Interview with Neil Patel: New York Times bestselling author, top influencer on the web, and digital marketing legend.
Interview with Neil Patel: New York Times bestselling author, top influencer on the web, and digital marketing legend.
Neil shares content best practices, tips to build your brand, and how he sees the future of copywriting.
Few names are more synonymous with SEO and digital marketing than Neil Patel. As one of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs, Neil has elevated content to an art form. His videos, blog posts, and social media channels get millions of visits a month.
Neil stopped by Writers in Tech to share strategies for creating and promoting content, tips for growing your brand (hint: consistency and experimentation), and using Ubersuggest to spy on your competition.
Neil also talks about his plans for Ubersuggest, how he views content design, and why copywriting is an important skill set for the future. Check it out.
Join our free content and ux course: https://course.uxwritinghub.com/free_course
Follow Neil: https://twitter.com/neilpatel
Unknown Speaker 0:00
But I recommend that 40% of your time you write content like that, because if you don't write content like that, it'll be hard to get the search traffic.
Unknown Speaker 0:13
This is writers in tech, a podcast where today's top content strategists,
Unknown Speaker 0:17
UX writers and content designers share their well kept
Yuval Keshtcher 0:20
industry secrets. All right. So welcome to a writer's integrity podcast, a podcast brought to you by the UK's wedding hub, a platform that educate writers from all over the world today, I am very excited to have a very special guest. His name is Neil Patel, creator of many SaaS platforms out there, like Uber suggests crazyegg and Moe and Moe and I've been following his work for years now. Hey, Neil, how are you? Happy to have you here?
Unknown Speaker 0:48
I'm good. How are you?
Yuval Keshtcher 0:49
I'm very good. So tell me first of all, wherever you are right now in the world, I'm in Las Vegas. Really? And this is where you live? Yeah. Pretty cool. And how did you started your journey with being a writer in tech, as a content creator in like the internet? So how was your journey started?
Neil 1:05
Yeah, it was quite funny. So back when I was 15, I wanted to or more. So 16, I started helping people with marketing. And I was like, I want to get more customers. So you had a few options. One you can cold call, which I was doing. But it's hard to reach infinite people through cold calling, because I was only one person and it takes time. Plus, I was going to school. So I didn't have too many hours in the day to call. The second strategy that you had was pay for advertising, which I don't have enough money for. And the third concept that I had was, Hey, why don't I blog and become an expert in this space, and generate business through that way?
Unknown Speaker 1:43
So I created a blog to generate customers. And that's how I started. And what was the theme of that blog
Unknown Speaker 1:51
marketing. So I would blog about marketing trying to generate traffic and brand awareness. And yeah, that's what we're doing.
Yuval Keshtcher 1:57
When was
Unknown Speaker 2:00
you're probably looking at 2001 to 2003. in that timeframe, I was starting to blog and push really hard. And that was when I was really trying to get more and more traffic. I mean, I started
Yuval Keshtcher 2:16
the early days of like the search engine optimizations when you know, it was a wild west Back then, I guess.
Unknown Speaker 2:21
Yeah, I was using platforms like movable type that no one talks about anymore. And there's tight or, you know, this is way before WordPress was really popular.
Yuval Keshtcher 2:30
Cool. Yeah, I've been following your videos. And in few of them, you said like, there was like different techniques when we used to use back then now we can't use them anymore, of course, but you know, I like to hustle. And that's pretty cool. So what have changed since then. So everything changed since then. But let's say now 20 years to the future. It's 2021. So what can be a great content strategy for like, search engine optimization and blogging in 2021?
