10 Marketing Hacks To Get More Traffic and Build Your Personal Brand

(light music)
- It's free.
If your competition charges someone $99 and you're zero,
even if you're not as good,
we're people going to gravitate towards? The zero.
Who doesn't love free?
Maybe it's 'because I'm Indian that I love free stuff.
- [Audience Member] Whoo hoo.
- But free's legit.
(light music)
- Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Neil Patel.
(screen chiming)
(soft music)
♪ Let's go baby. ♪
- Let's do it.
How are you guys all doing today?
(audience cheering)
Awesome. Well, today I'm going to be talking,
I already forgot the title of my presentation.
I'm waiting for them to pull it up.
(audience laughing)
I talk so often.
I just got back from Rio and now here.
(audience cheering)
I get a break for a week
and then I think I'm on the road again for two months.
All right, so today I'm talking about 10 marketing hacks
that'll help you get more traffic
and build a personal brand.
You guys ready for this?
(audience cheering)
So I assume because of the name of the event,
everyone's here is looking to build wealth, right?
- [Audience Member] Yes.
- Don't go buy a fancy car.
That's tip number one. I'm kidding.
So my name's Neil Patel.
I'm a co-founder of a ad agency called NP Digital,
created a few other software companies,
have a ton of awards.
They don't really mean much other than the tactics,
the strategies really work.
I wouldn't have these awards if they didn't work.
You get what I mean, right?
So when I break down some of the hacks for you guys today,
just keep in mind they're tested and they work.
So we have roughly 750 employees,
60 plus clients around the world.
We're in a lot of different countries.
We have a lot of awards.
We created a company, this is my latest startup.
We went from zero to over a hundred million dollars
in less than five years.
We didn't put much capital into it.
I think I spent around maybe $5 million
of my own money into the business.
We went on the Inc. 500 list on our first year
as number 21 out of 5,000.
My team was really excited.
I told them 20 one's a useless number
unless you're playing blackjack.
21 isn't number one. I'm super competitive, but it works.
And I did a lot of this through personal branding.
And I believe that is the new way to really build a business
in which getting traffic to your website is fine.
But if you really build a personal brand,
you can build amazing business. Look at Ryan.
Everyone knows who Ryan is, right?
This is his event. Raise your hand if you know who Ryan is.
I'm assuming that's a yes. That's everyone. All right.
So a lot of his business came also from his personal brand.
I think of it as a new way to do marketing.
Mint, got just acquired by T-Mobile for $1.3 billion.
I think that's including earnout.
That's a shitload of money.
You think Ryan Reynolds is making 1.3 billion a year acting?
No, but Mint sold mainly because of Ryan's brand.
Before, Ryan wasn't the founder of Mint.
There was Mint Mobile,
they did a deal with Ryan Reynolds and got a cut
of the company and then it exploded.
And he's not the only one.
You guys familiar with this person here?
Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics.
Never tried one of her products, never bought it,
but she's made a lot of money.
And then there was articles that said, "Oh,
Kylie's not really a billionaire." Who gives a crap?
She made a shitload of money either way.
Stop trying to knock her.
What other 20 something year old made all that money?
Did they? No.
Like I don't understand why people hate over silly things.
Whether she made a billion or a half a billion good for her.
People should be happy for her success
instead of hating on it.
You know, I'm a little bit of the opposite.
When I was a little kid and I was watching American Idol
and I would laugh at someone singing, my mom would scold me.
Never make fun of people. Never be cruel.
Respect them for trying.
So never hate when other people are succeeding.
One of the best lessons my mom taught me.
Now when you look at Mint and you look at Kylie Jenner,
they're both in the consumer space.
Are you guys all there in consumers
or some of you guys B2B?
How many here B2B? Raise your hand.
All right. Not that many of you.
The stuff I'm giving today works for B2C and B2B.
My business, my latest one at least, is a ad agency.
That's B2B. You agree with me, right?
I'm selling to other companies.
And this is one of our later offers during this bad economy,
the offers were better during a good economy,
but 515 million for the company
that's less than five years old in a bad economy,
not that bad, right?
