In the bloggers interview series so far, we have done interview with famous bloggers like Zac Johnson and Harsh Agrawal. In today’s interview series, we have Neil Patel from NeilPatel.com.
Neil Patel is an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, digital marketing consultant and a traffic king. Neil started two SaaS analytics companies, CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics. CrazyEgg, which helps marketers make their website more user friendly. KISSmetrics, helps you improve the metrics that matter most to your business.
His blog QuickSprout took 21 months to get 100,000 visitors every month. CrazyEgg took 18 months and KISSmetrics took just 9 months to get 100,000 visitors each and every month. Majority of his online revenue comes from CrazyEgg (around 56%) followed by KISSmetrics which holds 38% and QuickSprout 6% of his overall income respectively.
Neil Patel Interview: Learn How You Can Improve Your Blog
If you are striving hard to get more traffic to your blogs or websites, Neil is the guy. He has increased traffic and revenue to 20 major brands and hundreds of other businesses including the giants like HP, Microsoft, amazon, TechCrunch etc.
Let us get into the interview to know how Neil Patel makes money and uses infographics as a way to drive massive traffic to all of his blog posts.
1. Please share some tips that newbie’s can use to take their blog to the next level?
I think focusing on content goes a long way. By making your content unique, in-depth and interesting you can really get maximum exposure. By writing posts that are 1500 to 2000 words long you will find yourself getting more search traffic in the long run.
Key takeaway: If you want to build a profitable online business in the long run, don’t find shortcuts. You have to follow a specific content marketing plan to reap the rewards. Creating great content has to be your primary focus, then and only then you will be able to get more traffic, links and profit.
2. Being a content marketer, what kinds of contents you feel have the potential to do well on internet when it comes about driving natural backlinks and traffic to them?
I think infographics and how-to posts have tremendous potential. It’s all about creating content that is interesting and worthy of sharing. If someone can learn something valuable from your content they are more likely to share your content and come back.
Key takeaway: Neil Patel is really good at driving traffic from infographics. 4 out of 10 top posts on his KISSmetrics blog are infographics, they drive massive traffic each and every month. Creating a highly appealing infographics generally costs around $300 to $500 but gives you 10 X more results in the short time in terms of getting inbound links, traffic and revenue.
So if you want to drive more traffic and build quality backlinks, focus on investing your money and time on creating problem solving infographics. Along with that, How-to posts also have the tendency to go viral, generally online people get curious about reading how-to posts.
3. Neil you must have made lots of investment with your online portals, please share few of your investments which you feel were big failures?
The biggest one was a hosting company in Texas. I’ve blogged about it here.
4. please share few of your success stories as an Entrepreneur and as a SEO guy.
I try not to talk about my successes as it’s rare for people to learn from them. Instead I try to blog about my mistakes.
5. How you manage your time among Kissmetrics, Crazyegg, Quicksprout and SEO consulting for clients?
I over-utilize my calendar. I make sure that every part of my day is calendared out. It’s very important for organization.
Takeaway: Managing your time is one of the key tasks to become a successful entrepreneur in online. Here are few tips to productively use your time.
- Don’t multi task as it can never get you anythings done. Researches show if you focus on doing multiple tasks at a time, your brain will degrade the performance of all the tasks irrespective of what you do.
- Focus on working in small blocks of time as it can improve your overall efficiency.
- Reward yourself when you accomplish a task. Make sure to have rewards that are not distracting you to get more things done.
6. You are one of the most popular SEO experts on the internet. Please share few mistakes you feel lots of SEO’s are doing these days?
I think they are focusing way too much on building backlinks manually. It’s important to focus on content to gain natural backlinks.
Takeaway: Recently Matt Cutts said to avoid guest blogging for the sake of getting backlinks as Google wants to degrade the sites that are giving backlinks to low quality sites.
Don’t build backlinks for the sake of improving your search engine rankings or Page rank. Instead of it focus on building strong relationships with other bloggers in your niche as it can allow you to gain links, traffic, subscribers and money in the long run.
7. Please share few resources and guides that SEO’s should use to improve their SEO skills?
I would suggest people check out my blog. There are a ton of guides on there that can help people with anything and everything digital marketing related.
Takeaway: Neil Patel writes amazing contents related to SEO. If you want to learn more about getting traffic from the search engines, you should check out his blog.
8. Neil, when you are doing SEO Audit of a website, what are the top 5 things you check out first?
I think there are lot more than 5 things to focus on. Here is a free audit template that can help you out.
Takeaway:Â Checkout his audit template to figure out your site SEO metrics. He spent a lot of money on creating it and giving it away for free on his site. You can find your site speed, keyword analysis etc just by entering your site URL.
9. Are you using any free or paid tool, plugin or software for SEO purpose?
I love using the free SEO tool on www.quicksprout.com
10. According to you, what is the best way to build quality backlinks to a website keeping in mind the kind of algorithmic updates Google is coming up with?
Focusing primarily on content. I would suggest that people really focus on content to get those natural backlinks.
Takeaway: Most people focus on building backlinks through guest blogging, blog commenting or other link building methods. But if you truly want to gain backlinks, traffic and revenue from your blogging efforts, focus on creating link worthy content that naturally attracts backlinks to your sites.
Additionally creating great content, link out to other bloggers in your niche frequently as it can gain their attention and you may get links back to your posts if they find your content awesome. Make external linking as a part of your content creation, find out at least 3 bloggers and link to them every now and then in your posts to build relationships, traffic and subscribers.
11. Quicksprout.com is a great blog and it’s liked by everyone. In the recent time, you have added lots of new features to it including a discussion forum, online marketing training videos and a SEO auditing tool. What are your future plans for Quicksprout and how it is helping you generate more revenue for your company?
I am going to continue expanding on the tools I have created. People have been telling me they are seeing immense value from the SEO tools, so I am going to focus on expanding that along with Quick Sprout University.
Takeaway: You can find almost everything related to Internet marketing on Quick Sprout blog, he recently started Quick sprout university covering the basic terms like email marketing, content creation etc. If you want to learn about marketing from the pros for free, he is the guy to go.
12. Neil, you have done SEO consulting for big brands like Microsoft, Techcrunch, Amazon, HP. NBC, Ebay etc. How was your experience while working with these brands?
It was great. I got to learn many things along the way. I also found out how complex SEO is big companies with huge websites.
13. From QuicksProut.com, I came to know, you are able to drive huge amount of traffic and quality backlinks through infographics. How you come up with the idea of a new infographics and which steps you take to make your infographics viral on the internet?
I just brainstorm ideas and see what topics are popular out there. It’s very important for me to focus on what people are interested in at any given point or time.
Takeaway: You need to focus on brainstorming your ideas to get the most out your blogging efforts. Most bloggers fail to gain readership because they write about almost every topic under the sun and they don’t spend much time on brain storming.
Use simple tools like a paper and pen to come up with ideas, focus on what problems your readers might face and analyze different solutions and write them on your blog as blog posts (they can attract lot of attention from your readers).
14. How Bloggers Passion readers can get in touch with you and your message for my readers?
They can just head to QuickSprout About page.
Over to you: Let me know how did you like Neil Patel interview? If you like it, please share and comment.
Read: SaaS SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Do SEO for Your SaaS Business
