Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Neil Patel: Grow Your Business With These Digital Marketing Trends in 2023 | E226

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Neil Patel was always thinking about what he could do to become financially successful, but as a teenager without a college degree, he couldn’t get a high-paying job. To solve this problem, Neil Patel created his first company, a job site called AdviceMonkey, at just 16 years old. Neil learned the vitality of SEO and online marketing, and since then, he has launched digital marketing agencies around the world to help businesses firsthand. In this episode, Neil will tell the story of how he became one of the world’s most recognized marketing experts. He will break down his biggest digital marketing tips, from social media, to email marketing, to SEO, and he’ll share his insight on marketing trends in 2023. Neil is a digital marketer, NYT bestselling author, entrepreneur, and investor. After founding CrazyEgg, Kissmetrics, and other multimillion-dollar companies, Neil now focuses on running his SEO Tool Ubersuggest, as well as his agency NP Digital, which specializes in paid campaigns, SEO, social media, and content marketing. He has worked with global brands like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP, and Viacom. In this episode, Hala and Neil will discuss:  - How Neil started his first company at 16 - Neil’s Marketing Formula - Understanding upsells vs. downsells - Increasing customer lifetime value - How to be omnipresent on social media - The biggest SEO hacks for entrepreneurs - Valuable email marketing tactics - New podcast marketing trends - How to view and leverage AI - Neil’s thoughts on the verification check - And other topics… Neil Patel is a digital marketer, NYT bestselling author, entrepreneur, and investor. In terms of accolades, Neil has received dozens over his 20+ years as a marketer. To name a few: Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, he was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama, and The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web!  After founding CrazyEgg, Kissmetrics, and other multimillion-dollar companies, Neil now focuses on running his SEO Tool Ubersuggest, as well as his agency NP Digital, which specializes in paid campaigns, SEO, social media, and content marketing. He has worked with global brands like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP, and Viacom. Resources Mentioned: Neil’s Website: https://neilpatel.com/ Neil’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel/ Neil’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilpatel  Neil’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neilpatel/ Neil’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neilkpatel/  Neil’s Podcast Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips: https://marketingschool.io/ Neil’s book Hustle: The Power to Charge Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum https://www.amazon.com/Hustle-Power-Charge-Meaning-Momentum/dp/1623367166 Neil’s company Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ Code Canyon: codecanyon.net LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course. Sponsored By:  Brevo - Go to youngandprofiting.co/brevo and use the promo code "PROFITING" to save 50% on your first 3 months of the Starter & Business plan! Collective - Go to Collective.com to save on taxes this year Nom Nom - Go to trynom.com/YAP for 50% off on your two-week trial More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new/ Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com-profiting. I don't know about you. It takes a lot to shock me these days. But to see our judicial system resemble a third world banana republic, to see trusted American companies embrace insane and destructive woke ideologies is frankly depressing.

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Again, that's patreonmobile.com slash America. When we're born and we grow up and we start getting elementary school, we have these ideas of what want to be astronaut, police man, firefighter. People believe that a lot of others just know what they want to do and then they grow up and that's what they do. But that's not actually true. The way most people find their passion is to actually try a lot of different things. When people try a lot of different things, they stumble upon stuff that they're naturally good at, and you tend to be more passionate about it.

The biggest trend that we're seeing right now in marketing is podcasting. It's a wide open ocean, there's not tons of competition, and what's really cool is, when you do podcast, a lot of times people are doing them with other people like you and I are and we're both gonna Push this on all their social profiles and we're both gonna get play from this so it's actually a really amazing win-win strategy for both of us What is up young and profitors? You're listening to YAP young and Profiting podcasts where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Hallitaha. Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen,

learn and profit. Welcome to Young & Profiting Podcasts, Neil. Thanks for having me. Really excited, yaap, fam! One of my favorite topics to talk about is marketing as you guys know I am a marketer. And today I'm thrilled to report that we have one of the most legendary and popular marketers in the world joining us And that's Neil Patel. If you don't know Neil, he's a digital marketer a New York Times best-selling author and entrepreneur and an investor After founding crazy egg kiss metrics and other multi-million dollar companies Neil now focuses on running his SEO tool