It just shows personal branding works.
And I'm not that popular.
I only have 408,000 followers on Instagram.
I'm looking at these numbers right now
because I don't even log into my Instagram.
I'm just being super honest.
495 on LinkedIn, a million on Facebook.
But I bet you there's no engagement on Facebook.
So the million probably doesn't mean much.
(screen chiming)
445,000 on Twitter, I don't even know my Twitter password.
1.15 on YouTube.
And I didn't know I had a TikTok account,
but I got 85,000 on TikTok.
(audience laughing)
All right? Technically,
I really did know I had a TikTok account.
My team told me like three, four months ago.
It was like, yeah, you've been doing this on TikTok.
And I'm like, I got a TikTok.
I don't even have the app on my phone.
I really don't even know what my login is
or even my TikTok email address.
Don't try to hack into my TikTok though.
I still want it.
(audience laughing)
But that just shows,
if I was able to build up a $515 million company
in a bad economy, right?
Go back to the offer 515,
and we've had a lot of offers and some much better than this
during the good economy,
but we're not really in a good economy anymore.
And I'm in B2B and Kylie Jenner and Ryan Reynolds did it
in B2C, it works for pretty much any industry.
You guys agree with this?
- [Audience Member] Yeah.
- All right, so let's go over how you can build a following
and get more traffic to your site.
And I'm going to give you 10 hacks to do so.
So we're going to go through this rapid fire.
Number one, ranking at the top of YouTube.
YouTube is great.
It's the second most popular search engine.
You know what the first most popular search engine is?
You also know who owns YouTube.
- [Audience] Google.
- That's right. So they're number one
and number two most popular search engine in the world.
So how do you rank on the top of YouTube
so everyone can see you, hear about your business
and buy your products and services?
Drives a lot of traffic too.
This is the traffic to our site that we get from YouTube.
We don't really do ads.
This is just people coming to our site from YouTube
and we follow this simple strategy.
So right when we post a video on YouTube,
in the first 24 hours, we push the video really hard.
We send out an email blast, text our friends,
tell them to leave a comment, you know, all that good stuff.
And what we find is YouTube's algorithm is the opposite
of Google.
When someone releases a video
and does super well in the first 24 hours,
it starts ranking at the top right away.
Google's algorithm, it can take a year, two years,
a long time to get your rankings.
YouTube, you can get your rankings in 24 or 48 hours,
one week for super competitive terms.
So that's all you have to do on YouTube.
Of course you need to create good content, but seriously,
if you create good content and you don't push hard
in the first 24 hours, you won't do as well.
Hack number two, give away free tools.
You can be in the mortgage industry,
you can give away a mortgage calculator.
That's the example of a free tool, right?
There's tools for every industry.
Real estate, tons of tools.
Car, tons of tools.
Clothing, tons of tools.
But the clothing,
people want to create those 360 degree views.
Oh look at this sweater, here's how you look,
turn around and put in your face.
So we give away a free marketing tool called Ubersuggest.
It teaches you how to get more traffic,
whether you want traffic to your website
or more keywords to figure out for social media.
We just keep giving away more and more and you guys can
check it out for free and just use the crap out of it.
Sure, there's some paid plans,
but 90 plus percent of the tool is free.
It's super effective.
We've had 36 million users over five years.
That's 7.2 million users per year.
Anyone want to guess how much we spend on advertising?
- [Audience Member] Zero.
- Zero.
Why does it work so well? It's fee.
If your competition charges someone $99 and you're zero,
even if you're not as good,
where people are going to gravitate towards?
The zero. Who doesn't love free.
Maybe it's because I'm Indian that I love free stuff.
(audience cheering)
But freeze legit.
(audience laughing)
So we repeated the formula,
there was this other tool called Answer The Public.
It was for sale.
We bought it last February for 8.6 million bucks.
People thought we overpaid for it. It was a free tool.
Technically they had a $99 plan.
We made it more free, gave away more stuff.
And we really exploded the growth in the tool,
as you can see in the traffic
because of more free we made it,
the more popular it became.
And it's from all over the world,
even places like Brazil.
