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

Starting point is 00:00:12 When we're born and we grow up and we started getting into elementary school, we have these ideas of what we want to be astronaut, policeman, 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 they 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

Starting point is 00:00:35 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 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 the social profiles. And we're both going to get played from this. So it's actually a really amazing win-win strategy for both of us. What is up Young and Profiters? You're listening to Yap Young and Profiting podcast where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable

Starting point is 00:01:16 advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Halitaha. Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast, Neil. Thanks for having me. Really excited. Yep, bam. 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 bestselling author, an 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,

Starting point is 00:02:12 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 with Neil. And in this episode, we're going to 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.

Starting point is 00:02:51 We'll try to cover everything from social media to email marketing to SEO. And last, 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 generation's 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

Starting point is 00:03:34 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:04:11 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 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.

Starting point is 00:04:41 So I went to the 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, the certifications. So I was missing out just on a ton of revenue. But I wanted that revenue.

Starting point is 00:05:04 So I started taking nighttime college classes and while I was 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 or $900 from college kids, I mean high school

Starting point is 00:05:41 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 100,000 visitors a month. No money. This sucks. So I'm like, you don't forget this. I'm just going to go forward, go to college and wrap things up and just go get that Oracle certification, just get the $100, $200 an hour. So tried going down that route. And while I was in high,

Starting point is 00:06:17 school still at 16 at this time. My first class was Speech 101, gave 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, can 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, but I know they're looking for someone who understands 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 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 in revenue to the

Starting point is 00:06:57 business through online marketing. So then the owner of the company had a son. The son owned the ad 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 arbitraging it and charging more on the other end. And over time, you know, I was around 16, 17 years old at this time. I was making 20 grand a month. And that's 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

Starting point is 00:07:41 on what 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 focus thing probably until 13, 14 years into my entrepreneur journey. It was late. If I focused on from day one on doing the right things, I would have a much, 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.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Well, it's funny. Now we have like all these resources like young and profiting podcasts. where we get to talk to Alex Formosy and he scolds 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

Starting point is 00:08:37 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 started getting into elementary school, we have these ideas of what we want to be astronaut, policeman, 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 want to 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 Hustlewoods and my co-founders, or not co-founders with, 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 want to be a doctor and then they grow up being a doctor.

Starting point is 00:09:34 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 stumble 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.

Starting point is 00:09:58 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.

Starting point is 00:10:20 Totally right. Did too many businesses, some I love, 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 masterclass. And I teach people how to grow on LinkedIn, how to master their content, go viral, how to convert leads into sales.

Starting point is 00:10:46 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, 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've got to make sure you're focusing on a big tam.

Starting point is 00:11:12 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,

Starting point is 00:11:36 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. 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 tam. 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

Starting point is 00:12:19 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 gobble up 0.1%,

Starting point is 00:12:54 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 want to find your audience in mass. You want to target them in mass. That's how you're going to target them in the cheapest way, most effective way. If you have to find like 10 people here or 10 people there, it's like you are just going to exhaust yourself and it's going to 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 ad to 500 people. All right. How many more people can you should? 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 tam. Once you have a big tam, then if you want to do well, you needed to take an omni-channel approach from LinkedIn to Facebook to Instagram to

Starting point is 00:14:02 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 continually costs more and more. So you got to add into upsells and downsells. In other words, build that funnel, figure out how to generate more revenue from that same customer.

Starting point is 00:14:29 And if they're buying more right at purchase, it allows you to spend more money on marketing, as well as figure out a way to generate reoccurring revenue. So how do you sell to them multiple times? And it may not be reoccurring in the sense that most people think where someone's 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, and the next day they'll buy toilet paper. And then they buy some shoes.

Starting point is 00:14:57 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 reoccurring products. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At YAP, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees.

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Starting point is 00:15:56 now. In fact, in the minute we've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Plus, there's no subscriptions or long-term contracts. You literally just pay for your results. You pay for the people that you hire. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com.com.com. Profiting. Just go to Indeed.com slash profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. What's up, young and profitors? I remember when I first started Yap, I used to dread missing important calls. I remember I lost a huge potential partnership because

Starting point is 00:16:40 the follow-up thread got completely lost in my messy communication system. Well, this year, I'm focused on not missing any opportunities. And that starts with your business communications. A missed call is money and growth out the door. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled QUO, the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, and it works right from an app on your phone or computer. The way Quo works is magic for team alignment. Your whole team can handle calls and texts from one shared number, and everyone sees the full conversation. It's like having access to a shared email inbox, but on a phone.