Uber suggest as well as his agency NP digital Which specializes in paid campaigns, SEO, social media, and content marketing. He's worked with global brands like Amazon, NBC, GM, HB, and Viacom to name a few. And in terms of accolades, Neil has received dozens over his two decades as a marketer. To name a few, Forbes says he's one of the top 10 marketers. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama, and the Wall Street Journal calls him

a top influencer on the web. So we're obviously very excited to talk to Neil. And in this episode, we're gonna share his journey of how he became one of the world's most recognized internet marketers. He'll break down his biggest digital marketing tips. We'll try to cover everything from social media to email marketing to SEO. And lastly, we'll get his insight on marketing

trends for 2023 and how we can future proof content in the age of AI. So, Neil, like I mentioned earlier, you were one of our generations most notable marketers. You're basically a household name when it comes to marketers. So congratulations on all your success. You're too kind. I don't know if my name is that household, but you're too kind. Well, when it comes to marketers, you are for sure. And you've always had an entrepreneurial and hardworking spirit. And I was surprised to learn that you actually started your first company

when you were 16. And so I'd love to understand some of the jobs and experiences you had as a teenager and also how you ended up getting into internet marketing and dabbling into that just as a teenager. Yeah, so when I was a young kid, I always had a drive to make money, which isn't the best reason to start a business. But from everything when I was like around 15, I was selling like CDs and music. From there, sold cable TV and stuff like that to parents without getting into too much detail. I probably shouldn't have done some of those things.

Then as I grew up, I was just like, you know what? I want a high paying job. And the reason I want a high paying job is my sister at the time was working for Oracle Consultant. And this Oracle Consultant was making like $120 an hour, sometimes like $200 plus an hour. That's a lot of money. And keep in mind, that's around 21 years ago. So 21, 22 years ago, that's even right now, even though when people are like, oh, I'm making 100 bucks an hour, people would be ecstatic with that. 100, 200 bucks an

hour, 20 plus years ago was much more than it is today. So my sister worked for this Oracle Consultant. I started looking online for Oracle Consulting Jobs. So I wanted this site called monster.com. It's not popular now. Everyone uses LinkedIn, which you know all about. But back then, people were using monster.com to find jobs. So I was typing in all these Oracle financial

consulting jobs and I couldn't qualify for any of them. Didn't have a college degree. Didn't have Oracle certifications. So I was missing out just on a ton of revenue, but I wanted that revenue. So I started taking nighttime college classes and whilst taking nighttime college classes at the same time because they didn't qualify for any of those jobs. I noticed that monster.com was making hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm like, you know what, if I just replicate this business, even if I make 1% of what they make, I'll be a rich kid. So I created my own job website, paid some contractors that I found online, use the money I made from picking up trash at a theme park to cleaning restrooms to selling CDs, get all the money that I could find.

Raise, I think it was like 500 bucks or $900 from college kid. I mean, high school classmates. So I would go to my class, try to get money from some of them and started the business, the job board also was going to college at night time. Job boards started getting more traffic, learned internet marketing on my own, did a ton of research, got traffic, but made no money. Literally just making zero money. I was devastated. I was like, I'm getting like a hundred thousand visitors a month. No money, this sucks. So I'm like, you know, forget this. I'm

just going to go for, go to college and wrap things up and just go get that Oracle certification, just get the hundred100, $200 an hour. So try going down that route. And while I was in high school, still at 16 at this time, my first class was Speech 101. Give a speech on how Google algorithm worked and how to get Google traffic. Someone in the class was working at a power supply manufacturer.

And they're like, man, we end up hiring you. My boss is looking for someone like you. I'm in sales here brushing up on my sales skills. Hence, I'm in that speech class. I know that they're looking for someone to understand Google. So they gave me a gig. Long story short, was for five grand a month. I was ecstatic. That's a lot of money. Even right now, that's a lot of money. So 60 grand a year, I didn't know that I was, what kind of impact I was making on that business. Eventually I found out I was driving around $25 million a year and revenue to the business through online marketing. So then the owner of the company had a son, the son owned at agency, and then he introduced me to Blue Cross, Countrywide, ING Direct,

which was like the first online banker. What is one of the first well-known online banks? And he was giving me five grand a month per client and just arbitrarging it and charging more on the other end. And over time, you know, it was around 16, 17 years old at this time, I was making 20 grand a month, and that's how I got my start. It's so amazing, you know, it just goes to show that if you find your passion early,

if you stay focused, you know, you've been doing this basically for two decades. Now, your company is running ad campaigns, spending billions of dollars with huge global brands. And it just goes to show how much you can do when you focus and you become like a true, true expert in your field. You're totally right, but I didn't learn the focusing probably until 13, 14 years into my entrepreneur journey. It was late. If I focused on from day one, undoing the right things, I would have a much, much, much bigger business, but that's a mistake that I learned better

late than never. I just wish I could turn back the clock and focus. Well, it's funny. Now we have like all these resources, like young and profiting podcasts where we get to talk to Alex from MoZ and, skulls us on like why we need to focus and all these things. So it was a different situation when you first started. You didn't really have as much resources as everybody else. So speaking on, you know, getting your start, I've got a lot of young listeners. And these young listeners often are really confused about where to focus their attention, how to find their passion, how to understand where they should focus in terms of their

