Thursday, 24 October 2019

Hi, I’m Neil Patel, Co-founder of NPDigital. Ask Me Anything!

Today, I thought I would do something a bit different, as 66.9% of my website traffic is brand new.

For those of you who don’t know, my name is Neil Patel and I’m the co-founder of a digital marketing agency called, NPDigital, where we help companies of all sizes get more traffic and sales.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for roughly 18 years now and most of the companies I co-founded have been in the software arena, specifically the web analytics sector.

And now, I’m back at it with Ubersuggest, my latest software company.

In addition to that, I’ve angel invested in dozens of companies. Some have done well, and others haven’t.

Overall, I’ve been blessed with a few successes that have made up for my failures plus more.

So today is your day to ask me any questions you have, and I will do my best to answer it. You can ask me about entrepreneurship, marketing, or anything else. I’ve dealt with class-action lawsuits, an FTC investigation (which I passed), and I’ve lost out on acquisitions from Fortune 1000 companies because of stupidity on my part.

All I ask of you is. Please keep your question as short as possible. One to two sentences max as I will get hundreds of comments (potentially even 1,000 or more).

So, what can I answer for you?

*** You may have to scroll a bit down to see the comment section***

The post Hi, I’m Neil Patel, Co-founder of NPDigital. Ask Me Anything! appeared first on Neil Patel.



* This article was originally published here

Saturday, 19 October 2019

New SEO Experiments: A/B Split Testing Google's UGC Attribute

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

When Craig Bradford of Distilled reached out and asked if we'd like to run some SEO experiments on Moz using DistilledODN, our reply was an immediate "Yes please!"

If you're not familiar with DistilledODN, it's a sophisticated platform that allows you to do a number of cool things in the SEO space:

  1. Make almost any change to your website through the ODN dashboard. Since the ODN is a cloud platform that sits in front of your website (like a CDN) it doesn't matter how your website is built or what CMS it uses. You can change a single page — or more likely — entire sections.
  2. The ODN allows you to A/B split test these changes and both measure and predict their impact on organic traffic. They also have a feature called full-funnel testing allowing you to measure impact on both SEO and CRO at the same time.

When you find something that works, you see a positive result like this:

DistilledODN Positive Result

SEO experimentation is great, but almost nobody does it right because it's impossible to control for other factors. Yes, you updated your title tags, but did Google roll out an update today? Sure, you sped up your site, but did a bunch of spam just link to you?

A/B split testing solves this problem by applying your changes to only a portion of your pages — typically 50% — and measuring the difference between the two groups. Fortunately, the ODN can deploy these changes near-instantly, up to thousands of pages at a time.

It then crunches the numbers and tells you what's working, or not.

Testing Google's UGC link attribute

For our first test, we decided to tackle something simple and fast. Craig suggested looking at Google's new link attributes, and we were off!

To summarize: Google recently introduced new link attributes for webmasters/SEOs to label links. Those attributes are:

  • rel="sponsored" - For paid and sponsored links
  • rel="ugc" - For links in user-generated content (UGC)
  • rel="nofollow" - Remains a catch-all for all followed links

On the Moz blog, all comments links are currently marked "nofollow" — following years of SEO best practices. Google has stated that using the new attributes won't give you a rankings boost. That said, we wanted to test for ourselves if changing these links to "ugc" would impact the rankings/traffic of our blog pages.

To be clear:
 We are not testing if the pages we link to change rankings, but instead the source page that hosts the link — in this case, the blog pages with comments.

Here's an example of a comment the ODN modified.

UGC Comment

After we set the test running, 50% of blog posts had comments with "ugc" links, while 50% kept their original "nofollow" attributes.

Experiment results

We expected a "null" test — meaning we wouldn't see a significant impact.

In fact, that's exactly what happened.

DistilledODN Null Results

If we detected a significant change, the probability cone at the bottom right would have pointed more dramatically up or down.

In fact, at a 95% confidence interval, the test predicted traffic would either fall 26,000 visits/month or gain 9,300 visits/month.

Hence, a null result.

This validates Google's statements that using the "ugc" attribute won't give you a ranking boost.

What should Moz test next?

While "null" tests aren't as fun as a positive result, we have a lot of cool A/B SEO testing ahead of us.

The great thing is we can now test out changes with the ODN, and when we find one that works, pass that to our developers to make the changes permanently. This cuts down on needless development work and stops the guessing game.

