Marketing School | Digital Marketing | Online Marketing

In Episode #56 Neil and Eric highlight how they go about hiring the best freelancers no matter the industry. Listen as they share websites, tools, and creative strategies for finding freelancers that are truly masters of their given craft. Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:25 – Today’s topic: The Best Services for Finding Great Freelancers 00:40 – Talking designers 00:47 – Dribbble for designers 01:18 – 99designs.com a contest driven resource 01:39 – visual.ly – great for infographics 01:53 – upwork.com 02:05 – A lot of the freelancers suck, but a lot of the people offering jobs suck too 02:31 – You need to find people who’ve done EXACTLY what you’ve done 02:40 – Check out freelancer.com as well 02:50 – Toptal.com is great for engineers and developers 03:10 – The Code Pen is where Eric sourced his developer 03:14 – Don’t forget about word of mouth sourcing 04:32 – Consider searching LinkedIn—it’s not as unusual as it sounds 05:05 – angel.co Angel List means you’re plugged-in 05:52 – ProBlogg

In Episode #55 Neil and Eric discuss tried and true strategies for making the most of a website that is no longer in use. Listen as they talk 301 re-directs, domain name investments, scrappy partnerships, and more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:25 – Today’s topic: What Should You Do with a Website that Is No Longer in Use? 00:35 – Neil usually does a 301 redirect to another digital property, or sells the domain 00:50 – Check out flippa to sell 01:09 – Rent the website as well 01:29 – Empire Flippers and FEinternational.com 01:58 – Eric just acquired another gun blog 02:10 – Used a 301 to drive that blog to his site 02:38 – 301 redirect EACH page and renew the domain for a very long time 03:10 – Redirect no less than the Top 25 pages driving traffic 03:35 – See what competitors are doing to make money 04:00 – If you drive the same amount of traffic, why aren’t you making the same amount of money? 04:20 – Finding website brokers 04:35 – Owning a premium domain name is a GREAT way to make mon

In Episode #54 Neil and Eric share their secrets for measuring the success of SEO changes you make to your website. Listen as they talk Google Search Console versus Google Analytics, and highlight how you should approach each tool. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:25 – Today’s topic: How to Know if Your SEO Changes are ACTUALLY Working? 00:34 – Checkout Google Search Console 00:58 – As long as it says you’re going up—everything is typically all good 01:05 – Look at impressions 01:49 – When you make a technical SEO change, make a note of it and check back in 20 days via Google Search Console 03:23 – One framework to use, Brian Balfour experimentation framework 04:04 – All you need is a spreadsheet 04:14 – Neil lists the columns in his spreadsheet 04:30 – Tracking against 1 EID 05:15 – Set weekly growth meetings to review changes 05:40 – Take screen shots 2 or 3 times a month to track your data, because you will lose your history in Search Console 07:00 – GrowthBot.io can sync with Slack and pre

Welcome to The Marketing School Podcast—your 10-minute resource to learn, grown, and nurture your passion for online marketing! In Episode #53 Eric and Neil discuss their favorite marketing tools that save you time. Enjoy! Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:25 – Today’s topic: Marketing Tools That Will Save You Time 00:34 – Droplr—take screenshots and videos with ease 01:23 – Ahrefs—links to all your competitors 03:14 – Drip—a fresh, effective take on email marketing automation 03:24 – LeadPages—build landing pages with ease 04:49 – HelloBar—collect email address, push out marketing message, etc. with ease 05:15 – Google Tag Manager—Add snippets to whatever pages you want, add pages at-will, etc. 06:29 – Rescue Time—Identify where you’re inefficient 07:06 – Text Expander—Save snippets so you don’t have to re-type paragraphs 08:09 – Gmail Canned Responses—a great time saver for email marketing 09:03 – ScheduleOnce – Just a great time saver in terms of booking people Leave some feedback: What should

In Episode #52 Neil and Eric discuss the all-too-common challenge of finding great ideas for blog topics. Listen as they share a number of their favorite tools, proven techniques, and secret sources for marquee content. Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:23 – Today’s topic: How to research new blog topics? 00:42 – Hold weekly meetings and crowdsource idea generation 01:00 – You can also tap into your email list 01:50 – Tap into feedly.com 02:05 – Neil only sources his audience for blog/podcast topics 02:31 – What type of problems are you hearing about again and again at conferences and industry events? 02:50 – BuzzSumo and Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique 04:00 – TrackReddit 04:48 – Tap into article sub-headers and use those sub-headers to create individual posts 05:30 – What have people engaged with in the past? 06:56 – Digital Marketer – Headline Ideas 07:15 – Aaron Ageis Quick Sprout 3 Key Points: Tap into the hive mind (aka the crowd). Listen into your industry’s buzz. Try transformin