passion that will also make money. What's your advice to them considering the fact that you've basically dominated this internet marketing niche? This is one of my favorite questions or topics, more so not really questions, but it's one of my favorite topics. I met a lot of young people. They've asked me the same thing. I didn't know my passion would be internet marketing, back then it wasn't really popular. And what I found is when we're born and we grow up and we

start getting to elementary school, we have these ideas of what want to be astronaut, police man, firefighter, you know, I wanted to be a doctor when I was a little kid. And people believe that a lot of others just know what they wanna do and then they grow up and that's what they do. But that's not actually true. Majority of the people that I've met and talked to and I also wrote a book called Hustlewood to my co-founders or not co-founders with the,

I had co-authors. And we did a lot of research and we found that majority of the people aren't really born and be like, I wanna be a doctor and then they grow up being a doctor. The way most people find their passion is they actually try a lot of different things and typically the stuff that they're not good at, they just don't do much of or if they don't like it, they just don't do much of. But typically what you find is when people try a lot of different things, they still wants

upon stuff that they're naturally good at, and you tend to love the stuff that you're naturally good at, and you tend to be more passionate about it. And that's what you should end up focusing on. But the way you end up figuring it out is not spending 10,000 hours to master something. It's just a ton of trial and error, and you just constantly try new things. I totally agree with you. And I think one of the reasons why you probably found your passion so early is because you were doing a lot

even as a young kid and experimenting and getting a lot of experiences. Holy right, did too many businesses, some I loved, some I hated, but live and learn. Yeah, you learned from it. Talking about niches, let's talk about picking your market. I know that selecting the right market

when you're starting a side hustle or when you're becoming an entrepreneur is so important. And I was talking to you offline about how I have this LinkedIn master class. And I teach people how to grow on LinkedIn, how to master their content, go viral, how to convert leads into sales. But where I see them struggling is that they don't have product market fit. Their offer isn't really right. They don't really know who they're marketing to, and then my strategies may not work if they don't have that all lined up and perfected. So I'd love to understand from you

what makes a good audience market. Well, it makes a good audience market to me is a big tam. So assuming you find something you're passionate about by just through trial and error, you gotta make sure you're focusing on a big tam. Everyone says the riches are in the niches. That's far from true. find something you're passionate about by just through trial and error. You got to make sure you're focusing on a big temp. Everyone says the riches are in the niches. That's far from true.

If you look at the majority of the large corporations out there like Tesla's, automotive, people need cars in this world. If you look at Microsoft, everyone needs software to run these computers and digital devices that we're on. If you look at Google, we're relying on search for anything and someone organizing data and feeding it to us in a very organized fashion. If you look at Apple, we need all these hardware pieces that they're selling from headphones to cell phones to laptops. These are large markets. If you look again, look at the biggest companies in the world.

They're going after large markets and not niches. So the key is to go after a big time. Now, you can start in a niche if you want, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to make sure that you can expand that niche into a large market because the amount of effort it takes to market a business, whether it's on LinkedIn or any social platform or even SEO, for a niche compared to a large market,

is almost the same amount of effort. Sure, it's harder in a large market, it takes longer to see results, but it's the same process in the same time and energy that you're putting into it. So might as well go after something big, because it's very unrealistic to be in a niche and being like, you know what, I'm going to dominate this niche and gobble up 100% of the market share or even 20 30% that's very hard to do. But on the flip side, it's easier to say, Hey, I'm going to go after this multi billion dollar market and I'm going to gobble up 0.1% of it, right?

You gobble up even something small, that's enough money where you're generating millions of dollars where it's meaningful. For example, if it's a $10 billion market that you're going after you got a 0.1%, that's big enough to create amazing life and a business. Totally. And just to define some things from my listeners who may not know, Tam is total addressable market. So you're saying you need a big sort of more broad market. You don't want to get too in the niches because they're really hard to find. That's like finding a needle and a haystack when you're a marketer, you wanna find your audience

and mass, you wanna target them in mass, that's how you're gonna target them in the cheapest way, most effective way. If you have to find like 10 people, they are 10 people there, it's like you are just gonna exhaust yourself and it's gonna be very expensive. Exactly right. You need to go after a big market

so that way you don't have to have frequency issues of like, Oh, I've shown my add to 500 people. All right. How many more people can you show it? Well, that's my only audience or even 10,000 people. It's not enough. You need to go after the masses. Yeah. So I know that you have a formula for marketing that you talk about. Could you break that down for us? Sure. So number one, go after a really big time. Once you a really big time. Once you have a big time, then if you want to do well, you need to take an omnichannel approach

from LinkedIn, to Facebook, to Instagram, to WhatsApp marketing through text, through email marketing, to SEO, to paid advertising. It doesn't matter if you like paid ads on Facebook or not, if it's profitable, it's profitable. You got to keep leveraging it. And then from there, you got to figure out how to add into upsells and downsells. Because if you look at marketing over time, it can certainly cost more and more.

