re not pissed off and they like your video or leave a comment. But that part hasn’t changed really. It’s storytelling. It’s marketing, but it is a numbers game. It’s a big hit or miss.
Brad Weimert: What is different?
Neil Patel: I would say what’s really different in today’s world is you’ve got to think really hard on what you can create that stands out. Everything just blends in. You know what they say, next year, the digital marketing spend is going to be $700 billion. We’re seeing too many ads. We’re getting ad blindness. We’re seeing marketing campaigns just blend in. It’s hard for people to do marketing that sticks out. People are getting less loyal to brands like, “Well, I don’t get it the same day delivery. I don’t get X, Y, and Z. I don’t want to buy this.” Like, people are having a harder time with marketing in today’s world and it’s tougher.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, no question about it. One of the ways that people seem to be getting exposure and this has been true forever in different mediums, but I seem to see it more today than ever is trend chasing. So, looking for the topical thing that’s happening that day, that week, that month, and just blasting content on it, even if it’s not necessarily aligned with your brand. Do you think it makes sense to do that to get attention?
Neil Patel: No. I tend to stick with stuff on brand that drives to the core business or else you just get followers and no revenue or you’ll get traffic and no revenue. Oh, sorry. I’ve been up since three. I had a fever at 3 a.m., so I woke up and took some medicine. Not the best thing, but that’s life. I did a webinar too this morning with the fever. Wasn’t easy, but yeah.
Brad Weimert: I know that game. I woke up at four but I’ve got my coffee next to me that’s keeping me moving.
Neil Patel: There you go. I don’t drink caffeine, so it makes it harder.
Brad Weimert: It makes it much harder. Why do you not drink caffeine?
Neil Patel: I have a ton of energy without it minus me being sick right now but normally, I have tons of energy and I don’t need the caffeine. I love what I do and it gives me the energy that I need.
Brad Weimert: Do you drink alcohol?
Neil Patel: Nope.
Brad Weimert: At all? Zero?
Neil Patel: Nope.
Brad Weimert: Ever? Have you ever?
Neil Patel: I have drunk alcohol in the past. As I got older and got married and then have kids, just slowly stopped drinking it. And then COVID happened and then really didn’t drink it because never really had alcohol in my house other than what people buy us as gifts. So, then went a long time without drinking alcohol, then just never picked it back up again.
Brad Weimert: Is a conscious decision now not to have it?
Neil Patel: No. Now, I’m allergic to it.
Brad Weimert: Oh, and you just have a bad reaction?
Neil Patel: Uh-huh. Within like imagine a hangover but imagine taking a really, really tiny sip and getting that hangover within three minutes of taking that sip. It’ll stop you drinking alcohol that’s out there.
Brad Weimert: It sounds like a disincentive.
Neil Patel: Yes. I’m not even buzzed at that point. You get what I mean, right? Like having a small sip of beer, you’re not going to get drunk from that and having a massive hangover like you pounded 20 beers and/or 10 beers or whatever the number is, but you get that same type of hangover effect in three minutes of taking your first sip. You won’t want to take any more sips of alcohol. And that’s what happened.
Brad Weimert: Well, that sounds pretty organic. The questions around vices for entrepreneurs are always interesting to me because people rationalize things in different ways. And I don’t know that there’s a right answer. I fundamentally don’t believe that anything is good or bad or right or wrong. I think it’s all contextual. But hearing people and the path that they take is always helpful to me to reframe things. Yep. I definitely when I’m out in the business world connecting with people, find alcohol to be super helpful to lower walls.
Neil Patel: It does. It makes people a little bit more social, chatty. Like, it’s great but I can’t drink it anymore, so.
Brad Weimert: Well, sometimes I think about those things and I’m agnostic. So, there’s a voice in my head that says, like, maybe this is God telling you something, and then I don’t know how to reconcile that framework but I do think it’s like an internal signal. And sometimes I wonder if my body is just doing it and saying, “Hey, look, you’re supposed to be doing something more than this. This negative reaction that you’re having right now is actually a benefit to you.”
Neil Patel: Yep. Look, my body’s just telling me stay away from those and I was like, “All right.”
Brad Weimert: All right. Cool, man. Okay. So, back to marketing and trends. You played with AI a little bit. There is conversation around search and consequently CEO suffering dramatically as AI takes over. You know, Google losing a foothold if you can talk to ChatGPT or the like. What are your thoughts on that?