Welcome to The Marketing School Podcast—your 10-minute resource to learn, grown, and nurture your passion for online marketing! Links affect two types of traffic sources: organic traffic and referral traffic. In Episode #51 Eric and Neil discuss how to drive a lot of traffic to your website without building links. Enjoy! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Marketing School Podcast—your 10-minute resource to learn, grown, and nurture your passion for online marketing! In Episode #50 Eric and Neil discuss why they decided to do this podcast in the first place, what their hesitations were, and the benefits of doing it. Enjoy! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Marketing School Podcast—your 10-minute resource to learn, grown, and nurture your passion for online marketing! In Episode #49 Eric and Neil discuss how often you should be tracking your keyword ranking. Enjoy! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Episode #48 Neil and Eric discuss their respective strategies for studying competitors. Listen as both hosts explain why examining the competition—while occasionally valuable—is not as helpful as examining customers, and why your big strategy shifts should be determined by YOU as opposed to the competition. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:10 – How much should you focus on your competitors? 00:15 – Neil doesn’t focus on competitors too much 00:29 – Remember that the market is HUGE 00:45 – There’s a LOT of room out there 01:03 – Making a shitload of money as #2 or #3 is awesome—you don’t need to be #1 01:47 – Just focus on building your OWN business 02:12 – SEMrush 02:15 – Use it to gain keen insight into what your competitors are doing 02:49 – AdBeat 02:54 – See what your competitors are doing with more granularity 03:13 – If you’re going to pay attention to competitors, may attention to new products and market shifts 03:55 – If you don’t, you’ll get left behind 04:10 – Don’t sweat the sm

In Episode #47 Neil and Eric walk through their Top 10 Plugins for WordPress—they’re not only talk about the plugins and their features, but best practices for making the most of these WP add-ons.  Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:15 – Sharing the Top 5 Wordpress Plugins 00:35 – Yoast SEO plugin 01:03 – ThriveLeads is all about content upgrades 01:20 – Allows for opt-ins that are relevant to specific content topics 01:52 – Allows for the addition of an easy CTA for every post 02:02 – Pretty Link 02:09 – If you’re promoting someone else’s product as an affiliate, you can cloak the affiliate link 02:47 – Also great for Facebook ads 03:03 – PolyLang 03:13 – Requires more work, but it creates SERIOUS ROI 03:49 – Most people don’t speak English, yet most of the content available is in English 04:16 – Manual translate your content 05:05 – CoSchedule 05:19 – A wordpress plugin that organizes everything into an editorial calendar 06:56 – WPSmush 07:09 – Condenses images to make to help pages

In Episode #46 Neil and Eric explain how to measure the results of your content marketing efforts. Listen as Neil and Eric illustrate why measuring your content marketing, while important, isn’t necessarily KEY until your content marketing and its reach has hit a certain level of exposure. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:30 – How to measure the results of your content marketing efforts 00:40 – What gets measured gets managed 00:55 – One thing you can do?—start simple. Track what’s important using a spreadsheet 01:45 – With content marketing, it takes time to measure results so be patient 01:50 – Neil never measures ROI from content marketing 02:25 – When you’re spending your OWN time on content marketing, there’s virtually no cost 02:45 – Content marketing is a LONG-TERM play 03:00 – As long as traffic keeps going up, you’ll be able to find a way to monetize 03:20 – Once traffic exceeds 10,000, start collecting emails 04:15 – Calculated Risk 04:55 – Content marketing is a 12-18 month journey befor

In Episode #45 Neil and Eric talk testimonials—what they are, why they’re important, and how you can go about collecting them for your business. Listen as Neil and Eric share their personal experience with testimonials—both good and bad—and illustrate why you should never create a fake testimonial. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:30 – How you can get testimonials from your customers 00:39 – Testimonials are KEY because they do all the hard legwork in terms of winning new business 01:28 – Add company badges and testimonials to your homepage 01:49 – YesInsights 02:39 – Email people asking for feedback 03:03 – Roughly 3 people out of every 100 will give you feedback…at least one of those should be good enough for a testimonial 04:32 – A testimonial will give you a conversion lift of around 8% to 10% 05:19 – Net Promoter Score 06:05 – Be sure to ASK people if you can use testimonials…if you don’t, you can get in BIG trouble 06:15 – However, when it comes to logos, it’s better to ask for forgiveness tha

In Episode #44 Neil and Eric talk about generating more blog topics for your website—why it’s so important and the tools you can use to ensure your content is always fresh. Listen as they share their personal strategies for creating winning blog content that’s not only interesting to them, but interesting to their readers. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:30 – Generating more (and more exciting) blog topics 00:37 – Use BuzzSumo 00:53 – Take what BuzzSumo gives you and IMPROVE upon it 01:54 – Look at posts that are fairly new 02:20 – Take the sub-headers and turn those into individual posts 02:58 – Use Google News or Trends to see what’s hot 03:23 -- Learn how to write content that’s fresh AND informative 04:00 – The internal search feature on your website isn’t sexy, but it is valuable 04:35 – Go to NeilPatel.com in the footer click on TOOLS and then type in your competitor’s URLs 05:00 – Don’t copy your competition, outperform them 05:55 – Convince and Convert 06:30 – Look into your analytics