I don't know how to speak Portuguese,
I barely can speak English, but it's done really well.
18.8 million users over five years,
3.7 million users per year,
and it's been growing since we bought it.
Secret, give away what people are paying for. That's it.
It's that simple.
Go find what they're paying for,
that there is no free option
or the free options sucks and make yours better.
For example, if you want to go do that,
most people believe that you need to end up building it
and spending a lot of money.
What we do is we go and we find
either A, someone who has a tool that already charges for
and they barely make any money
because there's a lot of those on the internet.
And we go and we buy them.
You don't have to spend 8.6 million like us.
That was stupid.
You can literally buy some of these things for five grand,
one grand, 500 bucks.
Or you can go to site site codecanyon.net
and you can buy these tools for 10, 15, 20, 50 bucks
and you can put your own logo on them
and put them on your own website.
Again, it's codecanyon.net.
And I don't know who owns that site,
but they have tools in every sector
for less than a hundred bucks.
Now it's not as good as you building your own tool
or finding something else that people are paying for,
making for free, but it's better than nothing.
So you guys good on hack number two?
All right.
And you can also see tools like HubSpot,
they gave away free CRM to go after Salesforce.
The last time I checked their stock prices.
I think it's roughly a 20 billion company.
Not bad, right? Free tools.
And everyone knows Canva, free tools.
Canva is free for so long.
Heck, Canva has paid plans
and I don't even know when they ask you to pay.
That's how free it is.
Hack number three,
going viral on LinkedIn and TikTok.
TikTok's amazing. Trust me.
I don't know my username and password,
but I know it's amazing because it's so popular.
So here's a quick way to go popular
on either LinkedIn or TikTok. And it's a simple strategy.
See with LinkedIn, there's this company that did a study,
it's called Omnicore Agency.
Less than 1% of LinkedIn users create and share content.
But here's the key on LinkedIn,
just because you create content
doesn't mean you're going to go viral.
On the flip side,
if your content has a ton of comments
in the first four hours, specifically four hours,
your content on LinkedIn will go super viral.
And it has to be engaging content.
It can't be like, cool tip.
Well no one cares that you left a comment that says,
"Cool tip."
But check this out.
I can't see too far back in the room
because there's just so many lights,
but there must be hundreds of you,
maybe a thousand of you. Let's go with 500.
Turn to your left, turn to your right
and turn to the people behind you,
get their LinkedIn user info and tell them,
"Hey, when I post something cool on LinkedIn,
if you like it, comment on it. I'll text you.
If you don't like it, you know, you don't have to comment."
(audience laughing)
But then tell them, "If you post, don't worry,
I'll comment for you no matter what."
Then you know, you know you're guilt tripping them.
(audience laughing)
They're they're going to pose a comment either way.
I wish I could do that with my children.
Does not work with children.
But in the first four hours, if they leave detailed,
good comments, such as like, "Oh yeah,
that is a good way to get a mortgage,
but if you also try this mortgage tip, it's like, oh yeah,
that one's amazing."
And then other people leave their mortgage tips
or their real estate tips
and that's what makes the content explode
because those comments are engaging.
They're not just like, nice posts.
Nice post comments are useless,
they don't do anything for you.
TikTok, same thing, but it doesn't have to be done
in the first four hours.
I created a video or more so, I spoke at an event.
And when I was speaking at the event,
I talked to them about, hey,
podcasting isn't as competitive as blogging.
There's over a billion blogs, you know,
around the web and there's less than 10 million podcasts.
And someone left a comment saying, "Neil, you're an idiot.
You're totally wrong.
Podcasting is more competitive than blogging.
There's more podcasts than blogs."
It was something like that.
And I didn't argue with them and I didn't leave a comment
because one, at that time I didn't know I had a TikTok
and two, I didn't have my login information, I still don't.
So there's no way I can log in
and argue with them in the first place.
But other people kept arguing with them
and it started blowing up.
And then I realized, huh, comments are the key to TikTok.
I had my team do way more tests with this
and we started getting way more engagement on TikTok
and a lot of our clients did as well.
