Bowensthinks

Can you guess how long I’ve been a marketer? 7 years? Maybe 10? Guess again. I’ve been a marketer for 18 years now. That’s a long time… And funny enough, I’ve also been an entrepreneur for the same amount of time as I’ve never really held a “corporate” job. Many of you think I am smart, and I am great at marketing. But let me burst your bubble… I am NOT smart, and I am NOT a great marketer. Instead, I’ve just been doing everything long enough where I’ve learned what not to do. See, the first 4 or so years of my marketing career went really slow and didn’t go the way I wanted. This was mainly because I kept making mistakes. And even worse, I kept repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So, when I was around 20 years old, I created a list of marketing principles to never break because I wanted to ensure that I didn’t repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Over time I kept adding to the list, and it has helped me succeed not only as a marketer but also as an entr...

Are you frustrated that no one will link to you? Have you tried all of the basic link building methods like email outreach to find out that none of them are working for you? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Everyone says you need to write amazing content to build links. And although that helps, what if I told you it isn’t a requirement . Yes, link building is hard, but not impossible . And if you are struggling to build links, here are the tactics you need to follow… even if your website, product, or content aren’t as good as your competition, these tactics will work. Tactic #1: Link Intersect If you email a site asking for a link, the chances are they are going to ignore it. I get these requests all the time… and I ignore them too . But on the flip side, if you emailed someone that linked to 3 or 4 of your competitors there is a good chance they will also link to you. When someone links to a few of your competitors, this tells you that they don’t mind linking to sites within...

I’m a marketer. I know more about traffic generation than most others, and I surely know more about marketing than developers. But what if I told you that developers can generate you more traffic than an SEO or any other type of marketer? And no, it’s not because the developer implements changes to your site… they are just able to produce more traffic . What’s crazy about this is that it’s cheaper in the long run than paying marketers. Most of you know that I have an ad agency, Neil Patel Digital . And although I always want more big companies to pay us, typically a developer can generate you more traffic than I (or any other ad agency) can drive. It sounds bad, but it’s true. Here’s what I mean… My traffic growth I’ve shown you my traffic over time. You already know I get a lot of traffic, but, in case you forget, here’s my latest traffic numbers: In the last 31 days, you’ve helped me generate 1,864,246 unique visitors and 4,764,739 pageviews. That’s not too shabby! Even a...

Did you know that I’ve failed at SEO before? No, I’m not talking about when I first started my career. This was when I knew SEO like the back of my hand. I’m talking about when I was good enough to get sites ranked on page 1… that’s when I really failed at SEO . And boy was it was heartbreaking! Let’s just say this: I was able to rank a site on page 1 of Google for the term “online poker” and then my rankings tank. Not because of a Google penalty but from something I never expected. But before I go into what I learned, let’s first go over how it all started… Online Poker Lowdown Back in 2010, I bought an old poker site that was never really updated. It was called Online Poker Lowdown . Funny enough, the site is still up today even though I don’t own it. The reason I bought it was because it ranked in the top 1,000 for the term “online poker.” The site just needed some updating. If you are wondering how I found it, I was Googling for the term “online poker,” and I hit up ...

I wrote my very first blog post on July 24, 2005. That blog post is no longer live because it was terrible. The post was called, “Winning the Search Engine Marketing War.” It was 412 words long, contained no images, no external links, and it didn’t provide much value because it didn’t teach you anything. But you know what, back in 2005, the blog post was pretty darn good. See, I wasn’t competing with a lot of blogs back then. Currently, there are well over 440 million blogs and back in 2011, that number was 173 million . And in 2005, the web was still so small that there were only 64 million websites (with only a small portion of them being blogs). In other words, my first blog post was pretty darn good because something is better than nothing. People were just happy to get some information, even though it wasn’t great. But over the years, blogging has changed. What it used to be in 2005, isn’t what it is today. What blogging used to be A blog used to just be a blog. It was ...