Unknown Speaker 2:56
Yes. So in 2021, for search engine optimization, and blogging the way I look at it as Can you really stand out, and I have this formula for blogging, and I found that it works really well. So the first is if you look at the search trends, and what people are searching for, most of it is beginner content, how to do X, Y, and Z, what is SEO, how to write a headline, it's stuff like that. But that's a content that no one wants to share on the social networks. And no one wants a link to because it's been beaten to death. But I recommend that 40% of your time you write content like that, because if you don't write content like that, it'll be hard to get the search traffic, then 10% of your time, I recommend that you write advanced content. What I mean by advanced content is, you know, like content with stats data that shows your expertise. For example, the blog post that I published today was I think was like 64% of all Google searches generate no Crick's. Okay, and we took data from Uber says technically 62.41%, so a little bit off 62.41% of all Google searches generates zero clicks. And I started including data from how many people don't click from when they're searching from mobile to what can you do to increase your clicks. And I had a lot of stats and data on how people like clicking on titles with questions in there or title tags with 15 to 40 characters versus longer ones that have 60 characters, and I had all this data. And I talked about how to combat that. That's advanced piece of content that won't get much SEO traffic, because who's really searching for, you know, 62.41% of all Google searches, generate zero clicks. It's very rare that someone's searching for how many Google searches generate no clicks, you get what I mean? Like it's not a popular topic, like how to tie a tie or how to write a blog post, right. But this is the kind of content that generates the backlinks to social shares, which increases your overall site's authority, which then helps your basic content and begin Content rank well, so now you got 40% of your time reading on beginner content 10% of time reading on advanced content 20% of the time, I recommend that you rewrite your old content. If you go into Google Search Console, it'll show you the content that's declining over time in traffic, and the content that you need to rewrite. And what I would do is 20% of the time spent on rewriting your old content, there's over a billion blogs on the internet. That's roughly one for every seven people. We don't really need more blogs. But doesn't mean you shouldn't blog. It just means that Google has a prime picking space because they're prime pickings. LinkedIn has their prime pickings, they want fresh up to date information. So rewrite your old archaic content. And when you rewriting your old archaic content, I would highly recommend that you just keep it up to date and fresh. So whether it's you need to add video, change images, delete old information, like if you're talking about MySpace, no one cares about MySpace anymore, you delete that. So that's an example of updating. And then 30% of the time, I recommend promoting your content. A lot of writers they want to focus on writing, which is great, but it's a competitive landscape. If you're not promoting, you're not going to do well. So you need to look to see who tweeted out competitor articles and be like, Hey is off. You know, I noticed that you tweeted out x y&z article by author a BNC have a similar article, but mine covers 10 more tactics that theirs didn't feel free and tweeted, if you like it, I also reach out to all the people who are, you know, linking to my competition, but not linking to me, you can easily do that. And Uber sent us for free. And then last but not least, anyone that I link out to my article, I asked them to share it.
Yuval Keshtcher 6:39
That's amazing. And I remember a few of your best videos you gave like on your YouTube channel, like actual templates of how to reach out to people nicely. So they would like share your content or say, so they will give you like backlinks and stuff like that. So I've been actually following that advice. I think it was like three years ago, and it actually worked. So that's a great piece of advice.
Unknown Speaker 7:06
I'm glad you implemented it. The hardest part that I have is when I teach people or give them advice,
Yuval Keshtcher 7:12
such as getting them to execute on it. It's tough, you know, like, I still don't get how you spend your time. So you just walk me by percentage how you spend your time, but how can you build this content? creation slash consistent machine? That is like being consistent is the hardest part when it comes to content creation? So how do you do that? Like you have the marketing podcast every day,
Unknown Speaker 7:36
and the blogging every day, I enjoy it. So it doesn't seem like it's a lot of work for me. Okay, that's the first thing, when you enjoy something, you're more likely to do it put in the time energy effort that's needed. The second thing is, is I'm not the CEO of my company, I focus on promotion and content creation, and building the community. I don't focus on running the day to day of the business. So I'm spending my time creating content, I enjoy it. And that's what really helps.
Yuval Keshtcher 8:02
That's amazing. And how do you delegate the responsibilities that you don't like to other people in your organization? Do you have any tips for that?
Unknown Speaker 8:11
I have a co founder, who's my CEO, and he's better operations than I am. He does all the delegation and business side, I focus on the marketing and promotion side. Brilliant. Okay, let's
Yuval Keshtcher 8:22
go back to the content creation part. So you said something about publishing, also updating old content. So we recommend also to like republish your articles and stuff like that,
Unknown Speaker 8:33
when you republish your article, when you're updating your old content, you don't change the URL or anything, if you want to, you can just 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. But it's more so you just update it, you change the published date to update it today. And that's it. But when it's updating, it could be that you update a sentence, it could be up to you five paragraphs, it could be that you delete five paragraphs, there is no general rule. And the reason being is every post needs to be updated differently. What I mean by that is, I look at the keywords that the page is ranking for, I search for them, and then look at my competitors content. And I see are they doing anything better than me? And that'll give me an idea of where I need to update and where I need to spend my attention and focus.
Yuval Keshtcher 9:17
Do you use Google suggests to see what your competitors are writing about, like you do the keyword research on Uber suggests?