We have a Trello board set up for test ideas, and we'd love to add some community ideas to the mix. The ODN is currently running on the Moz Blog and Q&A, so anything in these site sections is fair game.

We're also looking at experiments where we use Moz data to inform these decisions. For example, a Moz Pro crawl identified that the Moz Blog titles currently use H2 tags instead of H1. Google recently indicated this likely shouldn't impact rankings, but wouldn't it be good to test?

Missing H1 Tags

What wild/clever/ridiculous/obvious SEO things should we test? With each good test, we'll publish the results. Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Big thanks to the Distilled Team, including Will Critchlow and Tom Anthony, for embarking on this journey with us.

And if you'd like to learn more about DistilledODN and SEO split testing in general, this post is highly recommended.


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* This article was originally published here

Friday, 18 October 2019

Intro to SEO Competitive Analysis 101 - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

A good, solid competitive analysis provides you with priceless insights into what's working for other folks in your industry, but it's not always easy to do right. In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus walks you through how to perform a full competitive analysis, including:

  • How to identify your true competitors
  • Keyword gap analysis
  • Link gap analysis
  • Top content analysis

Plus, don't miss the handy tips on which tools can help with this process and our brand-new guide (with free template) on SEO competitive analysis. Give it a watch and let us know your own favorite tips for performing a competitive analysis in the comments!


Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today we're talking about a really cool topic — competitive analysis. This is an introduction to competitive analysis.

What is competitive analysis for SEO?

It's basically stealing your competitors' traffic. If you're new to SEO or you've been around awhile, this is a very valuable tactic to earn more traffic and rankings for your site.

Instead of researching blindly what to go after, competitive analysis can tell you certain things with a high degree of accuracy that you won't find other ways, such as:

  • what keywords to target, 
  • what content to create, 
  • how to optimize that content, and 
  • where to get links.

How to do an SEO competitive analysis

How does it do this?

Well, instead of researching just in a keyword tool or a link tool, with competitive analysis you look at what's actually working for your competitors and use those tactics for yourself.

This often works so much better than the old-style ways of research, because you can actually improve upon what other people are actually doing and make those tactics work for you.

1. Identify your top competitors

So to get started with competitive analysis, the first challenge is to actually identify your top competitors.

This sounds easy. You probably think you know who your competitors are because you type a keyword into Google and you see who's ranking for your desired keyword. This does work, to certain degree.

Another way to do it is to look at the keywords you rank for, because the challenge is you probably rank for far more keywords than you believe you do.

Moz, for instance, ranks for hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of keywords, and we want to know at scale who are all the competitors ranking for all those different queries. This is very hard to do manually.

Fortunately there are a lot of SEO tools out there — Ahrefs, SEMrush — many tools that can tell you look at all the keywords that you rank for across thousands of SERPs and then calculate, using advanced metrics, exactly who your true competitors are.

I'm happy to announce that Moz just released a tool that does exactly this. We're going to link to it in the transcript below.

It's called Domain Analysis. It's a free tool. Anybody can use it.

You simply type in your domain, and we look through all the keywords that your site ranks for in our database, we look at all the competitors, and we use some advanced heuristics and we match those up and we tell you who your true competitors are. Once you know your true competitors, you can continue with the rest of the analysis.

2. Perform a keyword gap analysis

The first step that most people take in doing an SEO competitive analysis is identifying the keyword gap. Now for a long time, when I was new to SEO, I heard this term "keyword gap" and I didn't really know what it meant. But it's actually really simple.

It's simply what keywords do my competitors rank for that I don't rank for, and that's the gap. The idea is that we want to close that gap if the keyword is valuable or high volume. The trick is you can do this on your own manually. You can see all the keywords you rank for using an advanced keyword tool and then list all the keywords your competitors rank for and then combine those lists in Excel. It's a long, tedious process.

Fortunately, again, major SEO tools, such as Moz, can do this at scale for you within seconds. If you go to Moz Keyword Explorer, you simply enter your domain, enter your top competitor's domain that we found in this first step, and it will list all the keywords that your competitors rank for that you don't rank for. 

You can then pull this into a spreadsheet and find keywords with high volume or keywords that are valuable and relevant to your business.

This is an important point. You don't just want to go willy-nilly after any keyword your competitor ranks for. You want to actually find the keywords that are relevant to your business.

