If you're wondering what is growth marketing or what is a growth marketer, this post is for you.
Digital marketer, entrepreneur & angel investor Neil Patel
I’m a Los Angeles-based digital marketing consultant and had the honor of connecting with global lead generation and demand generation master Neil Patel.
He graciously walked me through what it takes to be a growth marketer. As an SEO consultant leader and content marketer, it was an honor to connect with him.
In terms of credentials, here are some of his:
US President Obama's Top 100 Entrepreneurs Under 30 list
The United Nations' Top 100 Entrepreneurs Under 35 list
And Forbes Magazine's top-10 marketing guru list
But that still doesn’t do him justice because he’s also nice. Humble, approachable, and easy to talk to.
And I can't be alone because his CEO, Mike Kamo, has a 100% approval rating on Glassdoor, and Neil hired him.
Neil Patel Digital's ratings on Glassdoor.
If you're in a rush and this post is TLDR, you can jump to the specific section you're interested in here.
Table of Contents
Why Neil Patel Shares Growth Marketing Hacks
How Neil Patel Picks Tech Startups to Invest In
Personality Traits Neil Patel Looks for in Founders
How Neil Patel Creates Top Ranking Blog Posts
Neil Patel's Headline Optimization Strategy
How Neil Patel Creates Top-Ranking Podcasts
How Neil Patel Ranks for Competitive Keywords
How Neil Patel Decides When to Blog and Podcast
Sliders and Pop-Ups vs Content Injections
Neil Patel's Favorite Lead Gen Tools
Neil is the real deal. If you follow these easy growth marketing techniques, you're organic traffic will grow.
1. Sharing Growth Marketing Hacks
He’s probably the most generous digital marketer alive, sharing tons of useful, evergreen “how to” growth marketing hacks for free.
Neil publishes tactical growth marketing content on his popular Neil Patel blog.
He produces a daily podcast called Marketing School with Eric Sui.
And he maintains a popular YouTube channel that's always overflowing with fresh, informative, useful content.
In my opinion, his collection of work are probably the best growth marketing hacks of all time.
He’s entirely an self-made man who has bootstrapped a veritable empire from next to nothing.
He’d never call it an empire.
But it is.
And if you know me, you know that I always call a spade a space.
Neil also invests in and has grown a number of his own self-serve, lower-priced software-as-a-service offerings.
They're all digital marketing related and include Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, Hello Bar and Ubersuggest.
He’s also established a global digital marketing agency called Neil Patel Digital with 7 offices worldwide.
His firm grows traffic for small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise clients through SEO, paid digital, conversion optimization and email marketing funnels.
Here’s how he decides which tech startups to invest in.
2. How Neil Picks Startups to Fund
OK, so this one isn't a growth marketing strategy. But stick with me. It does apply.
Unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves and get dirty, you're not going to be successful at growth marketing. Let me explain.
One of Neil's first Investments was a company called WalkScore which is a data service that rates a neighborhood’s walkability.
The service was integrated into quickly into a number of mobile real estate apps.
Homebuyers searching for listings in say, Santa Monica could see how walkable, bike-friendly and public transportation ready that neighborhood is.
When coupled with real estate listing information, that data became exponentially more valuable and company was acquired by Redfin. Neil has backed a number of startups through successful exits.
His first three software-as-a-service companies -- Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics and Hello Bar -- were and are all digital marketing information services.
When coupled with Google Analytics, they make it easier for content marketers to:
Improve their Search Rankings
Get more Organic Search Traffic
And Generate More Leads
But the number one thing he looks for, is the founder. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's all about execution.
3. Who Neil Invests In
Neil looks for self-reliant founders who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves. He want people willing to do whatever it takes themselves to drive growth, rather than those who rely on others.
He told me a story about an Ivy League educated founder who had received backing from a top incubator. This founder was unwilling to engage in enterprise sales.
Instead, he asked Neil if he knew any good sales people he could recommend to help them hunt for enterprise deals.
