- You've had all these successful companies,
you've done well, Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, all these.
You decided to start Neil Patel.
I would love to hear not only how did you get all of
this traffic, how did you do it from start to finish,
but also why was this important to you.
Like what was your driving mindset throughout all this?
- Yeah, sure, so my driving mindset behind all this
was Kissmetrics is a corporate blog.
I don't own it, I raised venture capital.
Crazy Egg isn't a personal blog either.
Quick Sprout I ended up creating a business
around it, and then I'm like you know what,
I want a personal blog that sticks with me for life.
Funny, Neil Patel turned into Neil Patel Digital
which is my agency, so I'm like this sucks too
because now I don't have a personal blog anymore.
But most people don't know if they want a
corporate blog or a personal one.
And here's the mistake that I learned.
If you want to sell a company,
you're better off creating a corporate blog.
If you're a serial entrepreneur and you want to
tap your audience because you keep creating businesses
in the same niche, you're better off with a personal blog
because you can keep building up that business.
Or a new business, and then once it gets to the size
and it's self sustainable you can do other marketing
channels or build up its own blog.
I'm a big believer that a personal blog
for serial entrepreneurs is something that everyone
has to have, it's more important than a corporate blog.
- Interesting.
- And that's how I got my start.
I didn't want to create a blog.
I was like I want a place where
I can keep going and marketing to.
- Right.
- That was my real reasoning behind it.
- Now you're different than I think a lot of people.
When I think of a personal blog, I also think of
all right, what's flying today, I came and saw Neil,
this is what happened, right.
- Yeah.
- So it mixes in the personal side with also just
the hard core, like www.neilpatel.com is a business blog.
- Yes, I look at the personal blogs in which if
you want to talk about what you ate and food,
I don't know how to monetize that stuff really well.
And most people don't.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, you can make some money but not enough
where I would be happy with.
So for that reason, I go after big market caps.
So I call it total addressable market size.
It's not my invented term, it's just industry-wide term.
You're looking at the total potential to make or earnings,
or how much money is being spent in that industry.
For example, the global digital advertising business
is a multi billion if not hundreds of plus billion, right.
I don't know what the exact number is,
but Spend is over probably $100 billion a year.
And it gets down to how big is the market.
Because you're never going to take 100% of it,
you're only going to take a fraction of it.
And for me, if I got 1% of the digital marketing industry,
I wouldn't care, I'm rich, I'm a billionaire, right.
And I'm not doing everything for money,
but like business-wise I created something big enough.
- Is that your goal, 1%?
- My goal is, when I'm doing all the software stuff
and marketing stuff, I want to create the largest
marketing technology company in the world.
I don't have a goal on what I want to buy,
or I don't care for homes or cars, and you know that.
For me it's just I want to create the biggest company.
And it's kind of like a sport in and of itself,
it's the scoreboard and I want the highest score.
- Right.
- There's no reasoning, it's just.
- See to me, are you not number one right now?
- Company wise, no, there's so many larger companies
like HubSpot is worth multi billions of dollars.
I don't have a company I've created
that's in the billions yet.
You know, there's a lot of companies like
even like Adobe where they have marketing
components and they're bigger.
If you look at Google, they're focused on marketing, they're
$700 billion, Facebook is $500 billion I think currently.
Either way, they're all large corporations.
I have a long way to go.
And that's why I built up the Neil Patel audience,
'cause I'm like if I can build this big community
of marketers, I can keep going after them.
See everyone talks about Instagram and Facebook,
Pinterest, but you know what, Facebook changes
their algorithm and then you're screwed and
then you get half the traffic.
Same with YouTube, same with Instagram and all these.
With my own blog and my own audience,
my own email list, I control it.
Yeah, sure, maybe I'll get a little bit less
traffic 'cause Google adjusts their algorithm.
Or Facebook adjusts something.
But I'm still in control.
It's my own platform, no one can shut me down the next day.
And that's why people should do it.
And it's like the way I built it up,
which is going back to your first question,
is I built it up by just doing the grind.
Three years of writing amazing content,
and then just going out there
and trying to outrank everyone.
And it was a really simple process,
I went to SEM Rush, I typed in every single competitor,
I looked at their most popular content.
It shows it by traffic.
I took those articles, and then I put them into
atrufs and I sorted them by which ones had
the least amount of back links,
and I wrote better versions of all of them.
At least in my opinion.
And that's how my traffic grew.
Because I'm like wait, these are the articles that
get the most traffic, yet they're the least
competitive 'cause people barely built any links from,
let me just go and write better versions of them
that are updated and more thorough.
And after years of doing that,
that's how you get a lot of traffic.
My buddy Mike, who runs Dr. Axe,
he did a similar strategy and that's how
they got to over 20 million visits a month.
- That's amazing, it's incredible how Google
is now just, it's pretty much just have the
best content out there, and kind of figure it out
and say this is awesome content.
And then you can rank, right.
- Yeah, and then if you build a brand,
like you're doing and I've been doing,
it's easier to get rankings.
'Cause you're less likely to connect with Coca-Cola
than you are with an individual like Tony Robbins.
- Right.
- So building a personal brand, the loyalty,
easier to get people to come back
and build a massive audience.