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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the 2x Webby Award Honoree Be A Marketer podcast!
[0:00] Dave Charest: On today's episode, you'll hear from someone who went from launching a failed job board at 16 to building one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the world and why the fundamentals of marketing haven't really changed, no matter how flashy the latest trend looks. This is the Be a Marketer podcast.
[0:31] Dave Charest: My name is Dave Charest, director of small businesses at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business, even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer, and at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
[01:03] Dave Charest: Well, friend, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. That can only mean that it is time for my podcast partner to take her seat. Welcome the one and only Kelsi Carter.
[01:14] Kelsi Carter: It is me. Hi, Dave.
[01:17] Dave Charest: I like the way you actually took your seat and you started to walk away like, I'm like, no, come back, Kelsi. I did.
[01:22] Kelsi Carter: got up. I was just like, I'm done.
[01:24] Dave Charest: We. I need you here.
[01:25] Dave Charest: So, Kelsi, all right, I'm going to put you on the spot. We've been working together for a while now. We've been talking about marketing a lot. You've seen me speak at places. If you had to choose one thing that I kind of harp on a lot, what would it be, do you think?
[01:40] Kelsi Carter: You do not own your followers on social media. Email marketing is still important. Email list is critical, even if you have a good social following, you still need an email list.
[01:53] Dave Charest: I like that.
[01:54] Kelsi Carter: That was a very I think it's just relevant now, but that's something recently, I feel like I've heard you say to our guests and everyone that we've had on the show, time and time again, that's something they've said and you've shared that, you're like, I really like that that you're stressing
[02:07] Dave Charest: that. Yeah, so I'm going to try it one more time. If you had to say in one word, would I?
[02:13] Kelsi Carter: Like how that sums up one word? Yeah,
[02:16] Dave Charest: well, not that specifically, but if things that I talk about.
[02:19] Kelsi Carter: Fundamentals.
[02:20] Dave Charest: Yeah, there it
[02:21] Dave Charest: is. OK.
[02:22] Kelsi Carter: Fundamental. I was like, I got that. I thought you were like trying to get me to be like email and I was just like,
[02:31] Dave Charest: Well, email, I think is one of those fundamental tools,
[02:33] Kelsi Carter: right?
[02:33] Dave Charest: And so one of those things. And so the reason I bring that up is because like, I think again, time and time again, we've seen, right, if you do the fundamental things, those form a strong foundation, they earn you the right to try the shiny objects, the things that are supposed to be sexier than the fundamentals, all of those things and
[02:52] Dave Charest: I brought it up just because like I think here we are again, we've heard it with past guests, right? We've heard it more specifically with uh Dr. Knowles when he joined us, for example, and today we have a guest who's, you know, been quite successful in the digital marketing space for many, many years, and I was happy to hear a lot of this talk about fundamentals coming from him today. And so,
[03:14] Dave Charest: Throughout the conversation that we have today, he returns to the idea that while the tools do evolve, those core principles of effective marketing, brand building, leveraging multiple channels, focusing on the return on investment, really making sure that you're delivering value and all that you do, right? That stuff still remains the same. And so,
[03:34] Dave Charest: What can you tell us about our guest today, Kelsi?
[03:37] Kelsi Carter: Today's guest is Neil Patel, entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of NP Digital, which is a top global marketing agency headquartered in Las Vegas with offices worldwide. So Neil was named a top marketer by Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, and even recognized by President Obama as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30.
[03:59] Kelsi Carter: Neil has helped businesses of every size drive traffic, generate leads, and scale revenue.
[04:05] Dave Charest: Neil has worked with brands like Amazon, NBC, HP, Viacom, and his marketing blog consistently ranks among the most read in the industry. So whether he's building multi-billion dollar companies or breaking down strategies that work for small business owners,
[04:21] Dave Charest: I would say Neil really just has this knack for making complex marketing feel doable. In our conversation today, you'll hear how to identify the marketing channels worth your time and why Neil's compares it to throwing a spaghetti against the wall. In this instance, it's actually a good thing and why search engine optimization is now search everywhere optimization and how AI is reshaping where and how people find you.
[04:46] Dave Charest: And really the hidden power of ugly marketing tactics that consistently outperform the flashy stuff. So, let's go to Neil, who takes us back to one of his earliest ventures and how a market crash turned into one of the most defining moments of his career.
[05:03] Neil Patel: One of my first businesses was an ad agency. Got crushed during the 2008 crisis. But fast forward to today, technically seven years ago when I started it, I was never trying to start another ad agency. I was like, ah, not a scalable business, very reliant on humans, and the problem with ad agencies are
[05:24] Neil Patel: Some of the work is subjective, right? You may think it's great, some may think it's not, it may convert really well, they may not care because they just don't like the way it looks. So you get work that may be subjective and I was never really planning on creating an ad agency. But then I had my own software companies and I was tired of paying other marketing agencies to do work that I didn't like. So I created an ad agency that would
[05:50] Neil Patel: Do the types of marketing that I would want for my own business, and then we started taking on some outside customers and then it just kept scaling from there, but never really thought there was going to be this much of a
[06:01] Neil Patel: demand.
[06:02] Dave Charest: Well, give us a sense of that scale then, right? So where are you today just in terms of size of the company versus, I guess when you started, when this was 2017 when you started? 2018, 2018,
[06:11] Neil Patel: OK. And we had
[06:14] Neil Patel: Our first year was really tiny. I think we're around 5 million in revenue. I don't know what the headcount was, year after we did 18, then we did 30 something and we kept growing. Fast forward to today, I don't know how many people we have, but call it 1000 something people within the organization.