He also told me about a young man named Pierre Laguerre who founded a company called Fleeting, a Marketplace for truck drivers.
Unlike the Ivy leaguer, Pierre called and emailed prospective customers himself. He rolled up his sleeves and networked through to the decision maker and convinced them to try his service out.
Pierre is not a sales guy. But he's self-reliant, and willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen. He’s the type of founder that Neil likes to back.
4. How to publish top-ranking posts
What does it take to publish consistently top-ranking blog posts that reach on average 21,000 readers each?
You might think Neil has an army behind him churning out content with him, dotting the I's and crossing the t's.
But he’s also surprisingly self-reliant. He authors all his own content. And he’s shared a good deal of content about his streamlined writing process.
Ubersuggest helps you generate keyword ideas for your content marketing strategy and production.
To summarize, his basic process starts with the headline, which he uses Ubersuggest to help come up with. He looks at the headlines around his keyword that have been shared most on social media by pulling a “Content Ideas” report.
Based on most shared posts that are similar to the topic he’s writing about, he comes up with 4 or 5 headlines. And he runs them by his editor Grant.
Before you read the rest of this section, STOP for a moment and really take this in:
5. Neil's Headline Optimization Strategy
Neil’s process is very methodical. He’s writing to rank for a keyword. So by starting with most shared headlines related to the keyword, he has a very clear direction from which to write his article.
He’s not going to waste time later trying to shoehorn his piece to work for a headline he writes after the fact. This is a key distinction if you want to work efficiently.
And it’s counterintuitive to most of us, because we often use the writing process to get clear about what we want to say. That doesn’t work if you're writing to get found by searchers.
In creative writing and journalism, we’re taught to write first and then create a headline summarizing our piece after it’s already been written.
If you’re a growth marketing specialist writing content to solve problems based on keywords, start with the headline. That way you know you'll be addressing the reader's pain point.
Then, you create the content to back up your promise. You've got to deliver. If your page bounces visitors, it’s not going to rank, even if it does get found.
It’s a different way of thinking about the process. But always, always, always start with your headline.
Once he and Grant agree on what the headline will be, Neil starts by writing the introductory paragraphs first. Next he jumps straight to the end and writes the conclusion.
Heatmap and behavioral analytics research (using tools like Crazy Egg and Hot Jar) show that blog readers check the introduction first. Then, they scroll to the bottom to read the whole article.
By writing the conclusion, he tells the reader what they'll get if they read the whole piece.
That growth marketing tactics works to get them to spend more time on the page. Especially if they're curious to know how he arrived at those conclusions.
It's an amazingly clever, strategic approach to writing blog posts that grow traffic through organic search and social media sharing.
It's why I call him an owned and shared media master.
Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that specializes in generating new keyword ideas. Originally founded as a tool that scraped Google Suggest terms, Ubersuggest was recently acquired by entrepreneur Neil Patel, who has since expanded the feature set significantly.
After his headline, opening paragraphs and conclusion are in place, he inserts his sub headlines, or H2 tags, between the headline and the conclusion. And these are all semantically related terms he’s pulled from “Keyword Ideas” report in Ubersuggest.
In the old days, we used to call this keyword theming. Neil has taken the practice to the next level by showing how to put it into action.
Then, he fills in the body text under each of the sub headlines with his body copy. From there, it goes to his editor who takes it final. After it’s done, Neil pushes and shares.
He creates his own images, usually screenshots, and the whole shebang takes anywhere from 2 to 5 hours to produce the initial draft. He moves articles on his blog once a week.
A growth marketers guide to hacking blog headlines from Copyblogger.
Neil works with freelancers to translate his blog posts into Portuguese, German and Italian. He says going international is the easiest way to grow traffic. He has a great post about using hreflang tags on your website to help Google find and index blog posts in other languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcIRv2AE59I
The Search Engine Journal Podcast recently interviewed Bill Hunt about properly implementing hreflang tags as well, which is pretty advanced but worth checking out.