In Episode #43 Neil and Eric hammer out the realities surrounding YouTube advertising. Want the two-word summary?—it’s awesome! YouTube advertising is one of the easiest ways to revolutionize your business, listen as Neil and Eric show you how. Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:30 – Does YouTube advertising REALLY work for your business? 00:38 – It’s a hidden GEM! 00:55 – Any time you’re running display, you’re looking for TRACTION more than anything 01:45 – Going all-in with YouTube advertising saved a company 02:10 – At CrazyEgg, YouTube advertising generated more revenue in one month than any other medium 02:52 – Check out Tai Lopez 03:33 – YouTube advertising is extremely profitable—but it is expensive to set up and it’s a lot of work 04:05 – Bid on pre-roll and search ads 04:40 – Leads coming in at less than $1 a pop 05:10 – For Growth Everywhere, we’re targeting entrepreneurial viewers 05:39 – Other people being lazy is your opportunity 06:41 – The key to getting an add that works really w

Welcome to The Marketing School Podcast—your 10-minute resource to learn, grown, and nurture your passion for online marketing! In Episode #42 Eric and Neil discuss their favorite marketing tools, like Infusionsoft & LeadPages—and why. Enjoy! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Episode #41 Neil and Eric talk about how to generate more leads. Neil stresses the importance of not just getting people to sign up, but getting qualified leads that are viable for your business. Learn as they share. Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:30 – How to generate more leads for your website 00:39 – Tools you can use 00:40 – Hello Bar 00:45 – SumoMe 01:03 – Figure out why someone should become a lead 01:19 – Give something to convert them into a lead 02:15 – Make sure content is categorized 02:35 – Segmenting your audience 02:57 – Example on marketing funnel post 03:15 – Give a bonus on the topic 03:39 – Sending people to case studies 04:33 – It’s about getting qualified leads 05:01 – Taking people down to a long funnel 05:16 – Putting click to action after getting leads to sign up 05:35 – Drip and Infusionsoft 05:50 – Make sure to segment people from your website 06:04 – Lead scores 06:39 – Breaking leads into multiple steps 07:14 – Try storytelling as a strategy 07:5

In Episode #40 Neil and Eric discuss the 7 simple SEO tactics for increasing your web traffic. Neil shares the reason for his long blog posts and why you should link them to your most popular page. Learn how to optimize your website’s exposure with these easy, non-technical steps. Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:29 – 7 Simple SEO tactics to sky rocket your traffic 00:49 – Linking to your most popular pages 01:19 – Make sure to link on every blog post 01:29 – Featured snippets 01:53 – How to Rank Zero 02:01 – Make sure you have a H1 title and tag 02:19 – Google’s role 03:01 – Click through rates 03:18 – Optimizing title tags 03:48 – Think of title tags as human 04:14 – People love to Google, “What is SEO?” 04:27 – Second order page scraping 04:37 – Getting into Google search console 05:25 – Google likes to audition you 05:50 – Neil’s loooong blog posts 06:05 – More keywords you have, more long tail terms 06:38 – More detailed content, more sure traffic 07:02 – Transcribing videos

Welcome to The Marketing School Podcast—your 10-minute resource to learn, grown, and nurture your passion for online marketing! In Episode #39 Eric and Neil discuss why webinars are great for generating sales. Enjoy! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Episode #38 Eric and Neil teach you how to promote a blog post. Whether you have a tight budget or an endless one, one of these plans will help you get people to read your content and share it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:24 – How to promote a blog post 00:43 – In the beginning, 80% of your time should be spent on promotion. 01:00 – Find people who have already shared content 01:15 – Use Buzzsumo and Twitter 01:50 – Think about how you can stand out. 02:10 – Link out to influencers within the blog post. 02:55 – Link out ten times for every 1000 words. 03:10 – Linking to companies. 03:28 – Paid social ads. 03:40 – A huge chunk of funds go to promotion. 04:14 – Drive people to your site using Facebook. 04:29 – Also use Google. 04:40 – Figure out how to write amazing headlines 05:00 – Copyblogger Headline Formulas 05:30 – Headlines make a huge difference! 05:45 – Portent Headline Generator 06:05 – Build up a group of people that will help promote your content. 06:35 – It wi

In Episode #37 Eric and Neil discuss the value of a good infographic. Neil has seen more traffic and backlinks from infographics than from anything else. Learn how you can create an all-star graphic that drives up traffic on your site. Time Stamped Show Notes:  00:24 – What goes into creating a viral infographic 00:40 – Links effect Google rankings 00:53 – Take complex info and make it visual, and people will link to it. 01:15 – Your rankings will skyrocket 01:30 – For Neil, backlinks and traffic have come mostly from infographics. 02:00 – There are a lot of crappy infographics. 02:10 – Start at Visual.ly to see examples of good infographics. 02:40 – Pull out elements that work in those designs. 02:50 – Dribbble is another resource to contact designers. 03:17 – The first step is to get good data. 03:28 – Get a researcher off of Upwork to collect and outlined data. 03:45 – Don’t have more than six main points. 04:05 – Flow these points into a story. 04:25 – Publish the blog and get an embe