Content Marketing Hacks with Eric Siu

In this episode of the Best Passive Income Model Podcast, listen in as Mark Podolsky chats with digital marketer, Eric Siu. Eric Siu is the CEO of the digital marketing agency called Single Grain and has worked with Fortune 500 Companies such as Sales Force, Yahoo, and Intuit. He is also the founder of the podcast, Growth Everywhere.

In this episode, Mark and Eric talk about how he got started. Eric graduated from college and was doing data entry at a cubicle somewhere when a friend suggested he try out digital marketing. Instead of rotting away doing the same job every single day, Eric decided to go for it. From there, Eric got an internship and never looked back.

Eric worked with his mentor, Neil Patel, as the Vice President of Marketing online, an educational marketing company called Treehouse when Neil asked him to help his cousin out and run the company. Eric eventually took over the company two years ago, paying $2 out of his pocket from the company profit. He then brought it to where it is today.

When asked about digital marketing, Eric said that it never ends. Social media has blown it up to a point where everything can be measured. It is important to have the ability to look at the numbers to see whether they’re working or not. 95% of the people start with something that you can draw conclusions from and this is a good start.

Eric started Growth Everywhere because he saw that there were no marketing podcasts out there. It also allowed him to talk to founders and pay it forward. It was a chance to put people together. It has grown by itself and Eric humbly says it gets nice comments. He has since started a training course behind the podcast. He believes that it is a complement to Single Grain and it’s also free branding for them.

For entrepreneurs, those doing a side hustle, want to increase their passive income, or are new to marketing, Eric advises the listeners to choose a path. Choose something and stick with that. Get good at it. Neil Patel at QuickSprout.com did just that. He came out with content every week for years. It’s about going an inch wide and a mile deep.

Eric advises having a budget of about $20,000 to $40,000 to get a funnel working. However, not a lot of people who are starting out have this kind of budget. He suggests that everyone can learn content marketing. He says it’s free to learn and be the expert. You can also eventually learn to articulate your message into words. When you do it consistently, you’ll get better at it, it will start compounding over time, and it’ll eventually get noticed. Building an audience is the hardest thing to do, according to Eric. If we’re not collecting email addresses or creating one-to-one relationships with our prospects, the platforms own us. Perry Marshall says that the goal of each email is to entice your customers to open the next email.

As a marketer, your job is to bring people to the point of sale. It’s all a game. Every single marketing tweak you make can add to or decrease your bottom line. To be a great marketer, you need a growth mindset. Keep pounding away at it. When you’re starting out, you have to learn a couple of times a day. If you say it’s too hard for you, you shouldn’t be in business.

On hiring a copywriter if you have a low budget, Eric suggests going through a Facebook Group called Cult of Copy. Siphon off as much information as you can. Educate yourself first. As a rule of thumb, ask yourself if your content is interesting to you. Is it something that makes you proud to share it with people? That would be a good parameter, according to Eric. To know who to trust and who not to trust, you can take in as much information as you can but it’s on you to determine signal from the noise. Look at consistency. How do you feel after listening to a podcast? Do you feel like you’re being dumped into a marketing funnel? 99% of the time, your gut will tell you when you’re getting the value or the runaround. Check out Frank Kern, Seth Godin, Eric Siu, Ryan Lee, Ryan Deiss, and Neil Patel. They all show up everyday. They are prolific and you get a sense that they really care. You get a sense that they love what they’re doing and that they just want to give.

When writing email, differentiate yourself with others by writing as if you’re writing to your mom. Have a long-term view of it. Build a relationship over time, as suggested by Gary Vaynerchuck. You can’t keep throwing right hooks because people will start to hate you. A good ratio agreed upon by Mark and Eric is 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 in terms of sending content before the promotion. The basic idea is to send 4 or 5 good pieces of content before you do the promotion. On Keyword Searches, Eric suggests that it’s something you don’t need to pay attention to. The more important question to ask whether or not you’re adding value to the world.

It is important to practice your writing every day. It’s like going to the gym and exercising. It helps you get better at it. Eventually, you start seeing the fruits of your labor. Eric set a goal of writing 500 words per day and inputting this into a spreadsheet that tracks the number of words he’s written in a year. When you get into the habit of doing that, you are able to automate the process. Keep going.

When asked about newbie mistakes that make him cringe, Eric talked about giving up too early. In terms of content, it takes about 12 to 24 months for things to compound and for you to see the machine giving your returns. You just have to play the long game. In the beginning you’re gonna suck. You just have to embrace it. You have to suck first to get good. However, when you no longer feel passionate about your work, maybe it is time to let go. 36 months is a perfect time to let go. As Seth Gold says, when you fail, you’re done. Move on to the next thing.

The strategy that’s working right now for digital marketing is Gmail Advertising. He says that it was something Google wasn’t consistent in implementing it. Not a lot of people are hitting it. Now is a good time to get in before it becomes saturated.

Eric also talks about playing a bigger game. He says he already has something that’s giving him a good cash flow. The next step is to figure out what he can do next to make him happy or how he can make an impact on the world. This is a game people optimize and play until their lives end.

When asked about Marks Best Passive Income Model, Eric said it sounds sexy. He also says that he can’t say much about it but at a high level, it’s interesting and he can’t really put fault in it.

TIP OF THE WEEK:

Eric: Long form content with 2,000 words or so are important to have out there. There are over 2 Million blog posts produced every single day. 300 to 500 word articles are not enough. Visit www.growtheverywhere.com and read “21 EPIC 10x Content Marketing Examples We Can All Learn From.” Read those and learn why they’re good.

Use a dashboard tool called Cyfe that helps you monitor your business data from one place and would cost $20 a month. It’s a steal and you can make as many dashboards as you want. Ahrefs allows Eric to see how many links he’s acquiring for SEO services. However, it’s fairly expensive.

Mark: Subscribe to Growth Everywhere Podcast and check out www.growtheverywhere.com. There are tons of resources on that website. My favorite tool out there is the Bad Hire Calculator.

Thank you for listening to the Best Passive Income Model podcast. Your support helps me to invite guests who share their knowledge that you can use to grow your business.