3. Perform a link gap analysis

So after you do that, we also have the cousin of a keyword gap analysis — link gap analysis.

This is a very similar concept, because you need links to rank. But where do you find the links? So you want to ask, "Who links to my competitors but does not link to me?"

The theory here is that if someone is linking to your competitor on a similar topic, they are more likely to link to you because they are in that business of linking out to that type of content.

An advanced tip is you often want to look at two or more competitors. The idea is that if someone is linking to multiple sources but not to you, it's more likely they'll link to you if you have superior content.

Again, SEO tools can provide something like this. You can list all the backlinks to yourself or your competitors and combine them in a spreadsheet. But the tools make it much easier.

In Moz's Link Explorer, you simply enter your competitor, you enter another competitor and yours, and you can find all the people who are linking to those competitors but not to you.

An advanced tip that I like to use is do it at the page level. Don't look for domains that are linking to your competitors. Look for specific pages and you can do this in Link Explorer. We're going to show you in a little more detail in a guide I'm going to link to at the bottom of this post.

4. Perform a top content analysis

So we understand links, we understand the keywords. But what content do we want to create?


Top content analysis, this is very easy to do these days. You're basically looking for content that earns your competitors a lot of traffic or a lot of links.

The idea is if other people are linking to these things, then it's highly probable that you can earn links with similar but better content. So the idea is you go to a tool like Link Explorer. You can sort by top pages, and you pick out the content that has the most links for your competitor. Then don't just re-create the content, but make it better. This is called the skyscraper technique, the idea of finding content that does really well and then making it better.

Then once you have this, you go back to your link gap analysis and you reach out to those people who are linking to that content and you ask them for links, showing them the better content.


So that's it in a nutshell. When we put it all together, we have a very valuable process. We can go back to our individual pages, look at those pages that are ranking for our competitors. When you're all done, you can actually take your page, plug it into your keyword gap, and see all the keywords the page is ranking for.

Our original keyword gap analysis looked at the domain, but now we just want to know what the page is ranking for. We can add that into our own page and make the page even better. We can again reach out to the same people who are linking to this page, show them our better content, and that is the process.

New Guide & Free Template

Whew, I'm exhausted. This is a huge process. I went over it really quickly. Fortunately, if it went by a little fast for you, we just released a guide, "An Introduction to SEO Competitive Analysis." We're going to link to it.

Get the Guide + Free Template

Guide to SEO Competitive Analysis

It explains all these processes in much more detail. It's free to use. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey, I really enjoyed making this video. If you found value in it, give it a thumbs up. Please share on social media and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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* This article was originally published here

Thursday, 17 October 2019

The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing: How People Buy Now

Posted by MiriamEllis

This post contains an excerpt from our new primer: The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing.

Planet Fitness, Great Clips, Ace Hardware… you can imagine the sense of achievement the leadership of these famous franchises must enjoy in making it to the top of lists like Entrepreneur’s 500. Behind the scenes of success, all competitive franchisors and franchisees have had to manage a major shift — one that centers on customers and their radically altered consumer journeys.

Research online, buy offline. Always-on laptops and constant companion smartphones are where fingers do the walking now, before feet cross the franchise threshold. Statistics tell the story of a public that searches online prior to the 90% of purchases they still make in physical stores.

And while opportunity abounds, “being there” for the customers wherever they are in their journey has presented unique challenges for franchises. Who manages which stage of the journey? Franchisor or franchisee? Getting it right means meeting new shopping habits head-on, and re-establishing clear sight-lines and guidelines for all contributors to the franchise’s ultimate success.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of articles dedicated to franchises. Want all the info now? Download The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing:

Download now



Seeing the Shift

Whoever your franchise’s customers are, demographically, we can tell you one thing: they aren’t buying the same way they were ten, or even five years ago. For one thing, they used to decide to buy at your business as they browsed shelves or a menu. Now, 82% of smartphone users consult their devices before making an in-store purchase. Thank you, digital marketing!

Traditionally, online marketing wasn’t something that franchisees had to think much about. And that was sort of a good thing because everyone knew their lane.

  • Franchisors handled national or regional marketing through broadcast, print, and other media. They also handled digital marketing — which, within recent recall, consisted mainly of a website, social media accounts, and paid search.
  • Franchisees managed the local beat with coupons, flyers, direct mail, and other community and word-of-mouth marketing efforts.