Neil Patel: So, I’m going to read something I put on Twitter, I think, two days ago. All right. “A lot of marketers are worried that SEO is dead or won’t exist anymore. Well, one number tells a different story. $32.78 billion, it’s a revenue generated by Google’s partner network, AdSense, in 2022. And if you can guess how the sites got their traffic, SEO is a good chunk of it. It’s not profitable to grow your AdSense site through paid ads. You have to organically get traffic and Google knows killing SEO impacts a revenue. They would need time to test and figure out alternative ways to make up that revenue. As you will change and some sites will lose traffic from certain queries but it doesn’t mean SEO will disappear. It will just change. Especially with certain queries, Google will struggle with an accurate answer. Just think about a health-related question. They know that AI won’t always give the correct result which can harm people. And removing inaccurate information isn’t easy. Just search for anything online, chances are you’ll find pages ranking with inaccurate information. Instead of worrying about SEO dying, focus on an omnichannel approach because this won’t be the last time Google or any platform makes a change that can negatively impact your marketing.”
I posted it on Twitter on Saturday. And the reason I posted that is a lot of people just have this belief that SEO is dying and so I was like, “Okay. Go tell Google to erase that $32 billion chunk in revenue.” Now, it won’t erase fully but you get the point. It’ll go down drastically. Good luck with their stock price the next quarter. It’s not going to happen. Does it mean SEO is not going to change? Does it mean that people won’t get less traffic? I’m not saying that. Yes, some people get less traffic, but you just got to adapt. SEO is not just Google. SEO is Bing. SEO is optimizing for Instagram and TikTok. A Google VP said when Gen-Z or young people are looking for a place to eat or a restaurant, they’re looking first on TikTok and Instagram before they’re looking on Google. This is from someone who works at Google. You can do SEO if you have an Airbnb company. Let’s say you have rentals. Well, when people search on Airbnb, you want to make sure yours ranks at the top. SEO is everywhere and I think that’s where people mess up and it’ll change. That could mean you get less traffic or more traffic. But it doesn’t mean that it’s going away and you can’t worry about those things. That’s why you’ve got to look at all platforms. Facebook’s changed their algorithm so many times that it hurts a lot of marketers and so does Instagram and TikTok, and LinkedIn, and the list goes on and on. This is just normal.
Brad Weimert: So, platforms change. Marketing methods stay the same. That’s the narrative of a long-standing marketer for sure.
Neil Patel: Platforms change. A lot of the strategies stay the same. Maybe the tactics change, but you just got to adapt. And if you don’t adapt, you’re going to lose and that’s fine.
Brad Weimert: What tactics a year ago worked really well that aren’t working today?
Neil Patel: Sure. So, you’re not that big of a timeframe difference but I’ll give you a year. So, like on Instagram, doing carousels works extremely well. They would count that as engagement and it would cause your images to do really well whatever you post on Instagram. Not so much these days. They want the reels. On YouTube, years ago, two, three years ago, if you optimized for search, videos that did well in the first 24 hours tended to rank high, that’d be enough to do well on YouTube. YouTube’s really competitive now. Now, if your thumbnails aren’t amazing, your videos aren’t engaging, people aren’t sticking around, you’re not going to get the same view count. All this stuff affects the results.
Brad Weimert: Many, many years ago, you could keyword stuff in SEO and just cram the keywords in and that was sort of the V1 of how do I get ranked on a search engine. Today, if you do that, it’ll just crush you, right? Tremendously negative impact. What are the biggest mistakes that you could make today as a marketer by trying to game the system that you’re actually going to hurt yourself doing?
Neil Patel: Yeah. Short-term gains, long-term pain. You know, I would say right now, if you want to do well in the system, there’s one set to keep in mind, 15%. 15% of the searches that happen on Google each and every single day are brand new searches that have never happened, that never took place before. 15%. Go after the keywords that people are now starting to search for that didn’t have the demand previously and you can use tools like AnswerThePublic for that. And if you do that, you’ll be in a much better spot.
Brad Weimert: Interesting. Tell me more about that. Where does the rubber meet the road from strategy to tactics there?
Neil Patel: Well, it’s pulling stuff from Google Suggest like what people are typing in and what are like new upcoming trends. So, then now you have all these content, things that you can go after that a lot of people aren’t competing against and you do not necessarily have a lot of competition, but there are also getting a lot more volume, not as competitive and you can get results much quicker.