[06:29] Dave Charest: Amazing. Do you ever think you were gonna end up with this global business?
[06:33] Neil Patel: No, that wasn't really ever the intention. The goal when I was creating the ad agency.
[06:40] Neil Patel: Being super transparent, I would have been happy if we had 10 million in revenue and 2 in profit. I never expected it to be this size.
[06:49] Neil Patel: And now that it is this size, I'm disappointed that it's not bigger. So I'm never really satisfied.
[06:57] Dave Charest: Well, that's that's probably says something to, you know, the number of businesses that you start. Are you still involved in the like the tech companies that you've created before? Do you still, are you still involved in all of those? OK, cool. So
[07:08] Neil Patel: some of them
[07:08] Neil Patel: didn't work out.ISS metrics did not work out. I don't know who owns it now.
[07:13] Neil Patel: Crazy Egg is still there involved in that, but it's really just NP Digital and Crazy Egg, the others all got sold off or
[07:21] Dave Charest: failed. OK, got it. Well, talk to me a little bit about when you think about just MP Digital, what are the different ways that your business is making money today? And I'm just thinking like for the different types of things you're doing percentages, you don't have to give me like numbers or anything like that, but what are the types of things you guys are doing?
[07:37] Neil Patel: So we have a software division. We make money selling software kind of like you guys, and our software's free all the way up to, you know, call it 100 bucks a month. And then we have
[07:50] Neil Patel: Consulting for SMBs, and then we also have consulting for enterprise corporations. Those are the three main areas that we make revenue. Now, there are
[08:02] Neil Patel: I would call it a 4th bucket, just like miscellaneous, and there's not a lot of miscellaneous. I don't know what the numbers would be, but maybe a few million bucks a year, so it's a really tiny amount. Speaking fees, things like that, which we try not to optimize for. We get a lot of paid speaking requests. I probably turned down almost.
[08:24] Neil Patel: 70, 80% of them. How
[08:26] Dave Charest: do you decide which ones you do do?
[08:28] Neil Patel: Size. So if it's a large audience, that's great for branding, and then the second thing we look for, and no particular order, but the second thing we look for is ideal clients.
[08:39] Neil Patel: Are the attendees our ideal customers, not from an S&B perspective, more so from an enterprise perspective. Because in the agency game, you make majority of your revenue from enterprise brands.
[08:50] Dave Charest: Right. Talk to me a little bit about, if I'm not mistaken, you come from a family of entrepreneurs. How did that, I guess influence you in your journey?
[08:59] Neil Patel: I learned a lot from just listening to my uncles. My mom was an entrepreneur, she was aggressive, and she kept pushing until she got what she wanted.
[09:08] Neil Patel: And to give you an idea of how aggressive she was, she had a daycare and when she lacked kids for her daycare, she would go to other daycares that were full and be like, Oh, here's some flyers to give out to parents that come by when you're full and you could them out fine.
[09:22] Neil Patel: And she wasn't paying them for any of that kind of like, but that's kind of aggressive, right? When you think about being an entrepreneur, just willing to do that and having the guts, most people would never dare to do it. But yeah, I saw people taking risks all the time and for me there was nothing wrong with taking the risk and I don't really see them as a risk because when you grow up around something, you kind of become numb to it.
[09:46] Neil Patel: I was numb to risk at a very early age.
[09:49] Dave Charest: I
[09:49] Dave Charest: was gonna say that becomes the, the environment, right, that becomes normal to you, right? So it doesn't feel like a risk necessarily, it just feels like the thing you're supposed to do, right? Yes, exactly. So tell me the story behind, if I'm not mistaken, was your first business that you started was like at 16.
[10:05] Dave Charest: Was this uh Advice monkey, is this the business?
[10:08] Neil Patel: Yeah, so Advice Monkey was a job board and the job board failed miserably because when I was out and about, what I really wanted was, or more so when I was younger, I was trying to find a high paying job.
[10:21] Neil Patel: So it was on Monster.com. I couldn't find any high paying jobs. And the reason I couldn't find any high paying jobs is I wasn't qualified for any of them. I was gonna say
[10:32] Dave Charest: you're 16,
[10:33] Neil Patel: right? Exactly. So I wasn't qualified for any of them. And what ended up happening was, I was just like, you know what, these job boards make a killing, OK? They make a killing.
[10:47] Neil Patel: So, maybe I should go out there and just create a job board, because Monster.com at that time, I don't know if they are more, was publicly traded. Then there's career builder, hot jobs and all of them and I was like, you know what?
[10:59] Neil Patel: Let me go and create a job board, and if I make 1% of what they make, cause they're making hundreds of millions of dollars, I was like, I'll be rich, and I couldn't get a job board at 1% or anything near there because when I created it and popped it up, I didn't have job listings, B, I had no traffic. Eventually I got the job listings, so I did a partnership with some of the other job boards out there. I think was one was called like USA Jobs or USA Job board or something like that. And they were giving me a file with all their job listings and we would post it on our platform.
[11:29] Neil Patel: But none of this stuff really caused me to make money from that. But what I learned from that process was how to get traffic to a website. Cause once I had traffic, even though I had job listings, I didn't know how to monetize. So eventually I was able to get traffic, but I didn't know how to monetize, but I was like, let me just go try this traffic thing.