Then people started shopping differently and traditional lanes began merging. Customers started using online directories to get information. They started using online listings for discovering local businesses “near me” on a map. They started reading online reviews to make choices. They started browsing online inventories or menus in advance. They started using cell phones to make reservations, click to call you, or to get a digital voice assistant like Siri or Alexa to give them directions to the nearest and best local option.

Suddenly, what used to be a “worldwide” resource — the internet — began to be a local resource, too. And a really powerful one. People were finding, choosing, and building relationships online not just with the national brand, but with local shops, services and restaurants, often making choices in advance and showing up merely to purchase the products or services they want.

Stats State the Case

Consider how these statistics are impacting every franchise:

  • 76% of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase. - Google
  • 88% of shoppers regularly or occasionally browse products online before purchasing them in a store. - Adweek
  • 45% of brick-and-mortar sales in 2018 started with an online review — a 15% year-over-year increase from 2017. - Bazaarvoice
  • According to Google, "near me" mobile searches that contain a variant of "can I buy" or "to buy" have grown over 500% in the past two years, and we’ve seen a 900% growth in mobile search for "___near me today/tonight." - Google
  • Search interest in ”open now” has increased 300% in the past two years. - Google

These are huge changes — and not ones the franchise model was entirely ready for.

There used to be a clear geographic split between a franchise’s corporate awareness marketing and franchisee local sales marketing that was easy to understand. But the above statistics tell new tales. Now there is an immediacy and urgency to the way customers search and shop that’s blurring old lines.



Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks

Even a memorable jingle like this one goes nowhere unless the franchisor/franchisee partnership is solid. How do customers know a brand like Ace stands by its slogan when they see a national TV campaign like this one which strives to distinguish the franchise from understaffed big box home improvement stores?

Customers feel the nation-wide promise come true as soon as they walk into an Ace location:

  • Place located where the internet said it was? Check!
  • Abundance of staff? Check!
  • Friendly? Check!
  • Online purchase ready for pickup? Check!
  • Trust earned? Check!

A brand promo only works when all sides are equally committed to making each location of the business visible, accessible, and trusted. This joint effort applies to every aspect of how the business is marketed. From leadership to door greeter, everyone has a role to play. It’s defining those roles that can make or break the brand in the new consumer environment.

We’ll be exploring the nuts and bolts of building ideal partnerships in future installments of this series. Up next is The Unique World of Franchise Marketing. Keep an eye out for it on the blog at the end of the month!

Don’t want to wait for the blog posts to come out? Download your copy now of our comprehensive look at unique franchise challenges and benefits: 

Get my copy


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* This article was originally published here

Wednesday, 16 October 2019

The Real Secret to My Social Media Success

The other day I was recording a podcast episode with my co-host Eric Siu and he wanted to discuss something in particular.

He wanted to talk about how I got to 62,000 Instagram followers in a very short period of time and without spending any money on ads or marketing.

Eric is a great marketer as well, and when it comes to social media, he spends much more time than me on it and he even has people at his ad agency dedicated to helping him grow his personal brand online.

And of writing this post, he has 4,056 followers.

It’s not just with Instagram either, I beat him on all platforms.

Heck, he even does something that I don’t do, which is smart… he continually pays for advice. For example, he had his team jump on an hour call with Gary Vaynerchuk’s social media team so they could learn from them and grow his brand faster.

So, what’s the secret to my success?

Well, before I get into it, let me first start off by saying I love Eric to death and the point of this post isn’t to pick on him or talk crap… more so, I have a point to make and you’ll see it in a bit below.

Is it the fundamentals?

Everyone talks about strategies to grow your social following… from going live and posting frequently or talking about the type of content you should post and what you shouldn’t do.

I could even tell you that you need to respond to every comment and build up a relationship with your followers, which will help you grow your following and brand.

And although all of this is true, I dare you to try the fundamentals or the strategies that every marketing guru talks about doing. If you do, I bet this will happen…

It will be a lot of work and, if you are lucky, in the next 30 days you may get 10% more followers.

Sure, some of you will get much more growth, but you’ll find that you can’t always replicate it and it won’t be consistent.

So, what is it then?

Is it luck?