Unknown Speaker 9:24
Correct? That's right. So I'll look at Uber sedus, I put on my competitors URL, I got a in the left hand navigation, there's traffic analysis, and I click on the top pages, which shows all my competitors top pages, and that'll show me what their top content is. And that'll give me ideas on what I should be writing about. Also, if they have similar pages, I look at their similar pages to mine and see what they're doing differently than me or what I can improve on based on what they're doing.
Yuval Keshtcher 9:50
Fantastic. So most of the platforms that I know out there cost like a lot of money like href or sem rush and over suggestions like free so Can we trust the data of auto suggest like we can trust it, that of sem rush and href? In your opinion,
Unknown Speaker 10:07
I think sem rush and hrs are amazing tools, who process is mainly free, we have some paid plans, but you can mainly use it for free. And we actually get our data from the same sources. Keep in mind, these companies were built many, many years ago, right. So when they're built many, many years ago, we did things like using AWS use similar data providers, when the data providers are selling the data 20 times, we worked out cheaper deals. And when you do things like that, we're able to do it at a fraction of the cost that they are, hence we're able to undercut the market.
Yuval Keshtcher 10:37
That's amazing.
Unknown Speaker 10:38
Eventually, what I want to do is make Uber says 100%, free, even the data, have no paid plans, except for automation. What I mean by that is I eventually want to do over, we just automatically do your SEO for you. And for that you pay and for all the data and everything else is 100%. Free, unlimited usage. That's my eventual goal.
Yuval Keshtcher 10:57
When do you feel like you're going to reach that goal
Unknown Speaker 10:59
sometime next year? That's amazing. Well release automation this year will adjust how we do payments this year. And next year, we'll roll it out.
Yuval Keshtcher 11:07
Alright, so that's amazing. So we have many people in the audience right now they want to build their own personal brand, they want to start a blog. Many of them are like content designer, they want to do the percentage of like, they're already writers, but they want to put their work out there. Now I know that you need to localize your content for the different platforms, and you don't know where to start. And it's like overwhelming should I use Instagram or Tiktok? Or a blog or LinkedIn? Or? I'm really curious to know, like, what's your take on that? Let's say that I'm starting today, I want to brand myself as I don't know, a UX writer to find, like, interesting clients or to build an agency or something like that. So where would you start
Unknown Speaker 11:47
somebody a few things. First is I would publish content first on your own blog. Second thing is, after a few days of having that content up, repurpose it. There's no reason why you can't share the post on LinkedIn, share it on Facebook that you can do the same day. And then once you share the content, then after a few days, when I say repurpose, you can take the whole article and just put it on LinkedIn, you can take the whole article and put it on Facebook, you can go on Quora answer questions by taking snippets of the article and link back to fishing. You can you know, continually repurpose the con, you create videos from it, you can create a podcast episode from it. Marketing is turned into omni channel used to be able to build a business just off of one channel and build a brand off of one channel. And marketing. They call it the rule of seven when someone sees or interacts with your brand seven times, they're much more likely to remember it, evangelize it connect with it. So you actually have to use all platforms even if you don't want to.
Yuval Keshtcher 12:36
And what about the more visual platforms, they know that like, it takes so much time and you know, first of all, to engage with your audience, you need to answer all of them one by one that takes a lot of time. And also, you know, now I take a snippet of an article and put it on Instagram, that also takes a lot of time to make it visualize to make a nice infographic. So what kind of process can I set up to make that efficient?
Unknown Speaker 12:59
Yeah, I would go out there and go hire people from Upwork to help you out for $5 or you go to Fiverr. For a few bucks, you can find people to help you out. Both are great platforms. The other thing I would do is start with a few platforms, you don't have to do all of them. You can just blog on your own site and then promote the content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, which doesn't take much effort. Repurpose articles A few days later. And then eventually you can get into Instagram, tik tok, YouTube, podcasting, but you don't have to do that right away. Start with a few the easy ones and then expand as you're getting more traction more customers, because then you can hire more staff to help you All
Yuval Keshtcher 13:36
right, cool. Are you on Tick Tock? Oh, by the way,
Unknown Speaker 13:38
now I need to be we have a tick tock account. We just
Yuval Keshtcher 13:42
it's it's another beast, you know, it's like to figure it out without being like, lame, like, so many people are trying too hard on that platform. And you don't we don't want to be that person, I guess. Yep. We still want to give out to people. Very cool. And is there any specific tips for growth like I know that being consistent is is one thing, but I know that like your social media accounts, you have many followers on Twitter and on YouTube. And I remember when I listened to your podcast with Eric fears ago, you had like this event and he said like, if you're going to have 1 million downloads, so we're going to make this event happen and you were very consistent about it. Like I listened to like 20 episodes when when you talked about it, and I guess it was way more than that. So except from consistency and clicks like that. You have any like tips for growth?
