Neil Patel for many veteran marketers, start-ups and business owners alike is often perceived as perhaps the holy grail of internet marketing expertise.
With the flashy pop-ups, crazy imagery and opportunistic claims such as “Make money while you sleep”, it’s no wonder he drives a fan fare. Like many ‘experts’ in the online marketing Neil Patel derives authority is earned through transparency and openness, proven success stories and a steady stream of seemingly authoritative content pushed through the Neil Patel blog.
A lot of the time Neil Patel gets it right, he makes valid points and provides good insight but in his recent article on the 3rd September entitled “Numbers Never Lie: Metrics that will Tell you if your blog is engaging”, he missed the mark – big time.
Let’s get a few basics out of the way:
• Users go to blogs routinely for news
• Blogging drives sales through some kind of beautiful ‘Content Strategy’
• People who read blogs are not instant buyers
If you do not believe any of the above comments are true, please wash your mouth out with soap and cry in the corner because in the modern world of content consumerism, blogs serve one primary purpose which was entirely overlooked by Neil Patel in the context of SME’s and Start-ups.
SEGMENTATION
I and most other savvy internet marketers don’t give a flying toss whether you read my blogs or not. In fact, I rarely write articles because I have better things to do. I rarely aggregate articles through the media and I seldom suggest my clients engage in blogging unless they do so with the view of segmentation.
According to Hubspot, 55% of users spend less than 15 seconds on a website in the aggregate. At first, this seems outrageous – especially after you’ve spent three hours writing the perfect article for people to only read the first four lines.
TARGETING
The fact that a user clicked on a particular article which conveys information about a certain topic area provides marketers with a wealth of information, far superior to the targeting tools of Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other platform combined. Instead, you have an entire qualified audience for a topic area at your fingertips which can be used for the purposes of remarketing and customer profiling to do whatever you want with. It’s automatic next-level qualification of prospects and something that the so called experts fail to acknowledge time after time.
You can spend all the time you like writing perfectly engaging content but if you have the choice between sales, leads and profit compared with users who spend 1.5 minutes on-site versus just 20 seconds, I know which option I’d choose.