[11:47] Neil Patel: And the way it started off was, while I was in high school I was taking nighttime college classes. One of the nighttime college classes was on speech 101. I gave a speech on how Google's algorithm works, and someone in that class was like, hey, I'm a sales rep at this power supply manufacturer called LPAC. We're decent size, we provide like power supplies like heart resuscitator machines like Phillips or Boeing airplanes.
[12:10] Neil Patel: And they're like, we're looking for someone like you, keep my Google and search at the time was much newer. So they gave me an hourly contract ended up being around 2 an hour, 250 if I had a guess, maybe $175 on the loan, I think it was 175 to $250 an hour. I'm taking a guess. I know it's more than 150, I know for sure it was less than 250. Somewhere in between, it could have been any of those numbers you're talking about pretty much 23 years ago, so it was a long time. Yeah,
[12:36] Dave Charest: gonna say how old were you at that point? Like
[12:36] Dave Charest: I
[12:36] Neil Patel: was
[12:38] Neil Patel: 16,
[12:38] Dave Charest: 16. So you must have been like psyched, right? Like,
[12:42] Neil Patel: that's a lot of money, right? Because I do know my first contract was $1000 it was either $1500 or $2500. It was a one time fee. I was getting paid hourly. It equated to one of those two numbers. It was somewhere in that range. And I was teaching them how to get rankings on Google and they was like, can you just do it for us? And they're like, we'll pay you $500 a month. I was like, OK, $500 a month for 16 is a lot of money, pure profit, just my time.
[13:06] Neil Patel: I was able to scale that their marketing to generate an extra $25 million worth of leads from the internet. Now, I didn't close up $25 million worth of sales. I brought them the leads. Their sales team closed them and it created $25 million worth of revenue for the business. But it was a team effort. If I drove the traffic and no one could close it, it doesn't matter. It was worth $0 but they had a good sales operation. And what ended up happening was the owner of that company.
[13:36] Neil Patel: He had a son and his son owned an ad agency called Tonic LA. He introduced me to Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the largest health insurance companies in the US. He introduced me to ING Direct, I think it's a German bank, right? It was one of the first online banks back then that was actually a novel concept.
[13:53] Neil Patel: And then he introduced me to Countrywide, which is now um Bank of America, I think they called him up in the 2008 recession, right? And that's how I got my start and he was giving me $5000 a pop per client. You have to do the math, that's $200 a month, 16 years old, that's a lot of money.
[14:12] Dave Charest: Amazing.
[14:13] Neil Patel: Even in today's world, $200 a month is sure,
[14:15] Dave Charest: yeah, I'm like, OK, sounds good. Yeah.
[14:19] Dave Charest: When you think about knowing what you know now, and if you go back to like, let's just say the job board that you created, right, like,
[14:26] Dave Charest: If you were starting that business today, what would you have done differently knowing what you know now?
[14:30] Neil Patel: Never started it. And the reason being is marketplaces are hard businesses because the chicken or the egg. You need the people interested in jobs, you need people who are listing jobs, you have to solve two problems at the same time. Marketplaces are really tough businesses. Very
[14:45] Dave Charest: interesting. I mean, there's a big lesson in there, right, when you start thinking about just you sometimes as a business owner, particularly a small business owner, right, you get excited about your idea.
[14:54] Dave Charest: But you don't really, uh, I guess this shows like, what are the things, the steps that you need to take to actually validate the idea before kind of going all in with it, right?
[15:03] Neil Patel: Yeah, but over the years I've been doing this long enough, where one of the big mistakes I made was, you got to pick a big town. A job board is a big town, but most of the businesses I created were small towns. The smaller the town, right, TAM stands for total addressable market, the harder it is to grow. For example,
[15:22] Neil Patel: People spend a lot of money on email, you agree with this statement. So there's money to be made there. You can have the best product, but if people only spend combined globally, $100,000 a year on email, how much money is there really to be made? Not much. So you need to pick big markets.
[15:40] Neil Patel: And big markets doesn't mean a lot of users. Big markets mean a lot of revenue. Salesforce doesn't have as many users as Canva. All right? Canada is more applicable to a lot more people than a Salesforce CRM. Yet, Salesforce is worth a lot of money. Why? It's because the people who spend money on the CRM are willing to spend a lot more. The person who's willing to spend on photo editing for their Instagram photos is not going to spend as much as a company who needs a CRM for their sales team.
[16:08] Neil Patel: So you need a big market, big market doesn't necessarily relate to headcount or population, it's more so related to revenue. The second lesson I learned is you need to focus and concentrate. I've tried too many businesses, done too many things instead of just sticking with one and trying to scale it up and
[16:24] Neil Patel: grow.
[16:25] Dave Charest: How do you start to overcome that challenge, right? Like start thinking about, OK, right, I really need to focus on something versus getting distracted.
[16:33] Neil Patel: I just learned it from experience over time, because I remember us raising $3 million for a Series A for KISS metrics back in the day. No, our seed was a million dollars, and then I think we raised $3 million or 4 more million dollars. It was, it was one, I think it was 3. But our our seed, which was in theory, the first round, was a million dollars. And it would investors always asking, how big is the analytics market and you would have to prove to them that it was a massive town.