Brad Weimert: Got it. Google Suggest, AnswerThePublic, look at upcoming trends, and try to look at where in the Venn diagram the overlap is between your existing users and what you’re trying to accomplish, and what’s trending.
Neil Patel: Bingo.
Brad Weimert: Start with text to test it on social. If you get traction there?
Neil Patel: Then expand to video.
Brad Weimert: Expand to video. Love that. What’s your turn time when you’re…? And what’s the rest of the content dissemination schedule for you?
Neil Patel: I like to execute once a week. Someone comes to my house. We take what’s working on the web and we crank out a ton of content and we can do that with an hour to two hours max. And then it’s just posted everywhere online.
Brad Weimert: And throughout the week, you’re testing text.
Neil Patel: Yes.
Brad Weimert: For your personal companies, how much do you rely on social content in this strategy versus paid or any other type of marketing?
Neil Patel: We tend to rely more on social and organic and SEO than paid. It’s our DNA. We also do quite a bit of paid but just not for ourselves because we have enough demand organically. And paid in our space is really, really expensive and it’s hard to make it profitable.
Brad Weimert: So, most of your energy then is content production?
Neil Patel: Yes.
Brad Weimert: And/or back-linking, I would imagine.
Neil Patel: No. Tons of back-linking, content production. When it comes to marketing, that’s where I’m spending a lot of my time. I also read and experiment a lot too.
Brad Weimert: Love that. Yeah. It seems like everybody is being pushed towards just produce more content. As you mentioned, a lot of it ends up being garbage. How do you ensure that you’re making quality stuff on a routine basis? And you gave a couple of tips there but you just leaned into, “I do a lot of research.”
Neil Patel: Yeah. So, one, I do a lot of research. Two, I look for what people are interested in like AnswerThePublic, Ubersuggest, things like that show that. Three, I really look at other competitors, what they’re doing that gives me insights on what’s working for them and what’s not. Four, I experiment and test. And the reason I say that is just because I think something’s good doesn’t mean other people will. When you push stuff out and you start noticing trends and, “Oh, people like this kind of stuff.” People don’t like it when I’m too negative in my content. People like it when I discuss these topics. They don’t like it when I discuss these other topics. These posting times per day work better than others, right? Like, all these things really matter.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. They seem to. And then actually tracking that stuff seems to be another full-time job.
Neil Patel: Yes.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. How do you approach looking at the metrics on all this stuff? I mean, do you have any fun tools or creative strategies to make sure that as you look across all the platforms, you get a decent view of the full picture?
Neil Patel: It’s not where an SA tool is reporting. We just track it all ourselves and we report. And then we look at our own analytics for every platform, and then we compare notes on what’s working, what’s not. I have a lot of people so it kind of makes that part easy.
Brad Weimert: It does. Yeah, it does. So, obviously, we’re in the wheelhouse right now of marketing, in a marketing agency, and maybe you have lessons from clients as well, but what platforms are performing best for you right now? And are there some that you’re much more bullish on?
Neil Patel: X, LinkedIn, those two are performing extremely well and I think they’re really underrated.
Brad Weimert: In terms of what you’re creating, how frequently do you have a CTA in the content?
Neil Patel: Not that often. We do it for branding.
Brad Weimert: Got it. And so, where’s the CTA, if at all?
Neil Patel: There is no CTA in most of our content. It’s just getting the brand up so that when people are interested in working with us, they hit us up. Keep buying more enterprise, right? Like, in most cases, you’re not going to get someone be like, “I read your blog post. Here’s $5 million.” It doesn’t really work out. A lot of checks and balances for big contracts.
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Brad Weimert: So, let’s say that you weren’t enterprise. What’s your approach if you were marketing to SMB or mid-market?
Neil Patel: I would have call to actions everywhere and tell people to sign up or DM me or whatever you want to test it out and see what works the best with the content type.
Brad Weimert: Got it. Yeah. We see different across our client base. We see a bunch of different funnels and some of them are book a call. Some of them are DM. Some of them are CTA-heavy and lots of content. Some of them are every ten things, do a CTA.
Neil Patel: Yep. You just got to test. There really is no right or wrong answer. Right? Or there’s not like one formula that works for all businesses. I really do believe it varies per audience, per business, per product or service. You just got to adjust and tweak. It’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the truth.