So you got to add into upsells and downsells. In other words, build up funnel, figure out how to generate more revenue from that same customer. And if they're buying more right up purchase, it allows you to spend more money on marketing, as well as figure out a way to generate rear occurring revenue. So how do you sell to them multiple times? And it may not be reoccurring in the sense that most people think we're someone subscribing for $10 a month, but it could be reoccurring as simple as I built an amazing product or service. I have product market fit where I'm Amazon and people will just buy toothpaste from me.

Oh, in the next day, they'll buy toilet paper and then they buy some shoes and then they buy a t-shirt or a headphone or a laptop. And Amazon is continuing making money from you each and every single month, even though a lot of people aren't subscribing to rear-caring products. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Young and profitors, do you have a brilliant business idea, but you don't know how to move forward with it? Going into debt for a four-year degree isn't the only past to success.

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So can you help us understand some examples of an upsell and a downsell? Yeah, no problem at all. So with upsells and downsells, this key is speed and automation. I learned that from a guy named Ryan Dice and he was spot on on it. And I did a lot of testing and I found that if you're offering upsell or downsell, anything that gives a results faster or an automated way tends to perform better. But to keep it simple, before we go into that, let's just take McDonald's as an example.

So with McDonald's, if you buy anything from McDonald's, at least when I was a little kid, they would say, would you like fries with that? That's an example of an upsell. Or would you like a happy meal, right? And typically, an upsell is you're selling something that could be more. So you order a burger and that is upsell to get them into a happy meal or a combo where they're getting a drink and a fries. A downsell could be, hey, you want a burger?

All right, cool. You already bought that. Would you like a large fries? Oh no, it's too expensive. How about a small fries? We're running a promotion on that. It'll cost you 30 cents more when you combine. How about a small price? We're running a promotion on that. It'll cost you 30 cents more.

When you combine your burger with a small price, you don't even have to spend a dollar more, so just 30 cents more. That's the example of a downsell because you're getting them on a lower price point when they're saying no to something that is more expensive. And typically, what you wanna do with your marketing is,

how can you sell something that will get them the results faster and automate away. So let's use beauty as example because it's the easiest example that I can think of. Let's say people want wrinkle cream. You can probably tell I don't use wrinkle cream. But let's say wrinkle cream because people don't want wrinkles. If you say hey, check out this light. It's purple or red or blue in color, and if you put it on your face, it'll get rid of the wrinkles faster. So instead of three months, maybe it'll take you only one month.

That kind of upsell does really well because you're getting the results faster. Or another way is, hey, here's some wrinkle cream. Here's this device that you can just wear when you sleep, and it just puts it in your face for you all the night, and it just injects it. I'm making it up. Or here's this toothbrush. Instead of buying it, here's this attachment that you can add on for another 50 bucks. And you just put in your mouth and it brushes your mouth for you. That's the example of automation where people pay for that because like, oh, cool. So I can walk around my house while this device brushes my teeth for me and I'm good to go.

Yeah. So the reason why all of this is so important is because we want to increase the lifetime value of our customers. Every customer costs a certain amount of money for us to acquire if we're using paid ads. Sometimes it's free if you're using organic strategies. And at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we're increasing the LTV or lifetime value of our customers. So can you further break down your perspective on that or any tips around increasing lifetime value? So lifetime value is about how can you get people to keep just buying more and more from you, whether it's reoccurring or upsells or downsells, but the key to really increasing

the lifetime value is just understanding what issues people have with your business, your products and services, and just talking to them and saying, hey, what can I do better? How can I more delight you? And just getting that feedback and continue adjusting your products and services is how you optimize the experience and increase your lifetime value. Let's get into SEO. So you're really known for your SEO tactics. SEO is search engine optimization

for anybody who doesn't know that acronym. What are entrepreneurs getting wrong about SEO today? What they're getting wrong about SEO is they believe that the key to winning is like, hey, you need more links. You need better on page code. And don't get me wrong. Those are actually factors in their important factors. So I'm not trying to downplay them. And you need to do them to rank higher. But when you do a search on Google, have you ever thought to yourself, man, this result should be number one. When I'm searching for cars, the less I'm trying to buy a new car, like, yeah, this result should be number one. Because there's a million backlinks in the number two result has only 500,000 backlinks. It doesn't cross your mind. No one cares which site it has. More backlinks are less backlinks