Starting point is 00:17:16 And also, Quo's AI can even qualify leads or respond after hours, ensuring your business stays responsive, even when you finally log. off. It makes doing business so much easier. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash profiting. That's QUO.com slash profiting. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. And I'd love to dig deeper on a couple of things that you mentioned. So can you help us understand some examples of an upsell and a downsell? Yeah, no problem at all. So with upsells and is 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 an upsell or downsell, anything that

Starting point is 00:18:07 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 an 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 large fries? Oh, no, it's too expensive. How about a small fries? We're running a promotion

Starting point is 00:18:49 on that. It'll only cost you 30 cents more when you combine your burger with a lot. a small fry, you don't even have to spend a dollar more. It's 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 want to do with your marketing is, how can you sell something that will get them the results faster and automate a way? So let's use beauty as an 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.

Starting point is 00:19:26 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 overnight and it just injects it. I'm making it up. Or here's this toothbrush.

Starting point is 00:19:54 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 they're 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.

Starting point is 00:20:24 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

Starting point is 00:20:56 do better? How can I more delight you? And just getting that feedback and continuing 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 and they're important factors. So I'm not trying to downplay them.

Starting point is 00:21:33 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, let's say I'm trying to buy a new car, they're 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.

Starting point is 00:21:54 No one cares which site has more backlinks or less backlinks or 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-end, the long run is building amazing product or service. If someone goes to your website,

Starting point is 00:22:19 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 on your website, even if you're ranking right now, your rankings in the long run 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 the stuff

Starting point is 00:23:01 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 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. The person will win 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.

Starting point is 00:23:31 Similar it 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

Starting point is 00:24:01 political viewpoints and he knows what he's doing. That's more relevant than Joe the Plummer or Sally the Plummer saying vote for Neil when it comes to politics. The same thing goes with SEO and rankings. If I'm trying to rank for marketing related terms, it's more effective for another marketing website to say, hey, Neil's amazing, or an authoritative website,

Starting point is 00:24:23 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 overreact,

Starting point is 00:24:39 do 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 to shove in tons of keywords in your content. Google and Bing understand what you're talking about when 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 Sylvester and to the public. They both have tons of free plans where 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.

Starting point is 00:25:20 The higher that number, that means more people are willing to spend money 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 going to 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

Starting point is 00:26:05 don't have the money, but you have the time, SEO is a great first approach. Or if you have both and you're a venture funded 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 pay 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

Starting point is 00:26:50 actually getting people to subscribe and opt in to our email list? My favorite one is give away a tool for free. So you can go to sites like codecany.com. Find tools in any industry, mortgages, cars, automotive, whatever it may be, buy them for like 10, 15, 20, 50 bucks. 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 an email address, have them register. So that way you can keep generating more emails.

Starting point is 00:27:22 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. it's one of our favorite strategies that not too many marketers use. Wow. So what is the name of that website that gives the tools? Codecannon, C-O-D-E-C-Nion.net. I love that. I've never heard of that before.

Starting point is 00:27:44 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 on 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 2020 right now, but February 2022, we bought a tool called Answer the Public for $8.6 million.

Starting point is 00:28:12 And Answer the Public was this tool similar to Ubersedges, 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 UberSSS did, but they only monetize it by charging for the tool. We felt, A, there's more money and services and marketing, and we've seen. 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 companies like WPP or Omnacom. So we're just like, wait, it's similar to our UberSSSS tool. They don't even monetize this from a lead perspective.

Starting point is 00:28:47 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, buying 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 ads and only them ads and get really qualified leads from that. We also love doing webinars, going live, doing podcasts with other people, Omni 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

Starting point is 00:29:31 and then instead of charging. So I used to charge money for speaking at conferences. Now I'm like, I don't care for the money. But what we love doing is having the conference organizer set us up with the right meetings. So a great example of this is I was in Brazil speaking at event, got set up with meetings with Michelin, the tire company, one of the biggest marketplaces is like their version of eBay down there,

Starting point is 00:29:55 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 Roll Pool. Right. Roll Pull is a global company. And it's been an amazing strategy to help us get customers. You can also beat a C, like if you're selling nail polish, speak at an event where you can meet potential distributors or the event organizer can set you up with the introduction to, let's say,

Starting point is 00:30:21 Walmart, who can carry your nail polish and put in all the stores. Yeah. These are such great ideas. And I love that you pointed out LinkedIn ads because two. 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

Starting point is 00:30:48 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 want to do is scrub your list. A lot of email solutions have this option. Like for example, I use ConvertKit. ConvertKit 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

Starting point is 00:31:29 delete them. That simple. So we only send emails to the people who are engaging, and that ensures that our emails stay in the inbox and have much better deliverability. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hello, Yap Gang. I know my young and profiting listeners want bigger businesses and a better life, and the New Year is the perfect moment to reset and commit to your growth. But let's be real. You can't build an empire if your finances are all over the place. That's by getting into it QuickBooks is one of the best first moves you can make this year. They've got powerful money management tools built right into their platform, and they have them for every stage of your business, whether you're a solopreneur or a small business.