Unknown Speaker 14:36
Yes. So the big one, and you spotted it, as I mentioned is consistency. That is the biggest thing. The second thing is actually experimentation. So I look to see what's popular, what's doing well well formats. And I try copying and not the content but doing similar approaches. Sometimes it works for you. Sometimes it doesn't. But when you keep experimenting, trying different formats, eventually of figuring out what content what tweets what Facebook posts will Do well, and the stuff that does well post more of it the stuff that doesn't do well don't post it as much. And then keep adding in new experiments. And you'll keep finding more type of content that does well. It's all about the content quality. That's the key to winning right now.
Yuval Keshtcher 15:14
It's like also testing you to kind of see the data of what gets most traction, more engagement, and then you post more of it, and basically, kind of testing it. Yep. Very cool. What's your take on UX writing, like product writing? Many people are talking about this new opportunities in the world of UX, like writing the copy of apps, like, for example, Uber suggest or different apps like there's a huge explosion right now. in this field. Also, we have like our own online education platform for UX writers. What's your take on that, like about the future of writers in tech? Basically, there is a new field right now named UX writing, many people are doing the transition right now from content marketing, to content design, like getting into the digital products, and like do in app monetization and stuff like that. So I want to ask, what do you think about this field and where this field is heading?
Unknown Speaker 16:13
Yeah, I think it's gonna be a portion of the market, and it's gonna keep growing. For example, with SAS apps, you can write content through app queues. What I mean by that is it helps you with user onboarding, and stuff like that, or you can write copy for user onboarding. Or you can do training tutorials for teach people how to use your product. Or you can do copywriting for e commerce products. When someone opens up your package and they get a home, you have this whole card that explains how to use it and you love a review. And here's some coupons for repurchases. And I think these areas are going to take a market of percentage of the work. And they're gonna have to also pay more though, even though it's going to be a smaller percentage of the market. They're gonna pay more money because this is where you're monetizing. And there's more of a direct ROI and you're gonna see more and more areas like that pop up. You're gonna see copywriters getting paid to script out YouTube videos, you're gonna see copywriters get paid to do things like do content updates, instead of writing content, updating content, you'll see copywriters getting paid to help create stories for PowerPoint presentations. And you're already seeing some of this stuff. But more of the things are going to add up because I think copywriting and storytelling is very important skill set that a lot of people don't have
Yuval Keshtcher 17:29
anything. And as we see Technology Co I guess that we're going to see super interesting combinations of different writing skills and the way we use technology for them, like VR, or let's write chatbots, as well, you know, writers will write chatbots as well, they do a conversation designers.
Unknown Speaker 17:49
Right now, the big thing is writing for Instagram bots, not too many people talk about it. And you know, when I look at that, that's another way to generate more work.
Yuval Keshtcher 18:00
So new features. First of all, I would like to thank you for being here today. And we have this thing that we're doing with all of our guests, which is some kind of brainstorming session when we need to name this episode. So Neil, how do you think we should name this episode?
Unknown Speaker 18:17
So I would do maybe something around the future of copywriting? Or how to succeed as a copywriter? in a changing world?
Yuval Keshtcher 18:29
Should we add like a number like in 2021? Or will it like be a sticky note? We'll win like two years from now. We will have to update it.
Unknown Speaker 18:36
Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 18:39
How copywriting is changing in 2021 or how to survive as a copywriter in 2021 I think that can work as well.
Yuval Keshtcher 18:46
That's a good one. I think we have a winner here. Okay,
Unknown Speaker 18:50
awesome.
Yuval Keshtcher 18:50
So Nick, thank you so much for being here today. If people want to reach out and find you what would be the best way to do it.
Unknown Speaker 18:57
It would be through Neil Patel calm I blog there you can reach out to me there of ad agency Neil Patel digital you can find out about Uber says there but Neil Patel calm.
Yuval Keshtcher 19:06
Perfect. So I'm going to add that link to the show notes. Neil, I had a pleasure talking to you. It was amazing to meet you in person. Thank you so much.
Unknown Speaker 19:15
Thanks for having me. My daughter enjoyed it as well.