[17:02] Neil Patel: So that's one lesson. It just took me a long time to learn but. I pitched a lot of VCs and they would all ask me, I just never clicked. The second lesson, there was a VC on my board named Phil Black from venture fund called True Venros, really cool guy. They invested in WordPress and a lot of other cool companies like Peloton, really early on. I know Peloton's has its ups and downs, but early on, you're gonna make money, and they did quite a few other amazing businesses that have sold for a lot of money or went public.
[17:31] Neil Patel: And Phil would always tell me, you know, Neil, as an entrepreneur, your job is to just go out there and find the best people to be in the business, and you gotta hire the best.
[17:43] Neil Patel: And I never understood the concept. I always thought about being an entrepreneur, you gotta be good yourself, that's more so a given though, and you need to build a team. OK. But some people on your team don't work out, some people in your team do work out. How do you minimize the risk of a team or not working out? And Phil didn't teach me this part, but he kept pushing us being like, you need to just get the right team. And what I learned over the years, and this has been really helpful at NP Digital, you go and you look.
[18:11] Neil Patel: To see all the people work for competitors, who are the ones that got promoted? Because if they got promoted multiple times, there's usually a good chance the organization found them valuable. Everyone, when you interview them always says they're amazing and they're the best, but if someone kept getting promoted, that means the company they work for found them valuable. So if someone kept getting promoted, there's a good chance they're good at what they do. Now, if that person worked for 2 of your competitors, and both of the competitors promoted that individual 3 times,
[18:40] Neil Patel: There's a really good chance that this person's really good, and those are the people that we went after to recruit, and that's what caused faster growth.
[18:50] Dave Charest: Love that. When you think about where you are now, just in terms of just your business, what do you love most about it at this particular moment?
[18:59] Neil Patel: I love the challenge of the business and helping companies grow. I love the challenge of making ourselves grow, and what I hate is also what I love.
[19:10] Neil Patel: The challenge of trying to make a business grow in this environment is really tough. That drives me, but at the same time I hate how the economy is bad. I was looking at a report the other day, and I don't know how accurate it is, the private sector in the United States has had no growth in 3 years.
[19:29] Neil Patel: 3 years. I know some companies have, but some companies have, and when you average it out, they're saying 3 years, there's been no growth. They're saying the growth's been in the public sector, the government, right? And the administration is currently trying to switch it or provide growth in the private sector, taper down spending on the public sector and reduce how many people work there.
[19:47] Neil Patel: I'm not trying to get political and saying what's right or wrong or anything. I'm just telling you that's what the stats that I read. And again, how accurate they are, I don't know. It's just the stats that I read on some news sites. And when you look at it from that perspective, we're still growing in this crap environment and the environments.
[20:03] Neil Patel: Not getting any better. In February, they say it was the first time that the private sector started showing signs of growth. There's an index and the month was over 50 for the first time in 3 years, meaning there's growth below 50%, at least what I read, maybe I'm misinterpreting the data. Below 50% is no growth. And so pretty much the last 3 years have been flat, and then we started seeing growth. But now with tariffs and everything that's going on and inflation is still not at 2%.
[20:28] Neil Patel: I don't see the economy just miraculously recovering in the next 34 months, which is making it challenging. Imagine doing marketing for a car company. We have quite a few car companies that are like, crap, we're gonna be charged all these taxes on our cars. We gotta cut marketing. No, I'm not saying what the politicians are doing are right or wrong. I'm just telling you this is the reality.
[20:50] Dave Charest: Sure, yeah, the reality of the situation,
[20:51] Neil Patel: yeah. It affects businesses like mine.
[20:54] Neil Patel: As much as I hate it, right? I'm not talking about the political side. I hate people cutting budgets. I also thrive in an environment when things are challenging.
[21:04] Neil Patel: When things are really good, yeah, I'm happy, but I get complacent and bored, and I work harder when things are bad, and I get more enjoyment when things are bad, as crazy as that sounds.
[21:15] Dave Charest: No, that makes a lot of sense actually. I mean, there's something to, it activates you in a way, right? That is different to your point where you're just complacent. Well, let's talk about this then. I want, let's shift to marketing a bit here and just when you think about your own business or the businesses that you're working with, and of course this is going to vary by industry and all of that, but
[21:32] Dave Charest: You've been doing this for a while and in good times and bad times and uncertain times as we're in now. What's something from a marketing perspective that from your point of view hasn't changed at all?
[21:44] Neil Patel: A lot of the fundamentals have not changed. I'll give you an example of this. If you look at most businesses that are large, when I'm saying large, I'm talking about a billion plus in revenue.
[21:55] Neil Patel: They make the majority of their money from their brand, their brand being out there long enough, people being familiar with the, the word of mouth spreads, it's done wonders for them. When your business is 23 years old, your brand is really tiny, 10 years old plus, what you'll find is you'll have, you'll be known within your industry. Everyone around the world won't may know you, but people within your industry typically know your brand after the 10 year point, assuming that you're doing marketing consistently for 10 years.
[22:23] Neil Patel: That's been fundamentally true for a long time. Brands are extremely powerful. You want athletic shoes, you may think Nike, you want a car that's electric, you may think Tesla. You want a luxury sedan, you may think Mercedes or BMW or Audi or Porsche or whatever. You want an extremely fast sports car, you may think Lamborghini or Ferrari. These are just brands. You want a credit card, you may think American.
[22:47] Neil Patel: Visa or Mastercard. You're not necessarily Googling for these things. You may Google for the best credit card for students or small businesses, but the majority of the people just know these brands and go to them directly to sign up. That's the power of marketing. And when you look at that, it's been consistent, not this year, not the last 10 years, but pretty much since inception.
