On this week's Q&A Thursday, I'm explaining why I started a personal blog at NeilPatel.com ►►Subscribe here to learn more of my secret SEO tips: goo.gl/ScRTwc Find me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/neilkpatel/ Read more on my blog: neilpatel.com/blog Kissmetrics is a corporate blog. I don't own it; I raised venture capital. Crazy Egg isn't a personal blog either. With 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 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 a decent size and it's self-sustainable you can do other marketing channels or build up its 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. 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 the audience. The global digital advertising business is multi-billion if not hundreds of billions, right? I don't know what the exact number is, but Spend is over probably $100 billion a year. It gets down to how big the market is. 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 this for money. I want to create the largest marketing technology company in the world. I don't have a goal for what I want to buy, I don't care for homes or cars, and you know that. For me, 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. I don't have a company I've created that's in the billions yet. You know, there's a lot of companies 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 because 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 in trouble, and then you get half the traffic. Same with YouTube, same with Instagram. With my blog and my audience, it's my email list, I control it. Yeah, sure, maybe I'll get a little bit less traffic because Google adjusts their algorithm. Or Facebook adjusts something. But I'm still in control. It's my platform; no one can shut me down the next day. And that's why everyone should create a personal blog and start a personal brand. The way to build your brand is simple. You have to 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 ahrefs, and I sorted them by which ones had the least amount of backlinks, and I wrote better versions of all of them. 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 because people barely built any links from, let me just go and write better versions of them that are updated and more thorough. After years of doing that, that's how you get a lot of traffic. My buddy Mike, who runs Dr. Axe, did a similar strategy, and that's how they got to over 20 million visits a month. So by building a personal brand, building loyalty, it's easier to get people to come back and build a massive audience. If you need help with online marketing or branding leave a question in the comments below and I'll personally answer!

Be the first to comment