So get people to leave engaging comments.
It doesn't even have to be in the first four hours,
but the sooner they leave those comments,
when the videos publish the better off, you're going to be.
And again, try within the first four hours,
but it doesn't have to be that way.
You guys good on that hack?
All right, hack number four, ranking higher on Google.
Who here wants more Google traffic?
All right, everyone,
even though everyone didn't raise their hand.
So I ranked for a lot of stuff on Google.
I don't know why my team screenshotted Google Secrets.
I ranked for things like online marketing
and digital marketing,
a lot of these terms on page one of Google,
some of them really high up at the top.
And there's a strategy that works super,
super well on Google.
So the secret to Google is brands rank higher.
Like if you look at Nike and the shoe industry,
more people are Googling Nike than shoes.
That's kind of crazy to think about. This is worldwide.
I understand shoes has different meanings
in different languages.
Like zapatos for Spanish, I grew up in SoCal,
I know my Spanish.
(audience member shouting)
There you go.
(audience laughing)
No, my parents would be like,
now say that in your own language. And I'm like, no,
I can't do that.
(audience laughing)
But as you can see, shoes is really popular and so is Nike.
More than 6 million people
in just the United States type in Nike.
I remember my niece or my nephew more so,
when he was growing up, for Christmas,
he told his mom he needed Nike shoes.
His mom asked why.
You want to take a guess
on why he said he needed Nike shoes?
Because it'll make him run faster.
No joke, that's the power of branding.
My wife tried to explain to him how that was not true.
I was like, that's good branding there.
And then when his mom started rebutting him
on why, you know, he doesn't need Nike shoes,
he went to his mom and he's like, "Mom, just do it."
(audience laughing)
I was like, "Damn straight, just do it."
And I was there and she's like,
"You're not helping with this."
At the time I didn't have kids. She's like, "Trust me,
you don't want to interfere.
You don't want me to interfere when you have kids."
And I still interfered. And now she interferes with my kids.
I learned that lesson the hard way. All right,
so the point of the story is brands rank higher.
The reason brands rank higher on places like Google is
because they know they're less likely to create fake news.
Other than CNN, they said I was running for senator
because most of the images
when you Google Neil Patel are my images.
And there was a senator named Neil Patel
that was running for,
or there was a guy named Neil Patel somewhere
in the United States running for Senate or something.
And I got a call from my mom and dad saying,
"Neil, you're running for senator?"
I'm like, "No."
They're like, "I see your image on CNN right now."
And I'm like, "Well, that's not me."
And they're like, "No, it's you.
I see you on CNN. Don't lie to your mom and dad."
And I'm like, "No, I'm not lying.
I'm not running for senator."
But typically brands are less likely to create fake news
other than that CNN incident.
So if you just take your personal brand or corporate brand,
you're everywhere, from social media,
to having your team talk about you on LinkedIn,
to talking about the corporate name,
just being on social media all the time,
24/7 and posting daily.
And you can post the same content
on all the channels or most of the content
on all the channels,
it'll help really grow your brand.
Good on that hack?
All right, hack number five,
how to generate 81.39% more Facebook engagement.
Trust me, we all need this
because their algorithm sucks
compared to what it used to be.
And we do a lot of tests and analysis.
We found that video content
over five minutes performs better.
Even though everyone's about these short form videos,
we found that the longer form videos are performing better
on corporate fan pages.
So what we ended up doing is we analyzed 939 company pages
and we found the same thing, 81.39% better engagement.
We didn't look at mine because one profile isn't enough.
But with 939 profiles, we found enough data.
So create longer content. Easy hack, right?
All right. Hack number six,
a simple way to get more Instagram followers.
Everyone wants to be more popular on Instagram?
Yeah, why not?
So according to Earth Web,
Instagram has seen a 17.6% decrease
in users creating live content.
That means less people are going live.
And 80% of users prefer live content over,
let's say reading a blog post.
According to Growthoid,
live video is expected to grow 15 times
from what it was last year.
(screen chiming)
So if live video is expected to grow,
live video is like a better version
of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians."
Maybe not a better version, but it's a similar version.