Luck is part of some people’s success, but not most. The problem with luck is it doesn’t teach you much and it isn’t easy to replicate.

The reality is, some people will just get lucky and have tons of traction.

In other words, luck isn’t the secret. But if you do want to get “luckier”, then you can always become an early adopter which helps a bit.

How early is early?

When you jump onto a social network when it’s new, it’s easier to grow and become popular.

For example, I got to over 30,000 Twitter followers extremely fast when Twitter first came out.

At that time, I wasn’t as well known… it happened because of a few reasons:

  1. Social algorithms are favorable early on – algorithms are typically favorable and most people will see your content. There aren’t many restrictions, hence it’s easier to grow. After a social network becomes popular, algorithms tighten up.
  2. Algorithms are easier to game early on – when you are early, you can use a lot of hacks to grow faster. For example, on Twitter, I would just follow tons of people a day and unfollow anyone who didn’t follow me back.
  3. First movers’ advantage – social networks want more users, that’s what they need to succeed. In the early stages of any platform, they want to help you gain more of a following so you will keep using their platform.

But here is the thing: even though being an early adopter helps, it’s not the secret to my success.

Just look at Instagram, I am really late to the game. But I started growing fast just this year as that is when we really started.

If you can get in early, you should do so, assuming you have the time to invest. For example, this is the time to get in on Tiktok.

When you get in early, there is always the chance that the social network may end up flopping. But if it does take off, you’ll be ahead of your competition.

So what did I do?

Here was the secret to my growth… and it still works today. Eric Siu is even doing it with me right now.

It’s piggybacking on brands that are already popular.

When I first started, no one knew who I was. And I’m not saying everyone knows who I am today… by no means do I have a large brand like Tony Robbins.

What I did early on in my career was piggyback off of other popular brands.

For example, I hit up Pete Cashmore from Mashable, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, Arianna Huffington from Huffington Post, and so many other popular sites like ReadWriteWeb, Business Insider, Gawker Media, and GigaOm to name just a few.

I know some of them don’t exist anymore, but back then they were extremely popular. Anyone who was in tech, and even some who weren’t, knew about each of those sites.

So, when I got started as a marketer, I hit up all of those sites and offered all of them free marketing in exchange for promoting my brand and adding “Marketing done by Neil Patel” or “Marketing done by Pronet”, which was my ad agency back then.

Just look at the image above. TechCrunch used to link to my site on every page of their site… forget rich anchor text, it really is all about branding.

The hardest part is, I had to email and message these influencers dozens of times just to convince them to let me help them for free. And a lot of them ignored me or didn’t accept my offer.

But of a few said yes.

Pete from Mashable was one of the first to say yes. Once his traffic and rankings skyrocketed, his competition hit me up. Especially TechCrunch.

What was funny, though, is that I was constantly emailing TechCrunch and didn’t hear back. 6 months from my first email, they eventually accepted my offer.

I made a deal with Michael Arrington at the time in which once I boosted his traffic, he would add a logo that I did marketing for him, which you saw above.

In addition to that, he would tell all of his venture capital friends what I did for him and share the results (so hopefully they would share it with their portfolio companies, which would help me make money) and write a blog post about me.

He didn’t end up writing the blog post, which is fine, but he did the other two.

When he sent out emails to VCs showing a Google Analytics graph of his traffic growing at a rapid pace, I quickly got inundated with inquiries about my marketing services.

In addition to that, I was building up my brand… and my social media following. I was gaining “social clout” because I was doing good work for influencers.

One could argue that boosting traffic for someone like TechCrunch by 30% is worth millions and I should have charged for my services. Although I spent countless time doing free work, I wouldn’t trade it for any single dollar as it is what made me and helped build up my reputation.

And I didn’t stop there. Even today, I try to associate myself with other popular brands. Just like how I was lucky enough to work with Robert Herjavec, who has a popular TV show in the US along with Mark Cuban…

Here’s how many visitors I was getting for my name “Neil Patel” on a monthly basis before I started working with Robert.

And this is how many visitors I get for my name on a monthly basis a few months after I worked with Robert.

That’s a 37.84% increase in a matter of months!

By piggybacking off of popular brands, it doesn’t just help my website traffic but also helps to grow my social media following as well.

Just like as you can see below with my Instagram growth…

Now it isn’t just me who can do this, anyone can.

How can you piggyback off of other brands?

