- [Instructor] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel, and today is another day of Content Marketing Unlocked. I'm going to be breaking out all the different media outlets you can be using to generate more traffic. It's week four of Content Marketing Unlocked.
There's this lesson, and then we have one more after this. Media outlets, especially sites like the Forbes, the Huffington post, the New York times, they're all great places to get traffic from, get even sales from, and even get links from. And now, when you're getting links from these sites and you're using guest posting, which I'm about to cover, you want to make sure you no follow them because you don't want to manipulate Google.
If you are getting other people to naturally write about you, you don't have to worry, but if you are a guest posting yourself, you want to of course, no follow those links. So let's dive into this. It's simple to get guest posting spots.
All you have to do is build a relationship and give value. It comes down to three steps, and I'm going to break them down. The first step is to send them an email, something like, and you want to customize this for your industry, but the email goes something like, Hey John, great article on growing your business through analytics.
I noticed you actually didn't hit on X, Y, and Z topic, but you hit on B and C, which is great. Have you considered modifying and talking about X, Y, and Z? Just our friendly tip.
Keep up the great work, I love reading your content. By giving people feedback and giving them positive feedback, but also giving them a critique that shows how they can improve, they're much more likely to want to respond to you, build that relationship, versus people who just keep emailing them asking them for things. And you'll find that when you shoot an email off like this, most people will respond.
And then I usually follow up with a second email a bit later, could even be a week later, John, wow, what an amazing article. I learned B and C from you. Keep up the great work, big fan.
It's really that simple. Third email, hey John, I realized that you haven't actually written on B and C topic. I looked through all your posts and I haven't found anything on it.
I think it ought to be really beneficial to your fans and followers just like me. I know you're busy, so if you don't have the time to write it, no worries. You've already done so much for me.
I can just write the article for you. Let me know if that works. Cheers, Neil.
Keep in mind, this person is going to usually take your content and ghostwrite it, right? You're not ghost writing for them. In essence, they're introducing you to an editor or someone on their staff, so that way, you can write and build that relationships.
In other words, what you're doing is you're expanding your relationship to being just more than them to also the editor and other people at that place where they write at. Because if you naturally email the editor of Forbes or Huffington post, they're probably going to ignore you, but if you got introduced to them by another writer that they already know and trust, they're much more likely to respond back. And of course, if you linked to your own website when you're doing guest posts, you want to make sure you no follow them, because when no follow the links, you're not bending Google's policies or guidelines.
And the goal for you is to become a regular contributor, not just writing one article, but you want to write on a regular basis because this is what builds a strong brand. For example, I've written on a lot of sites. Here's what it looks like on entrepreneur.
com. Social profiles, they'll link back to my website, link to some of my articles. Again, they are no followed.
They also do it with some of my videos, too. They take some of my videos, you need to have eye-catching titles, so that way they get a lot of views, they link back to my site, and again, drives traffic, and some of them turn into business. Here's one from Huffington post.
It's similar. Again, this strategy works, and here's one where someone guest posted, it wasn't me, on Nextiva. I was speaking there at a conference and some person wrote there, and the naturally linked to me, and this was great because I got a link from it, got some traffic, and it also drove some business as well.
The key with guest posting is to build a brand and generate leads. Remember, it's all about brand awareness. When someone sees or interacts with your brand seven times, they're much more likely to convert into a customer, and this is why you want to continually guest post and build up your brand over time.
And I talk about this a little in the previous lesson, which you can find at NeilPatel. com/training, go to NeilPatel. com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, go to week four, and it's the first video, and this will help build up your social following, build up your brand over time, and cause more sales and boost your conversion rates.
The next media outlet that I want you to check out is podcasting. And just like blogging, it starts with the topic for, let's say whatever you're interested in, go to Ubersuggest, type in a keyword, it'll show you what's popular, what's not popular, and it'll give you ideas on content. You can even go to the content ideas report in the left-hand navigation.
It'll show you all the popular text-based articles on that topic. Typically, if something was popular in a text based format, it'll also be popular in an audio based format. So it'll allow you to come up with more ideas.
And when you're looking for the ideas in the content ideas report, look for ones that have a high estimated visit count, high backlink count, and more social shares. When they have these three things, the chances are it'll do really well as a podcast episode. When you release these podcast episodes, don't just submit it to the iTunes store, the Android version of it.
You also want to send your podcasts out into the web, have your own website, put it on Spotify. These are all places where you can get listens. Just like with marketing school, my podcast with my cohost Eric Siu, we have our podcast on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Android, Google play store, SoundCloud.
We have it literally everywhere so we can get more views. And it's led us to get over a million views a month. It's that effective.
And it naturally grows because podcasting isn't that competitive, and that's why I recommend that you really go after podcasting. If you don't want to create your own podcast, you can get featured on other people's podcasts. What you'll want to do is, and I'm going to go through these pretty quickly, because I have a resource sheet that goes through this in much more detail, but in essence, you're building a list of podcasts you want to get on.
You don't want to aim for the biggest ones, the most popular ones like the Joe Rogan podcast is not going to feature you or me. You got to aim smaller and then eventually work your way up. Then you want to think of a great story to tell, create a pitch to convince him to have you on there.
Reach out, confirm the time and then boom, deliver. And you can end up getting the template, the guide on outreaching at neilpatel. com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, and then go to week four, video lesson two.
Another place that you should leverage from a media outlet perspective is social media. Everyone's on the social web. There's so many social sites out there.
They're searching for everything, so why not be on them? But there's a lot of them, so which ones are right for you? Well, of course there's Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and YouTube and Pinterest.
The list goes on and on. Eventually you're going to want to work on trying to be on all of them, be Omni channel, but in general, when you're first starting off, pick the ones that are most relevant. If you're in B2B, LinkedIn is going to have a better audience.
If you're in B2C, Facebook could work, or YouTube can work. If you're in an educational space, maybe YouTube will work. So, you've got to figure out what's right for your audience.
If you're e-commerce, Instagram is super effective. Facebook, I know many people think it's ugly and dead, but it's not. They have over 2.
2 billion users. It's the largest social network, and they own Instagram as well. Whether you like them or not, you should be on them.
There's also my favorite, which is YouTube. YouTube is the second most popular search engine, and if you want to do well on YouTube, check out my blog posts on neilpatel. com.
It's neilpatel. com/blog/youtube-seo That's neilpatel. com/blog/youtube-seo, and it breaks down how to rank higher on YouTube, and it gives you all the steps.
The big thing to know about YouTube is it's the opposite of traditional SEO. It's not long and steady wins the race. It's the person who gets the most views in the first 24 hours tends to rank the highest over time as well.
I also want you to consider leveraging influencers because if someone's a influencer, they're well-respected, they have a big brand. You want them to push and promote you as well, because that should help quite a bit. You can pay a lot of influencers.
There's a site called influence. co that can help you find influencers as well. Some action items for you.
Download these two sheets. We talked about them, the Growth Hacking your Content Marketing, and the Podcast Outreach. You can find them both at neilpatel.
com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, video a week for video two. And if you enjoyed the video, like it, share it, subscribe to the channel. If you have questions, leave a comment below, and I'll answer it.
Thank you for your time, and if you need that extra help, you can also check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital. Cheers.