So if it's expected to grow five or 15x
and Instagram is seeing a decrease in live video,
what do you think you need to do?
That's right. Create a live video.
Now if you do it twice a week,
what you'll find is you'll get more followers
and you'll get more engagement.
So then when you post your normal content on Instagram,
it'll perform better.
But here's a trick, make sure when you go live,
it's good quality content. That's the first.
If it's not good quality content,
just going live for the sake of it, doesn't work.
The second thing that you need to do is go live
with other members,
so your followers see them and their followers see you.
So for example, before WealthCon,
Ryan's like, his team reached out to me saying, "Hey,
can we go live?" I said, "Sure."
And I texted Ryan and Ryan's like, "All right,
we're going to go live this time." We did it.
So when we're going live,
my followers are seeing Ryan and his followers are seeing me
and that's causing both our profiles to also grow.
So again, turn to your left, turn to your right,
go live with your new buddies.
And if you don't like them,
turn to the behind and find someone else in the room.
because there's a lot of you guys.
Seriously do this twice a week with random people.
There's enough of you guys in here,
you'll start doing better.
Good on that one? Yes.
Hack number seven,
how to collect 200,000 emails a month without ads.
Remember we talked about those tools, right?
Like giving away free tools.
What we started testing is
if you want to keep using our tools,
like exporting your images of the tools or getting more
or using it like three times, we make you register.
So if someone, it's actually not even three times.
if someone uses our tool more than like two times in a day,
we make them register to keep using it for free,
to use it more for free.
And it's worked out really well.
We even make the login, sign in with Google
or continue with Google,
which makes it super efficient
because they just click a button
and then boom, you got more email addresses.
And it's worked.
Check out this graph.
Before we integrated our tools and after.
That's kind of crazy, right?
Roughly 10,000 subscribers a day versus 2000,
weekends are always lower.
See I'm in B2B. I always tell my wife, she always asked,
"What do you want for Christmas?"
Or she'll ask, "What do you want for your birthday?
Make a wish." And I always tell her,
I wish there was no weekends or Fridays
because my graphs go down on Fridays and weekends.
(audience laughing)
Hack number eight. So you guys good with that?
With your free tools,
make them register if they keep using it for free.
Hack number eight, easiest way to rank on Google.
All right, so it's competitive to rank on Google.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
But here's an interesting stat,
did you know that 15% of the searches
on Google are new searches for new keywords
have never been searched before?
Like just think about that.
There's billions and billions
of searches happening on Google,
but every day 15% of them are brand new
and never been searched before.
And in other words,
they weren't searched last year or even 10 years ago
or 20 years, they're brand new searches
that no one has ever searched before
and it's the first time Google has having someone
type in those keywords. See?
And what people do is they focus on these orange dots.
They go after the same competitive keywords
that everyone else is already targeting
instead of going after the blue ones
that aren't competitive.
So what's the easiest way to get traffic?
You go after the blue ones and new searches, right?
But there's a problem.
If no one's searching them,
how do you figure out these blue searches, right?
Because no one searched these keywords.
You got to figure out which blue ones to go after
and you don't want to go after the blue one
that's only been searched once
and is never going to get searched again
because then you ain't going to get any traffic.
So there's this tool that I bought last February
called Answer The Public.
Free tool, by the way, you don't need to pay.
And if it has a paywall in there,
you can still do a lot for free.
So again, you don't need a pay.
It tells you what search terms are brand new
that people are just starting to type in
that are becoming popular
and those are the ones you want to go after.
You can type in anything, real estate,
Los Angeles real estate, mortgages, whatever.
It'll tell you everything that is new and hot right now
within that country or language.
That's how you got through those terms.
And you can rank really high by just creating content
around those terms, like blog posts.
And if you don't want to write them,
there's this thing that everyone's talking about.
Have you heard of ChatGPT?
It can write content for you.
Or you can use a free one called Ubersuggest AI Writer,
which we also released.
But here's a kicker,
the AI won't write the best content for you.
So just go in there and modify it yourself and spruce it up
and make it a little bit better.
All right.