Brad Weimert: No, it’s not what people want to hear. I think one of the greatest ironies of entrepreneurial life is that we all want to do our own thing. Yet really what we want is for somebody to tell us what to do.
Neil Patel: Yeah. And they want to get the results as quick as possible, too.
Brad Weimert: Right. I want somebody to tell me what to do but they have to be super credible and I have to have 100% respect for them to trust that they know what I’m supposed to do.
Neil Patel: Yup.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s terrible. How do you think about evergreen content versus topical things right now?
Neil Patel: We do a mixture of both. We do evergreen. We do topical. That way you can capture people from all different types to audience types.
Brad Weimert: How often you refresh your evergreen content?
Neil Patel: The ones that are popular, we refresh at least once every 2 to 3 months.
Brad Weimert: Wow. I would be afraid that I’d be cannibalizing the initial post or content.
Neil Patel: You get way more traffic. Just look at Wikipedia. They rank for everything because their content’s so fresh and up to date.
Brad Weimert: What constitutes refreshing the content? How much do you have to change?
Neil Patel: We don’t look at it that way. We look at what do we need to change to make it better. We figure out how to change content, I know you didn’t ask this, based on Google search console. We look at our content. What’s been declining in traffic over the last three months because you can compare the last 30 days versus three months before or even the year before. And the stuff that’s declining is the stuff we tend to update the first and we just keep doing that and we keep rolling it.
Brad Weimert: Love that. How much content are you producing today versus two years ago? Do you have to produce more? Do you produce less? Does it matter?
Neil Patel: We produce way less content. If you’re talking about blog content, maybe we produce four or five a month. We update maybe 100 a month. Social content, we’re producing multiple pieces a day, at least one video a day, multiple text pieces a day. Multiple text pieces allow us to figure out what video pieces work.
Brad Weimert: Text pieces to video pieces and it sounds like you ultimately have larger blog pieces that you’re refreshing but that are more evergreen, that are long standing.
Neil Patel: Yes.
Brad Weimert: We’re piecing together your strategies, Neil. That’s great. I mean, from an SEO perspective, look, it’s a black box for a lot of people and a lot of people are in a race to figure out how to make it happen and throwing stuff against the wall and hoping. And there are a lot of agencies that try to teach SEO but not many do it super well.
Neil Patel: Yeah. Not too many do it well.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, I think that’s…
Neil Patel: But in a black box, it’s not that hard. There are so many articles and tools that end up breaking down how to do SEO. SEO is not hard. It just requires patience. That’s what people don’t have. They want results now instead of waiting a year, two years, three years. And the results can be amazing over time. I’m not saying you can’t get results in less than a year. It really compounds and people aren’t patient.
Brad Weimert: So, your content that you produce speaks to SMB, mid-market, as well as enterprise execs. Why is that the content to produce or is it just a byproduct?
Neil Patel: The reason we produce that content specifically for us is because it helps us get more leads that are qualified. Like, I won’t play a video that talks about here’s all the different shoes I tried and this one’s the most practical. Like, not going to give me any customers. I stick with what my ideal customer wants, not what resonates the most views because I could just go on Twitter and start releasing quotes and just do tons of quote bombs every single day and get tons of engagement. That’s not going to drive many customers.
Brad Weimert: But I guess that’s part of my question. I like that. And part of the question is I would think some of the things that you post around the cornerstone of creating a good SEO strategy or the top five ways to make sure that you’re producing good social content today or something, I know that they would speak directly to Easy Pay Direct’s client base, which are largely $1 million to $50 million companies. And so, I would think you would get a sh*tload of leads for that.
Neil Patel: We don’t want that.
Brad Weimert: That’s what I’m saying but I would think you would get those leads and get those followers. Is the content not getting that as well or is there something that you’re doing?
Neil Patel: It is. We get all of it. So, I’m going to load up my LinkedIn right now. Okay. And on my LinkedIn, I’m going to look at one of my last posts. Let’s see. So, if I look at the analytics from the last post, it had 50,000 impressions. I posted it five hours ago. If I look at company size, 19.14 from 11 to 50 employees, 1 to 10 employees were 15.7. Okay. And then 51 to 200 employees are 14.4. All right. So, now we’re at 49.2. 201 to 500 employees is 6.9. Alright. We’re now at 56.1. 501 to 1,000 employees is 6.5%. So, now that piece of content I posted to roughly 62% of the people at reach, some of them may be my ideal audience because there are some big companies with not a ton of employees, but roughly 40% is more my ideal audience. It’s a numbers game. Yeah, you’re always going to get some stuff that doesn’t resonate with your ideal audience, but that’s okay. As long as you’re also reaching your ideal audience at the same time, that’s fine. That’s what I love about LinkedIn Analytics. It’ll tell you the company sizes that are seeing your content.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, that’s worth the price of admission here. The number of people that post stuff and don’t look at analytics granularly is astounding.