[23:11] Neil Patel: Some of the other things that I have been true about marketing is if you look at all big corporations, they take an omnichannel approach. Big corporations are very rarely ever built off of one channel. They make the majority of their revenue from a ton of channels, and they all add up. Another thing that's very true in marketing is, you know, that's been consistent for a very long time, the money is in the ugly. Look how much money people spend on conversion rate optimization, but it's one of the biggest lever points.
[23:39] Neil Patel: Look how much money or time markers talk about email, but yet it's so relevant. I've seen so many articles saying email is dead and no one uses it, yet the email market has consistently grown and the email software companies have continually gotten bigger. So uh how dead really is it, right? But a lot of this ugly stuff in marketing, and to me it's sexy, but to most people it's ugly, things like SEO, emo marketing, conversion rate, optimization, paid ads.
[24:05] Neil Patel: This stuff isn't sexy, but it converts. A lot of people want to talk about the sexy stuff, like, look at this cool video I created on TikTok. How much revenue did it drive you? OK, how many likes did it get? Oh, I got all these likes and engagement. Cool. What did that cost for your brand traffic? How many visitors they bring to your website? Uh, well,
[24:22] Neil Patel: You know, it's harder to track, not that many visitors, right? And I'm not saying you shouldn't create social content. What I'm getting at is people want to focus on the sex scene. A lot of the sexy stuff doesn't drive as much revenue.
[24:34] Dave Charest: I don't know if this is just the social thing itself, but it does something to you that makes it feel like you're doing something and gets you hooked on that, whatever that is, when to your point, is oftentimes nothing.
[24:47] Dave Charest: Although it does a good job of making you feel like you are doing something that's useful. I guess, you know, you mentioned, of course, yeah, you know, you've got to move into the things that are doing something for your business, right? Driving revenue, doing those types of things. What do you say to the people that are
[25:03] Dave Charest: They're like, oh, you know what, I'm doing social, like I, I don't need to do email, like I don't need to do these other things, like, what do you say to that?
[25:10] Neil Patel: You can do that, but go tell me one competitor of yours who's big and at scale that just only does social. And it's the same thing. I hear some people tell me like the money's in the list, you just need to collect more emails, that's where marketing's at. I agree emails are powerful, but so is social media marketing and so is the SEO and so are paid ads and so is conversion rate optimization, so is affiliate marketing.
[25:31] Neil Patel: The real reality is you need to leverage all channels that work and are profitable. That is the best strategy.
[25:37] Dave Charest: So if you take that, because I agree with you, right, if you take that and you think about a small business owner, for example, right, like I know you work with a lot of like enterprise businesses and things like that that may have more resources than maybe a small business, right, when you start to think about that. So, yeah, how do you recommend like a small business that may have just like a single location, maybe more of a brick and mortar or something like that? What is like the order of
[25:59] Dave Charest: Operations you would take them through to get to that point where they are thinking multi-channel and omnichannel, right? And, and using those things together to actually support their business. Yeah,
[26:09] Neil Patel: so we work with a lot of small businesses to give you an idea, at least 13 of our revenue comes from the
[26:14] Neil Patel: Small and medium business category around the world. When we look at small businesses, they can't leverage all channels right away because most of them have budget constraints. All right? And I say most because it really depends on what you use as the definition as a small and medium business.
[26:30] Neil Patel: In some countries, the meaning of a small and medium business is an enterprise under $100 million right? $99 million for most people is not considered a small business. But when you look at it from a small business perspective, I like looking at marketing like spaghetti. When you cook spaghetti, you put it in a pan, you're boiling it. One way that you know it's cooked is you take it, you throw it against the wall, and it sticks.
[26:56] Neil Patel: So with marketing, I would tell you as a small business to just quickly try out 5 or 6 different channels and treat it like spaghetti and throw it against the wall. You'll quickly see the marketing channels that are starting to produce an ROI, the ones that have some potential, the ones that don't have much potential, and the ones you're just miserably failing. Start going after the ones first, that are showing that they have a ROI or potential, and get them scaled up and get them going and profitable, of course.
[27:24] Neil Patel: And then add in more channels, and you can add them in slowly. But as you grow, the some of your other channels, what you'll find is it's growing your revenue, it's growing the profit, and it creates more stability within the organization. This now gives you more flexibility to focus.
[27:39] Neil Patel: On more marketing efforts to take a little bit longer to generate an ROI, but you need to do them to really scale the business.
[27:45] Dave Charest: Is there anything on the flip side, we were talking about some of these fundamentals that haven't changed at all? Is there anything that maybe you used to swear by that just doesn't work anymore now?
[27:55] Neil Patel: Yeah, I used to swear by creating really detailed thorough content that was like 5, 10,000 words. Sometimes it works, but in today's world that due to TikTokification.
[28:05] Neil Patel: People have shorter attention spans. Microsoft Canada did a study and they found that a human has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. It's kind of crazy to think about. So if your content needs to be long to help get the message across and help the user solve the problems, by all means make it 5 10,000 words or whatever it may be. But if someone's Googling how to tie a tie, I don't think they want to read 10,000 words. They just want to see an image or animated for a video that shows them how to tie a tie.
[28:32] Neil Patel: And I used to also swear by text-based content. I thought it was the best channel ever. Now I would say video is first, people still prefer content and they want to consume it, but they prefer video over text-based
[28:45] Neil Patel: content.