are better on page code or worse on page code. Now don't get me wrong. Fast load time, more links, all these things are signals and you do need to do them and they will help you with your SEO. But the key to really ranking high in the long run is building amazing product or service. If someone goes to your website no matter how fast your website loads or how good your content is or any of those factors, if they don't find what they're looking for, they're going to go back and go to the next site. And if everyone keeps going back and they don't find what they're looking for. They're going to go back and go to the next site. And if everyone keeps going back and they don't find what they're looking for on your website, even if you're ranking right now, your rankings in the long one will decrease

because it's user signals that Google and Bing are picking up and it's telling them, hey, other people prefer other types of content. So don't just focus on the tactics to rank, focus on keeping people on your page and having a good content and good product. So you mentioned on page SEO for those non-marketers out there. What's the difference between on page SEO and off page SEO? On page SEO is a stuff you're doing to your own web pages that you can control, like speeding up your website load time. It shouldn't take a website five seconds to load or making sure they have keywords on

your page because if people type in dog food, but there's no mention of dog food on your page, they're not really going to rank for dog food. Off page is signals from other sites to yours. So a great example of this is it's like votes. First of all, when in a presidential election based on how many votes they typically get, typically the more votes you get, the more likely you are to win. Similar goes with Google. If other websites are linking to your website, it's kind of like a vote. Someone saying, I vote for Neil. I vote for John. I vote for Cassidy or New York Times or I vote for whatever site there may be. Another

aspect of a vote is the person voting for you. So if Trump or Obama or Biden say, hey, you should vote for Neil, whether you like those political figures or not, it's another politician saying vote for Neil. We endorse his political viewpoints and he knows what he's doing. That's more relevant than Joe the plumber or Sally the plumber saying vote for Neil when it comes to politics. The same thing goes with SEO and rankings. If I'm trying to rank for marking related terms, it's more effective for another marketing website to say, Hey, Neil's amazing or authoritative website like a New York Times or CNN saying

vote for Neil versus a small mom and pop plumbing site linking to my website and say Neil should rank higher. You mentioned keywords and I know when it comes to SEO, there's like lots to talk about keywords. And a lot of people sort of overdo it with keywords. So is there a right way and a wrong way to think about keywords when it comes to your SEO? Yes, you don't need a shove in tons of keywords in your content, Google and being understand what you're talking about from a topical standpoint, as long as you have some keywords in there.

The key is you need to find the right keywords to target. What are the ones that drive revenue? What are the ones that have a lot of search traffic? So what you want to do is you want to use tools like Uber, Ceres, or Answer the public, they both have tons of free plans, where you can type in any keyword. It'll tell you what's popular from a search volume perspective, what's not competitive, and what has a high cost per click. So a CPC stands for cost per click.

The higher that number, that means more people wouldn't spend money on more on paid ads, which means that keyword tends to drive more revenue. Okay, and Uber suggests we'll put the link in the show notes. So let's talk about if you had a choice between organic SEO and investing in Google ads as an entrepreneur. Would you suggest that people, like, where should we start first? Should we try to optimize organically first or should we just go straight to paid ads? You can try either or. There is no right answer for that it varies per market and also varies on your skill set

If you think you're gonna struggle with SEO and you also don't have the time to wait then paid ads is the best approach If you think hey, I don't or if you're in a circumstance where you don't have the money But you have the time SEO is a great first approach or if you you have both in your venture fund startup, or you have capital from previous ventures or parents, then you can do both at the same time. Generally speaking, in marketing, one social channel, or one paid channel, or one SEO channel, one's not really better than the other. It's, you leverage all channels as long as they can cause you to grow in a profitable way. Awesome. Okay, so let's move on to email marketing. Everyone in their moms is trying to grow their email list.

It's a really popular thing. Email still has really great ROI. And I know you're full of creative ideas when it comes to growing your email list. So what are some of your most innovative, creative tactics when it comes to actually getting people to subscribe and opt into our email list? My favorite one is giveaway a tool for free. So you can go to sites like codecanyon.net, find tools in any industry, mortgages, cars, automotive, whatever it may be, buy them for like $10, $15, $20, $50 and it's white label. So you can put it on your website and pretty much say it's your own.

And as people keep using the tool, if they use it once free, they use it twice, have them collect a, or collect an email address, have them register. So that way you can keep generating more emails. And we do that with answer the public and Uber suggests. And we generate close to 300,000 email addresses per month from that strategy, new emails. And it's one of our favorite strategies that not too many markers use.