Neil Patel: Yeah. No, I think that’s really important and people make that mistake. It’s like the data is there but people just don’t want to look at it. I don’t know why.
Brad Weimert: They’re busy. They don’t think about it or they don’t know.
Neil Patel: Yep.
Brad Weimert: Who do you study for to learn new marketing today?
Neil Patel: No one particularly. I just read a lot and I study competitors and other people and see what they’re doing that’s interesting.
Brad Weimert: Where do you go to find things to read?
Neil Patel: I don’t really like to… Okay, here’s one guru or popular marketer, etcetera. I’m also just looking at what are people running online and I look to see if I can learn from it and apply it to my industry.
Brad Weimert: Looking at ads that you get served?
Neil Patel: I look at ads I get served as well. I get a look at emails that I’m getting served. I look at Facebook’s library to see what competitors are doing. I look at all this stuff to get more insights.
Brad Weimert: But no specific sources that you tend to go back to for marketing.
Neil Patel: No.
Brad Weimert: Was that different when you got started? Are there OG marketers that you were like, “Hey, I need to learn the basics from these people?”
Neil Patel: Yes, a lot of them don’t just produce content anymore but it’s not even that. It’s changed through an omnichannel game. It’s changed to a game where there are so many different channels that you got to try and test and it’s just easier to see what’s happening, not by reading, but by experimenting and seeing what other people are doing and just crank it out and see if it works for you.
Brad Weimert: Okay. Before we wrap, I want to talk about money and what to do with it. So, you make a bunch of money. You have two options. One is that you figure out the tax game. The other is that you give it to the government.
Neil Patel: Or three, you can just donate it.
Brad Weimert: Or three, you can donate it.
Neil Patel: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: So, how do you approach that?
Neil Patel: My wife donates it. We pay our taxes, Federal and State. We live in the United States. And we focus more on the wealth generation versus tax savings but I’ve tried a lot of stuff. I’ve tried like the 831(b)s, which is captive insurance companies. I’ve looked into things like the land easements. I looked at things like bonus depreciation. The best strategy that we found to avoid taxes is to actually invest more money into growth. For example, if you buy companies, you get depreciation. It reduces your tax bill, not right away, but over time. So, we’ll do a lot of things like that to reduce our tax liability in the long run, and that causes more growth.
Brad Weimert: Interesting. So, out produce in the year of and invest for the longer frame.
Neil Patel: Yes. And get tax savings because most people have depreciation and most countries have depreciation. So, when we buy companies, we’re getting the depreciation and that’s how we’re saving a lot of money on taxes. And like real estate, they depreciate, but we get our depreciation from buying.
Brad Weimert: Are you actively involved in real estate?
Neil Patel: Not a big real estate guy.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. Just back into the business.
Neil Patel: Yeah. I have real estate. I have homes but they’re just homes. Dude, I’m not even living in a home. I’m in a rental right now. And my wife’s in the background sleeping. She’s sick. We’re all sick right now, even including my kids. Although my kids are not sick anymore. They haven’t been sick for like four days but then my wife got it, and then I started getting it.
Brad Weimert: They were the beginning. Your kids infected you.
Neil Patel: Yes. It all started around Halloween. That’s been quite a while.
Brad Weimert: It’s that all too known poison candy phenomenon.
Neil Patel: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: Cool. Well, Neil, I appreciate you carving out time to talk, man. If anybody wants to find out more about Neil Patel, where do you want to point them?
Neil Patel: NP Digital.
Brad Weimert: NP Digital, preferably if they have a thousand employees.
Neil Patel: Or less. It doesn’t matter. We’re always down to help people out of any size. We make most of our money from enterprise but we do marketing for SMB as well.
Brad Weimert: Love it. Love it, man. Awesome. I appreciate you carving out the time, man. Until next time.
Neil Patel: Sounds good.