[28:46] Dave Charest: I think there's something to that I did to a video where you are actually, I mean, you're able to create more things from the video, right, because you've got a good source that you can then transcribe that you can create the clips, right? You've got a bigger piece of content.
[28:57] Dave Charest: It's interesting you mentioned that idea of like, you know, the 5 to 10,000 word thing, which I think coming from your background, right, that's obviously like an SEO play in many ways. Talk to me about, let's start to go there, right? Like, I guess it used to feel like SEO could be because it was not as nuanced as it is today or smart in many ways, right? But like, it used to maybe feel like a game you could hack in some ways, right? Do you think that's still true today?
[29:21] Neil Patel: I
[29:21] Neil Patel: still think it's a game. I still think you can rank really well. We see it every single day with our customers.
[29:27] Neil Patel: It's harder than it was, call it 5, 10 years ago, but it's still a very effective
[29:32] Dave Charest: channel. So what does good look like in that channel then today then versus, you know, maybe what it uses?
[29:38] Neil Patel: Similar to what it did before, you should be able to generate more traffic than you did before. Here's an interesting stat for you. Did you know in 2016, Google had roughly 8.5 billion searches a day on their platform? That's a lot of searches. Now, people complain that er clicks have gone up. They have. I'm not doubting that.
[29:55] Neil Patel: But did you know if you fast forward to today? Chat GBT recently released a number saying they get around 3000 prompts a month. So Google released their own numbers. Did you know they get over 5 trillion searches a year? Put it in context to their own number, that's well over 13 billion searches a day, per day. Think about that for a minute.
[30:17] Neil Patel: Danny Sullivan from Google, he's a search liaison, once put out a quote saying that since Google's inception, Google has continually driven more traffic to websites each and every single year, and that's true. When we look at the organic traffic, at least when we validate with our data, we're seeing sites get more traffic than they were before.
[30:36] Neil Patel: Because what's happening is as Google continues to improves the experience, people are using it more and more, they're performing more searches, which is causing
[30:43] Neil Patel: Visitors to websites and the usage of Google increasing is making up for the increase in zero clicks. Now, of course, if there weren't zero clicks, then yeah, sure, websites would really be caching it in.
[30:56] Neil Patel: But Google's focusing on what's the best user experience. Like back in the day when you and I used to search what's the weather in Boston, Massachusetts, we chose Weather.com, we click on it, we go to the website and look at the weather. Now it just tells you what the weather is. Why do we need to click on a website to find out what the weather is? That is a better experience for us. Sucks foreather.
[31:15] Neil Patel: com, but a better experience for you
[31:17] Dave Charest: and I. So as
[31:18] Dave Charest: the business then, how do you account for that, right? Like, you don't necessarily or you may not necessarily get the click.
[31:24] Neil Patel: So when you look at clicks, it's a lot of its keywords. What keywords are you trying to rank for? A lot of keywords still drive clicks. There's a lot of keywords that don't like 2 + 2 equals 4.
[31:34] Neil Patel: But there's a lot of keywords that do and you can do your keyword research and figure out the right keywords for you. On top of that, there are keywords that don't really drive clicks, but it can be brand awareness. And as I pointed out earlier, people choose brands, Nike, you know, American Express, Tesla, etc. and building a brand helps, and being there and having your link bench in there and people seeing it helps even if there's less
[31:57] Neil Patel: clicks.
[31:58] Dave Charest: Gotcha.
[31:59] Dave Charest: Is there an SEO myth that you think that people still kind of believe that you wish they wouldn't?
[32:07] Neil Patel: A lot of people believe it's one and done. The other day, it was actually maybe around a year ago, I ranked a company for used Rolexes above Rolex, which is really tough to do. So they're the number one spot. And in 4 months of starting the contract, I got them there and like cool, don't need you guys anymore.
[32:27] Neil Patel: And then they're like, unless you're willing to do it for X amount of dollars, I'm not gonna keep paying you anymore, but at that point we knew we would lose money taking the services at that cost, and then guess what happened months later? The rankings started to just slip and it went down and down. They're still doing fine, but nowhere near as what they used to.
[32:45] Neil Patel: And it's not one and done. I wish it was and make my life easier.
[32:51] Dave Charest: I think a lot of people think a lot of things are one and done, right? And they wish it would be, but not the reality of that situation at all. When you start to think about small businesses, and I mean, is it still realistic to think that a small business, and again, I'm talking about, you know, maybe a small local business, right, to compete in search results if they don't have like a big budget?
[33:13] Dave Charest: Like, how does that all come
[33:14] Dave Charest: together?
[33:15] Neil Patel: So you're saying if you're a small business, should you even compete a search? Yeah,
[33:18] Dave Charest: like what does that look like for you? And if you don't have a big budget, where are the opportunities for a smaller business that might be local,
[33:24] Neil Patel: right? Well, let's go back a little bit. Most people believe that it's too hard to beat companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. Why is it that Google buys companies like Wiiz for 32 billion, I believe it was?
[33:40] Neil Patel: Because they weren't able to create it on their own. And it's not that they can't create it, they just move slow. So the big corporations, even though they have tons of cash, move extremely slow compared to the startups. So you have speed as your advantage. You don't need to spend as much money as the big companies because you have speed as your advantage. 2, it's very hard to ring for terms like credit cards or auto insurance, but there's a lot of long tail terms.