Wow, so what is the name of that website that gives the tools? Hodecanyon, C-O-D-E, Canyon.net. I love that. I've never heard of that before. Really cool. And let's stick on lead generation and go a little bit wider now. What are some creative ways to generate leads? Now, I know I've heard you want an interview in the past, say that you've

even acquired companies to generate leads for your agency. So I'd love to hear some of the creative ways that you've generated leads in the past. Yeah. So great example of this February. We're in 2023 right now, but February 2022, we bought a tool called Answer the public for 88.6 million. And Answer the Public was as tool similar to Uber Suggest, which accounted for roughly 40% of our consulting revenue at NP Digital. And at that time, I think Answer the Public had around 60% of the

traffic Uber Suggest did, but they only monetized it by charging for the tool. We felt, A, there's more money in services and marketing, and we've seen that ourselves. If you look at any of the marketing software companies, none of them generate anywhere near the amount of money as a marketing services company is like WPP or Omnicom. So we're just like, wait, it's similar to our Ubersets tool. They don't even monetize this from a lead perspective. Giving away free tools is a much better approach to generating more and more leads. And again, you can use that same strategy from Code Canyon, Vine Tools, drives a lot of traffic organically. You don't have to do tons of marketing because people love

free tools. And you generate leads from there. Another strategy that we love doing is LinkedIn ads. You can end up going out there targeting the specific company type and person and job title and show them as an only them ads and get really qualified leads from that. We also love doing webinars going live doing podcasts with other people on the channel of course just being on all the platforms helps generate a lot of leads. Another unique strategy that we do is we speak at conferences and then instead of charging, so I used to charge money for speaking at conferences. Now we're like, ah, don't care for the money, but what we love doing is having the conference organizers set us up

with the right meetings. So great example of this is I was in Brazil speaking at a vent, got set up with meetings with Michelin, the tire company, one of the biggest marketplaces. It's like their version of eBay down there got set up with one of their biggest life insurance companies in Latin America. So what we'll do is again, speak at some of these events and then get set up with meetings like role pool, right role pulls a global company.

And it's been amazing strategy to help get customers. You can also be to see like if you're selling nail polish, speak at a event where you can meet potential distributors or the event organizer can set you up with the introduction to let's say Walmart who can carry your nail polish and put it in all the stores. Yeah. These are such great ideas. And I love that you pointed out LinkedIn ads because too often I feel like when we're thinking of social ads, it's just meta, right? It's Facebook and Instagram and nobody's really thinking about LinkedIn or the other platforms.

So I think it's really cool that you mentioned that there's some really good targeting on LinkedIn. So back to email, I'd love to understand the importance of cleaning up our email list and how we can actually make sure that our emails hit the inbox in the right folders. The simplest thing to think about with emails is, if someone keeps sending you emails and you never open them, and a lot of other people get similar emails and they don't open them from the same people,

even if you don't mark them as spam, Google and Outlook and all these email providers will start putting them in the other inbox or spam box and less and less people see them. So what you wanna do is scrub your list. A lot of emails solutions have this option. Like for example, I use convert kit. Convert kit has cold subscribers

and they label them as cold because they mean when you send them emails, they don't open and they don't click. So what we do is we look at our cold subscribers on a monthly basis and we delete them. That's simple. So we only send emails to the people who are engaging and that ensures that our email stay in the inbox and have much better deliverability. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.

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That way, I can multitask while I learn. Get unlimited access to every class and right now, as the app listener, you can get 15% off when you go to masterclass.com-profiting. That's masterclass.com-profiting for 15% off an annual membership. Masterclass.com-profiting. I know a lot of people are doing this thing where they're scrubbing emails or scraping emails off LinkedIn and in other ways where people are not actually opting in. What would you say about that strategy?

You want, you can do it, but you're going to run into a lot of privacy and legal issues, so I would definitely recommend avoiding it. Even if it was legal, I would still avoid it because they're not opting in, and they probably don't care for what you have to offer. Instead, you want to engage with them in a way where they're interested about your products or services, and they're much more likely to convert. So for example, we sell into all CMOs and VPs of marketing. For me to just go and just email all of them, people are going to get irritated and hate

me, but on the flip side, if I show them some really cool tactics or strategies or some ads on what they could be doing better or if I try targeting them for a webinar that breaks on how to solve some problems and provide value first. That's much more likely to do better than if I just go and start spammy people and say, Hey, pay me money for marketing services. Yeah, it's totally a turn off. Can hurt your brand reputation. I agree. So let's say we do it the right way. We have a legit email list. People have opted in. We're scrubbing our list and our emails are hitting the inbox.