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Starting point is 00:36:02 Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash profiting for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's 30% off in 2026. Again, that's Framer.com slash profiting for 30% off, Framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply. I know a lot of people are doing this thing where they're scrubbing emails

Starting point is 00:36:29 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

Starting point is 00:36:46 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 show them 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 spamming people and

Starting point is 00:37:24 say, hey, pay me money for marketing services. Yeah, it's totally a turnoff, 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 lists and our emails are hitting the inbox. How can we actually get people to open our emails? What are your suggestions? Casual subject lines is one of the biggest thing when a friend emails you, it's 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 help boosting open rates.

Starting point is 00:38:02 In addition to that, make sure your emails provide value or 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 percent time providing value, 20 percent 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

Starting point is 00:38:30 ask you a question. So a lot of times when you send emails, you're going to 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 it 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

Starting point is 00:38:51 and buy from you. These are really good tips. Like 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 market.

Starting point is 00:39:11 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 lowercase like you said. That's right. As long as you rotate things up, it really does break things up. And yeah, 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.

Starting point is 00:39:47 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 one, two percentile. If you can do that, you're doing really well and you're doing a 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?

Starting point is 00:40:17 Either strategy works. You don't want to have like 10 links in an email that 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? Do you suggest that that's an effective tactic? We 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.

Starting point is 00:40:41 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.

Starting point is 00:41:07 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 podcasts

Starting point is 00:41:28 to get more listenership. And then people are trying to repurpose that content and use it all over the place. Because you can use a podcast content 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 played 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.

Starting point is 00:42:01 What can they automate? And most people look at AI like, oh, I can use open AI to help. 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 writing a piece of content.

Starting point is 00:42:36 It's actually spending money on paid advertising. Look at the revenue that Google is generating and Facebook is generating. I think Google still is 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.

Starting point is 00:42:58 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, Now, my 60 employees all have a really good intern that they can use to level up their work.

Starting point is 00:43:39 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 or something. than like 40 something million people in the first 24 hours got the blue checkmark, which was 600 and something million, I think 660. It was somewhere around there.

Starting point is 00:44:13 It was around $600 million in revenue. That's massive. I think the problem is what's going to happen is everyone's going to start getting these check marks and they're not going to mean much anymore. Yeah, I know. The social proof is going to be gone. Yeah, or they're going to have to have different colors or variations for it, kind of like how Twitter has like a government official version.

Starting point is 00:44:31 So then that way they have some sort of meaning, at least for some of the checkmarks. Yeah, totally. But I'm happy because I personally am having trouble getting verified and I have three bot 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 improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. The one thing you can do every single day is I would first start off right now.

Starting point is 00:45:08 It doesn't matter if it's the start of year, middle of year, end of year, break down what your goals off for the year, what you need to do to achieve them, break down those tasks into a monthly basis, then then take those tasks and break them out into 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.

Starting point is 00:45:46 I think that's a really good piece of advice because a lot of people, they're all talk and there are 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.

Starting point is 00:46:15 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 do. just really think about it from the grand scheme of things. And I try to stay really content and level-headed

Starting point is 00:46:36 because then it 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've 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? Neil Patel.com is where I blog. NPDigital is my ad agency.

Starting point is 00:46:58 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 Patel 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.

Starting point is 00:47:22 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 at roughly 80% value and 20% selling. And lastly, using questions in your emails to get people to respond, engage, and build a relationship

Starting point is 00:47:59 with you. And this tactic also does double duty to support in increasing your delivery. rate. In terms of benchmarks, Neil says that if we're getting open rates above 30% and click-through rates at 1 to 2%, we're doing a great job. Thank you so much for listening to 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, learned, 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

Starting point is 00:48:42 episode with your friends and family, spread young and profiting podcast by word of mouth. If you guys like watching your podcast videos, you can find us on YouTube. Every single full episode as well as clips is uploaded to YouTube. Just search young and profiting. You'll find it right away. You guys can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala. Beware of the fake accounts. I've got lots of fake Instagram accounts, but if you find me at Yap with Hala and shoot me a DM, I will definitely respond to you. It's pretty easy for me to find you guys on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:49:11 And then you can also find me on LinkedIn by searching my name, Hala 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 YAP team. Thank you so much for all your hard work behind the scenes.

Starting point is 00:49:30 I appreciate you guys so much. This is your host, Halitaha, aka the podcast princess, signing off.

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

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