[34:04] Neil Patel: Like car insurance for new drivers, car insurance for someone with a DUI. Hopefully no one has a DUI, but if they do, car insurance for someone with a DUI. These are long tail terms that are easier to arrange for that a startup can, and they won't provide as much revenue as the term car insurance, but it's a good
[34:22] Dave Charest: start. So small business again, how should they start thinking about it to how they get started? Like what, what are the first things they should be doing when it comes to SEO?
[34:29] Neil Patel: Yeah, so what we like doing is we like doing keyboard research.
[34:33] Neil Patel: So we have an SEO tool called Uber that people can use for free. You put in your URL. What was the name of that? Uber Suggests. Got it. OK, you can put in your URL. It'll tell you your domain authority, so like your overall authority, your backling count, how many people linking to you, and it'll show you all the keywords that your competitors rank for and even give you keyword ideas for you to rank for.
[34:56] Neil Patel: And then it'll tell you based on where your site is at and how new it is, which ones are easier for you to rank for and are low hanging fruit versus which ones are going to take a long time. So you go to the low hanging fruit. Within Ubers, it also offers a site audit report. This tells you all the technical errors on your page, which ones to fix in priority based on what will have the biggest impact for your rankings, and it even tells you how to fix it step by step.
[35:21] Dave Charest: There you go. Uber suggests, let's check that out.
[35:24] Dave Charest: So you mentioned something earlier about just that idea of traffic, like if nobody's converting or even when we're talking about social right where, if that doesn't have any actual business benefit. So, when we start thinking about, I think it's easy again to get seduced by the traffic alone because like obviously that's a portion of what it is that you're trying to do with SEO.
[35:44] Dave Charest: But how should business owners really be thinking about measuring the success of what they're doing in the SEO
[35:50] Dave Charest: world?
[35:51] Neil Patel: Yeah, the way business owners should think about success in the SEO world is you first look at impressions, so how many impressions are you getting on a monthly basis? And the impression count should be going up. You can see that in Ubers or Google search console, and that means that your site's starting to rank. You may not be clicking on it, but they're starting to see it. Then over time you need to make sure your clicks are going up.
[36:14] Neil Patel: And then you need to make sure that those clicks are converting into revenue.
[36:18] Dave Charest: So let's say you're seeing impressions, you're seeing clicks, but you aren't seeing conversions, like, I guess walk me through how you start to troubleshoot each of these stages, right? Yeah, so
[36:27] Neil Patel: if you're seeing impressions, that means you're doing SEO somewhat correctly and you're getting traffic. When you start getting clicks to your website, that means you're doing SEO correctly and the rankings keep climbing.
[36:38] Neil Patel: Sometimes you need to optimize title tags and meta descriptions to make the copy more appealing so you can get more clicks, but typically if your click rate's terrible, you're not gonna get the clicks in the first place, you'll just get impressions and your impression will start going backwards.
[36:50] Neil Patel: And once you get the clicks over to your website, you need to make sure, are you targeting keywords that my ideal customer will be searching for? If so, you should be generating revenue. If not, you need to do keyword research through tools like Ubers or Answer the public, type in a keyword related share space, and I'll show you all the keywords that are popular, low competition, and have a high cost per click. High cost per click means that you would spend a lot of money for advertising on that keyword.
[37:15] Neil Patel: That's good because if it has a high cost per click, it usually means that keyword drives revenue and converts for someone or else people wouldn't be willing to spend a lot of money. Those are the terms and keywords you need to go after. You want to try to avoid more of the ones that have a low cost per click because they usually don't convert as well. So a great example of this is I used to rank really well on Google for how to get Instagram followers.
[37:36] Neil Patel: Stopped optimizing that page for that keyword, even though it drove hundreds and thousands of visitors a month, because no one's going to sign a contract for marketing based on how to get more Instagram followers, and the people who do, they're not going to last long, they're going to turn and they're just gonna want me to help them get more Instagram followers.
[37:51] Dave Charest: Yeah.
[37:52] Dave Charest: That's such an important point, a similar, I, I used to have like a, a Twitter post or something like that on my site that ranked really well for, for things that it was just, but it was like no use to me. It was just getting like traffic that would come and figure out the thing, but it wasn't any converting traffic, right? So I think it's really important to think through that. What is the end goal, right? What is the thing that you're trying to move and then see how it's operating on that, right? Not just the the metric beforehand.
[38:15] Dave Charest: How do you see AI impacting SEO starting now, I suppose, right, as this this is really taken up, but even as we start to move in the next couple of years.
[38:23] Neil Patel: So AI has already impacted SCO. There's AI over using Google. There's many platforms. If you look at platforms like Chad GBT.
[38:31] Neil Patel: People will try to optimize and get their business included and there's a direct correlation from ranking on Google to being included in search GPT or getting recommended. And there's also AI integrated with an Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and their search is much more sophisticated than it used to be. If according to Google VP younger people, if they're looking for, let's say a place to eat.
[38:52] Neil Patel: Or something to do in many cases, they turn to Instagram and TikTok to do a search before they turn to Google. So because AI has made search better on a lot of platforms, you now cannot just optimize for Google, you got to optimize for all the platforms. So my ad agency NP Digital, we think SEO is no longer search engine optimization, we think it's search everywhere optimization, we optimize for all platforms.
[39:16] Neil Patel: Now, this state is a little bit old, when I say a little bit old, a few months old, cause I didn't have the 13+ billion searches from Google each and every single day, but the previous numbers I had were, there were around 46.1 billion searches a day on the internet. Google accounted for 8.5 billion, roughly 18.