How can we actually get people to open our emails? What are your suggestions? Azure Subject Line is one of the biggest thing when a friend emails you is not all capitalized and proper. It just could be as simple as something like, Hey, what's up? Or Neil, you got to check this out and all lowercase and basic things like that. What we found really helped boosting open rates. In addition to that, make sure your emails provide value and you're not selling all the time. So like 90 plus percent of the time we like providing value, you can go down to 80% time

providing value, 20% selling that also helps with open rates. The other thing that we like doing is making sure you're scrubbing your list, which we already talked about, that helps with opens and deliverability. And lastly, make sure every time you email people, I want you to respond to them when they ask you a question. So a lot of times when you send emails,

you're gonna get responses back or replies back with questions. And you can encourage more of that by just putting a question in your email and people be like, yes or no, it adds you to their address book a lot of times depending on the email provider, but also cause people to engage with you and build that relationship. So they're much more likely to remember your name, the company name, open up the emails and buy from you. These are really good tips. I'm just thinking about our own email marketing campaigns and I'm like, wow, we're not doing

enough educational content in the emails. And we have so much educational content that we could just repurpose for emails, but we've just been selling. So that's really eye opening. And I think the casual subject lines make sense because no matter what marketing platform you're on pattern disruption always works. Right. So you're just breaking up the pattern of things always looking the same. Everybody has an emoji in their subject line. So try it without an emoji, try it all lower case, like you said. That's right. As long as you rotate things up, it really does break things up. And yeah, if you even if you have a marketing tactic that works really well, if you keep doing it over and over again, and your competition all starts doing it, people tend to kind of drown it out over time.

Yeah, sensory adaptation totally. So one last question about email marketing, and then I would love to move on to trends before we close out the interview. So let's talk about what good looks like for an email marketing campaign. What are the metrics that we should be looking at? And are there any sort of metrics or benchmarks

we should be trying to hit in terms of open rates and things like that? You want to shoot for 30 plus percent open rates, and you want to shoot for click rates that are at least in the 1-2 percentile. If you can do that, you're doing really well and you're doing your great job. Do you suggest that we have just like one main link or is it okay to have multiple links in our emails, any advice around that? Either strategy works. You don't want to have like 10 links in an emails, any advice around that? Either strategy works. You don't want to have like 10 links in an email,

it starts getting overboard, but one, two or three links isn't too bad. And sometimes you should be sending emails with no links. How about emails with video and picture and things like that? Would you suggest that that's an effective tactic? We've found that text-based emails work the best, and they have better deliverability than when you start adding in rich media from our tests. Love it.

Okay, so moving on to marketing trends. What would you say in the general marketing space? We don't have to stick to any particular channel. What are the biggest trends that you see this year in marketing? The biggest trend that we're seeing this year right now in marketing is podcasting. So people look at podcasting, we surveyed over 8,000 companies and we found that the two big trends were podcasting and AI. And here's what I mean by that.

When we look at the total number of blogs out there, it's over a billion. When you look at the total number of podcasts out there, it's less than 10 million. It's a wide open ocean. There's not tons of competition. And companies are either A, starting to create podcasts and B, they're trying to advertise on podcasts. And what's funny is we're seeing them advertise on podcasts to promote their own podcast to get more listenership. And then people are starting to repurpose that content and use it all over the place. Because you can use a podcast on to turn into text-based

content. You can use it to turn it into social media clips, whether it's shorts or long form video, and what's really cool is when you do podcasts, a lot of times people are doing them with other people like you and I are, and we're both going to push this on all their social profiles, and we're both going to get play from this. So it's actually a really amazing win-win strategy for both of us, right? So companies are really pushing hard on podcasting

and they're pushing really hard on AI. What can they automate? And most people look at AI like, oh, I can use open AI to help write content and I can use them to figure out how to create images. But there's much more to AI from when we interviewed companies, a big portion of what they're looking to use AI from in a marketing standpoint is analytics. How can you have AI analyze your analytics on a daily basis and tell you where the wastage is within your marketing campaigns and where you can cut costs and reallocate money?

Because if you look at the biggest expense in marketing, it's not services. It's not riding a piece of content. It's actually spending money on paid advertising. Look at the revenue that Google is generating and Facebook is generating. I think Google is still as like a trillion dollar company or somewhere around there depending on the month you're in. And Facebook's still a massive company. We spend so much money on ad dollars. Imagine if analytics were analyzed by AI and it told us quicker when to cut our losses. Yeah. AI is something that I want to spend so much time trying to figure out how I can optimize my business, especially as a marketer. I feel like there's just so much information out there, things that we can experiment with.