Hack number nine,
how to get your followers and visitors to buy from you.
This is the easiest one.
If you guys don't do this one, you're making a huge mistake.
So when I started off in the world of marketing,
you're talking about I'm 37 now.
I feel old because when I pick up my kids,
sometimes I blow my back,
I don't understand how, but I'm getting old.
My wife is now over 30,
so she's starting to feel my pain too.
And when I first started, there wasn't really social media,
there was blogging and when someone left a comment,
you respond, it's kind of rude.
If someone asks you a question
and you don't respond to them, that's kind of rude, right?
It's disrespectful.
So you be polite, you respond to comments.
Same with social media. People leave all these comments,
no one wants to respond to them.
So back in the day,
20 years ago when I started in marketing,
I would respond to everyone
because it was a polite thing to do.
And then over the years I built up all these relationships
with people I've never met.
You know, there was Albert who came on before me
and he's like, yeah, we've been communicating on Instagram,
but it was my team who responded to him.
He still responded, he's smart.
He's just like, I don't know if it was you or your team,
but build that relationship.
You should respond if you don't have the time,
have people respond.
I still log in every once in a while
and I respond to people.
Or when people emailing, asking questions like,
Oh, we don't have money to hire a company,
but we have all these questions.
I actually sit down and I respond.
I just found out this new hack.
I'm not the most tech savvy person.
On my phone, on the Gmail app,
there's this microphone button and I can click it
and I can just talk and it types out the email for me.
Coolest thing ever.
(audience laughing)
I started responding while I was at the airport,
like walking from terminal to terminal. I was like, oh yeah,
you can do this and this and get more traffic.
Here's why your rankings drop for your wedding business.
And I'm like, oh, this is awesome
and they're so happy I was doing this for free.
But respond and help people out.
And then when you sell stuff,
you'll be shocked on how many people buy from you
because not only have you helped them,
but you've built up that relationship.
That's the key to getting that sale.
That's why when Kylie Jenner says, "Buy my makeup,"
you know who she is. You've built that relationship,
you're much more likely to buy.
And it generates us a lot of leads.
Here's how many leads we get a month in the B2B world.
Now we used to collect a lot of leads here,
that we're highlighting with the laser pointer,
and it's dropped because we started collecting leads
in places like Italy and France
where we don't have any employees yet.
And then I got to pay to store all these leads
and I don't like spending money
if I don't need to spend that money.
So I cut it all down and only store the leads we need to.
But as you can see, it works.
Hack number 10,
how to make your landing pages convert better by up to 50%.
That's a high number.
Wouldn't you like more conversions when you drive people
from Instagram or YouTube or Google or anywhere.
You need people to convert, right?
So it's crazy how many landing pages we have,
but most of them aren't optimized.
And we have this checklist.
And we took a lot of it from Salesforce.
Salesforce did a study
and they said these 27 elements converted the best.
So we took it all, put it in a PDF,
you can actually get it free,
I don't think you have to even give your information,
scan the QR code.
It'll break down everything you need
to have a high converting landing page.
All right, you guys done taking the images
so I can move on to the next slide?
I'll show you some of them.
I still see some of you guys with phones.
Don't worry if you miss them,
you turn to your left turn to right, you ask your buddy.
But here's some of them.
Like virtual product tours. Give them 10 reasons to buy.
Have ratings, like star ratings,
like four and a half stars, five stars.
Let buyers leave reviews.
These are all things.
This works for both B2B and B2C.
Testimonials, countdown timers, all 27 of them work.
They're battle tested. Salesforce is a big company.
Everyone's heard of them,
even if you don't use their product.
They own things like Slack.
Try them out, you'll get more conversions.
So here's a quick recap of the hacks.
(screen chiming)
You can take a screenshot or the team here has my slides.
You can bug someone here
and they can just forward you the slides.
And that's pretty much it. It's now your turn.
There's over 20 multimillionaires or millionaires
in the United States, which is the most out of any country.
Now It's your turn to become a millionaire
if you already aren't.
I wish you guys the best of luck
and I know you guys are going to succeed.
(audience applauding)
Thank you very much.