[39:34] Neil Patel: That just means the majority of the searches on other platforms. Now, in today's world, Google's at 13 billion, but so they're in the 20th percentile, but that still means the majority of searches on other platforms. For example, did you know there's over 6 billion searches a day on Instagram? Mainly probably for people looking for friends or some content.
[39:53] Neil Patel: There's over 3 billion searches a day on Amazon, right? There's a lot of platforms you can optimize for to make revenue. There's over 3 billion searches a month or prompts a month on chat GPT. There's over 500 million searches a day on the Apple App Store. That's a lot.
[40:12] Dave Charest: What's
[40:12] Dave Charest: your point of view on when you start thinking about just, obviously AI comes in to help save time, it can create generate content.
[40:20] Dave Charest: What's your point of view on how, I guess using AI to generate the content that is in these things? What's the best way to actually take advantage of that?
[40:28] Neil Patel: It can help you with ideation, it can help you with cure research like an Uber, we have an AI writer, but I'll tell you this, no matter whose AI writer you use, don't let the AI writer write.
[40:36] Neil Patel: 100% of your content. You need a human involved. The quality just sucks if you have AI writing your content fully. Here's why AI scrapes the web, takes everything that it's learned and helps create an output. People want to read new stuff that hasn't been talked about before. They don't want to read the same stuff that's been regurgitated for the last 10 years.
[40:54] Dave Charest: So a bad strategy would be, yeah, AI create this thing for me and then post it on your website.
[40:59] Dave Charest: A good one would be, help me with this stuff, but then actually make sure that you're involved in adding your own expertise in that and you know, whatever that may be in a particular situation, right?
[41:09] Neil Patel: We did an experiment with 744 articles, 68 websites, half the articles posted on the websites for human ran, the other half were AI written with human modification.
[41:19] Neil Patel: After, I think it was 5 months or 6 months, the human written content was averaging just from Google search for organic traffic. I believe there was 5.44 times more traffic on a monthly basis. Interesting. And then I computed, how much time did
[41:35] Neil Patel: AI spent to create the content versus human because when you have AI create content, you start to put in prompts, you have to upload it, you have to still do some work, you can use agents to help speed up the process. I look at how much visitors were generated per minute spent for humans versus AI and the human stuff still beat the AI stuff on a per minute spent basis.
[41:55] Dave Charest: If you think of a small business, maybe, you know, again, time starved, right, looking for, all right, if I've got some
[42:00] Dave Charest: Energy to spend on digital marketing and thinking about what are the things that I should do? What's one small shift or like what's one area where you think that they should focus to set themselves up for success in the long
[42:12] Dave Charest: run?
[42:13] Neil Patel: In general, or AI or just in general,
[42:15] Dave Charest: if we're just looking at digital marketing, I mean, I think I almost feel like AI is included in all of this in many ways, right?
[42:21] Neil Patel: Yeah, I would say if you're trying to set yourself up for success in the long run, the first thing I'll tell you is, what can you push out there that's unique that other people are not talking about?
[42:30] Neil Patel: The second thing I'll tell you is you got to leverage all platforms and take an omnichannel approach. The third thing I'll tell you is a lot of platforms penalizing you for putting out crap content. So make sure you put out good content that's easier said than done, but test your content on X first cause they don't care if it's crap or good, it doesn't penalize your future reach if you posted crap content in the past. So focus on X as a platform, test a lot on it, and then post your winners on all the other platforms, so you're not posting junk all over the web. And
[43:00] Neil Patel: Then once you start getting some of that stuff going and in traffic, really push hard on retention and conversion optimization.
[43:08] Neil Patel: There's an interesting saying, I don't have the stats for it, but most people don't know this in marketing it's actually easier to make more money off an existing customer than a new customer. Yet everyone focuses on getting new customers instead of delighting their existing ones. Give it time and be patient. Don't expect wonderful results within a few months or a year. You should see better results over time, including 6 months or a year, whatever the time frame may be.
[43:31] Neil Patel: But it really takes 3 years for things to kick in, 10 years to really build an amazing brand. Not willing to spend a lot of time, your small business is not gonna do as well as you want. Sad, but it's true.
[43:42] Dave Charest: Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, start with a test and focus approach. Neil's spaghetti analogy reminds us to quickly try a handful of marketing channels, see what sticks, and double down on the ones delivering a return on investment.
[43:58] Dave Charest: For a small business, this could mean testing email, local SEO, and one social platform to find the most effective mix. Adopt a learning mentality so you can move fast and learn where to focus. Number 2, invest in the fundamentals. Using multiple marketing channels, brand building, and proven tactics like email, SEO, or search engine optimization and conversion optimization.
[44:24] Dave Charest: May not be trendy, but they consistently drive results. Neal stressed that all big companies rely on a mix of channels to grow. You should use multiple channels to grow your business as well. Number 3, play the long game. Real brand power takes time, often 10 years or more.
[44:44] Dave Charest: Neil advises patience and consistent execution, noting that small wins now compound into sustainable growth later. So celebrate those small wins and keep your eye on the future. Here's your action item for today. Pick one marketing channel that you're already using and optimize it this week for measurable improvement.
[45:08] Dave Charest: If it's email, try constant context AB subject line testing to see which gets the highest open rate, then build on the winner.
[45:18] Dave Charest: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/BAM. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/BAM. Well friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.