There's so much to learn right now, and it sort of happened out of nowhere. And now as entrepreneurs, we've got to dedicate time to actually learn and experiment and figure out how we can leverage it for ourselves. Somebody, I don't remember who told me this, but they say AI is sort of like a really good intern. So how can you leverage AI and use it like it's a really good intern to help you just level up everything that you do. And if I just told you I had 60 employees,

now my 60 employees all have a really good intern that they can use to level up their work. Yes, my 60 employees all have a really good intern that they can use to level up their work. Yes, and they can be more efficient, which helps you increase your margins, which helps you give that cost savings to the customer or give them better results and spend more time on each campaign. So that way, they're happier. AI is a friend. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about another trend, hot topic, and that's IG verification, paid verification,

Twitter paid verification. What are your thoughts around that? I was reading an article, something like 40 something million people in the first 24 hours got the blue check mark, which was 600 and something million, I think, 660. It was somewhere around there. It was around 600 million dollars in revenue. That's massive.

I think the problem is what's gonna happen is everyone's gonna start getting these check marks and they're not gonna mean much anymore. Yeah, I know. The social proof's gonna be gone. Yeah, or they're gonna have to have different colors or variations for it, kind of like how Twitter has like a government official version.

So then that way they have some sort of meeting at least for some of the check marks. Yeah, totally. But I'm happy because I personally am having trouble getting verified and I have three bought accounts that are like selling fake crypto to my fans and I'm like, really happy about IG verification even though I don't have the capability yet. Okay, so we always close out the interview with two questions that I ask all my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing

our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? One thing you can do every single day is, I would first start off right now, doesn't matter if it's a start of your middle of your end of your, break down what your goals offer the year, what you need to do to achieve them, break down those tasks into a monthly basis,

then they take those tasks and break them out to a weekly basis, then break them down to daily, and then break those tasks down into what you need to do each day within the hour to achieve them. And don't go to sleep until you hit those tasks and complete all of them. Do that every single day and what you'll notice is maybe the next day you don't make money or the next week or next month, but if you fast forward a year, you'll notice a huge difference in your business growth or your income, as long as you're not going to sleep

without completing those tasks. I think that's a really good piece of advice because a lot of people, they're all talk and they're no action. And so this ensures that they're taking daily action and being consistent and I agree, that's the recipe for long term success. What would you say your secret to profiting in life is and this could go beyond just business

and financial? So, I try to be content in life. I don't think like when you're really happy, it's a state and then you go back down to reality. I try not to be where I have crazy ups or crazy downs and I always realize when things are going really well, keep in mind someone else has downs and I always realize when things are going really well, keep in mind someone else has it better than you. And when things are going really bad,

people have it much worse than you. There's people in this world with out of home, without clothing, without food and clean drinking water. Like a lot of us are so blessed when we just really think about it from the grand scheme of things. And I try to stay really content and level headed

because then allows me to think logically and appreciate what I have. And I think that's really great advice for entrepreneurs because as an entrepreneur, life is a roller coaster and a lot of my listeners are entrepreneurs. So you got to keep an even keel in the highs and lows like Neil says, Neil, where can our listeners learn more about you and everything that you do? Neilpatel.com is where I blog and P digital is my ad agency. Awesome. Thank you so much for all of your wisdom today. It was an absolute pleasure.

Thanks for having me. I get to interview all the goats, yeah, fam. All the goats. And Neil Potel is definitely a goat when it comes to marketing. He's one of the most well-known marketers in the world. And now, I've had the chance to finally interview him. I got to know his come-up story, which I didn't really know before.

And I'm even more impressed now that I've gotten to know him better. Neil gave us some great SEO and email hacks that we can implement straight away. And he has so many resources online for you guys to check out for free. If you enjoyed today's conversation, my favorite tip from today was when Neil schooled us on email marketing. He talked about scrubbing your list to help with opens and delivery using casual subject lines, keeping email campaign topics that roughly 80% value and 20% selling. And lastly, using questions in your emails to get people to respond, engage, and build a relationship with you. And this tactic also does double duty

to support an increasing your delivery rate. In terms of benchmarks, Neil says that if we're getting open rates above 30% and click through rates at one to two percent, we're doing a great job. Thank you so much for listening to Young and Profiting podcast. It means the world to me.

It is our baby. We work so hard on this show Young and Profiting podcasts. It means the world to me. It is our baby. We work so hard on this show and I hope that shines through. And if you listen, learn and profited from this episode, if you find value from this podcast, please take a couple minutes and drop us a five star review on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. It's really important for social proof for rankings and all that kind of stuff. So please drop us a five star review on Apple or your favorite podcast platform and share this episode with your friends and family.

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I will definitely respond to you. It's pretty easy for me to find you guys on Instagram. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn by searching my name, Halla Taha. Now my LinkedIn inbox is a little bit more congested, so if you want to reach out to me, shoot me a question or talk to me about a podcast episode, try me on Instagram. Big shout out to my amazing and hardworking app team. Thank you so much for all your hard work behind the scenes.

I appreciate you guys so much. This is your host, Halah Taha, aka the podcast princess signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science,

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