Just like how I piggybacked off of brands like TechCrunch, Eric is doing something similar to me at the moment.

We have a podcast that generates over 1 million downloads a month.

Eric’s had a podcast for years, but the one he has with me has more than 10x the listeners. This has helped him grow his brand a lot over the last year.

Let’s just look at the data. According to Eric, due to the podcast, he has signed up 6 clients, which has generated 540,000 dollars in annual revenue.

Now when he goes to tech conferences, 3 to 4 people tend to come up to him and mention how they love Marketing School and his work. In addition to that, it has been easier for Eric to set up meetings (people respond back to him more now), and he is also getting advisory shares in companies due to his growing brand. And the best part is, he is getting more paid speaking gigs for up to $10,000 a pop because of the podcast.

The data shows it was a good move by Eric for partnering up with me. He pushed me to do a podcast years ago and I told him no because I was too lazy. He didn’t give up though. Eventually, he got me to say yes and flew to my house in Las Vegas to record our first episode.

He did all of the work and it has been a great mutual relationship as doing this podcast has also helped grow my brand at the same time.

Now you are probably thinking, why isn’t his follower count growing fast enough?

Well, he needs to do what he is doing with me with a few more influencers to really put fuel to the fire. Just like how I didn’t only piggyback off of TechCrunch… at one point the Gawker Media network was linking to me on every page of their sites, which was seen by over 100 million unique people per month.

That really gets your brand out there!

Another example is Brian Dean from Backlinko as he did something similar with me back in the day. Years ago I approached him to write a detailed guide on link building with him and he also created videos that were on my old marketing blog Quick Sprout, which helped him grow his brand.

I can’t take credit for “making” Eric or Brian successful. They would have done well without me… and in the grand scheme of things, I really didn’t do much for either of them.

It’s like saying TechCrunch made the Neil Patel brand. Of course, it helped, and helped a lot… but one partnership won’t make or break you.

And if I didn’t continually blog, create videos, speak at events, or do any of the other stuff that I did, the TechCrunch partnership wouldn’t have been as effective.

Eric and Brian would have grown their brand in other ways because their work stands for itself, hence they would have been successful on their own. I just helped provide a little boost, just like how TechCrunch provided me with a boost.

And once more people get to know you, you’ll naturally do better on the social web.

For example, when Will Smith created his Instagram account, he didn’t have to buy ads or anything. Everyone just knows him already and that’s why his Instagram account blew up really quickly.

And you can do what Will Smith did on a smaller scale. Similar to what I did.

But don’t expect it overnight. Will Smith has been on television for over 20 years. It’s multiple shows, movies, and connections with other famous people that have really helped grow Will’s brand.

Of course, we won’t get on TV as Will has, but you can piggyback on other popular brands multiple times to create a similar (smaller) effect.

All you have to do is help these influencers out for free.

If you are a web designer, offer design services. If you are a marketer, offer marketing services. If you are selling a product or service, keep giving it away for free and maybe someone will talk about your company.

If you don’t have anything you can offer that has value, just look at whatever influencer you want to associate with, see where they may need help, learn that skill, and offer it for free.

It’s the easiest way to become popular on the social web.

Conclusion

That’s my secret to being popular on the social web.

It’s also how I built a decent size company… purely by leveraging other popular brands in the early days.

You can do the same, but you have to be patient. Don’t expect it to happen overnight.

For example, Eric’s brand has been growing but we have been doing a podcast together for over 2 years now.

Plus, he continually pushes on his own and doesn’t just rely on leveraging other influencers.

Remember, nothing worthwhile happens overnight.

You have to be persistent with your emails, your direct messages, your text messages, and whatever else you can do to get a hold of these influencers. Most will ignore you but it is a numbers game and, eventually, you’ll be able to associate your brand with someone popular, which will grow your brand.

And last but not least: Don’t expect an influencer to make you successful. Sure, multiple influencers are better than one, but that’s not what I meant.

If Brian Dean from Backlinko wasn’t good at link building, creating content, SEO, and educating, he wouldn’t do well… no matter who he associated himself with. The same goes for Eric.

Your skills, your abilities, your product… whatever you are trying to brand needs to stand on its own.

So, what do you think about my secret? Are you going to copy it?

The post The Real Secret to My Social Media Success appeared first on Neil Patel.



* This article was originally published here