Neil Patel Digital

Growing companies through innovative digital strategies.

Co-Founder

I am a New York Times bestselling author. The Wall Street Journal calls me a top influencer on the web, Forbes says I am one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says I created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. I was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

I've helped Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Google, Thomson Reuters, Viacom, NBC, Intuit, Zappos, American Greetings, General Motors, and SalesForce grow through marketing.

My marketing blog generates over 4 million visitors per month (51% of them spend money on paid ads), my Marketing School podcast generates over 1 million listens per month, my YouTube channel about marketing has over 31 million views and 765,000 subscribers, I have 1 million Facebook fans, and 372,000 Twitter followers.

I've spoken at over 310 conferences and companies around the world. From speaking at Facebook and Thomson Reuters to every major growth marketing conference, I'm available and interested in speaking at events worldwide.

For speaking opportunities, collaborations, events, and business development, please email Marina at mtampieri@npdigital.com

This is why a 14-year-old kid living in Missouri can go viral on social media while that 40-year-old marketing executive who has a Harvard MBA and works for a multi-billion dollar company can’t crack 100 views.

The marketing executive plans everything…

From the script, the editing, keyword research and even making sure brand guidelines are met.

Social media isn’t a formula.

Companies are trying too hard... just create authentic content.

People relate to real messages… no one cares for content that is dull but looks perfect.

Stop making your team jump through so many steps and hoops to create content.

It just doesn’t work.

And streamlining your social media process is just going to kill your views.

See the 14-year-old doesn’t think about data, systems, or processes… they just think, “Oh this is cool, let me post it”.

While the 40-year-old executive, wants to have meetings to go over ideas, then has a copywriter script it, and then brings in actors and videographers to help create the content.

Social media marketing isn’t that complex. Think like a kid, not an adult and you’ll do better.

Neil Patel

5 words to never use in marketing…

Don’t use “cheap”… try words like affordable.

Don’t use “discount”… try limited time offer or promotion or X% off.

Don’t use “buy”… try start my free trial, upgrade, add to cart or get started.

Don’t use “hurry up”… instead if there is a limited quantity show it. Or if there is a limited time, show a countdown timer.

Don’t use filler words like “um, sort of, basically, essentially…” you don’t need to replace them with anything.

My favorite content marketing AI use case…

When we analyzed 10,000 websites we found that 14.04% of the web pages on a website target the same keywords as other pages on the same website.

This is an issue because if multiple pages target the same keyword, search engines won’t know which page to rank.

So instead of giving you better odds of getting more traffic… it decreases your chances of ranking.

What I want you to do is find all the similar pages and then use the following prompts in order when combining two or more pages:

Prompt 1: Analyze the content on [insert URL]

Prompt 2: Analyze the content on [insert URL 2]

By asking those 2 prompts first it gives the AI time to analyze each article.

Prompt 3: What are the overlapping concepts in both articles?

This again gives the AI time to think and will help create a better output.

Prompt 4: Combine both the articles focusing on the overlapping concepts, but also include the unique concepts in both articles.

You'll want to double-check out the output.

In many cases the output won't be as thorough as you want, so you'll have to use this prompt to expand upon it.

Prompt 5: Expand the content. Specifically the section under the heading "insert the heading from the article"

Try it out. It will save you time.

When you combine pages, make sure you 301 redirect one of the URLs to the other.

And don’t forget to update internal links.

When we typically fix this issue on websites we work with on average we see a 13% increase in SEO traffic.

5 GPTs That Are Game-Changing For Entrepreneurs 

There are custom versions of ChatGPT that can make your life easier as an entrepreneur. 

Here are 5 worth checking out:

1. Data Analyst – you can drop in a file and it helps you visualize the data.

This is a great way for you to quickly visualize how your business is doing.

2. Slide Creator – this makes it much easier to create PowerPoint Presentations.

Whether you like them or hate them, you’ll find yourself creating a lot of them as an entrepreneur.

3. Whimsical Diagrams – explains and visualizes concepts with flowcharts and diagrams.

Look, you are always going to have tons of ideas. You’ll want an easy visual way to explain these ideas to others and this GPT helps with that.

4. ScholarAI – search and analyze data from over 200 million research papers and books.

You’ll always find yourself doing research and ScholarAI in most cases gets you what you need faster than a Google search. 

5. Voxscript – it helps summarize web pages and YouTube videos.

You’ll want to continually learn and get better. This gives you the most insights in the least amount of time.

This will help you with that.

Here’s the ideal content length for each social network (you’re not going to like the Facebook data).

We analyzed 2,384,083 pieces of content to figure out how long your content should be…

Instagram
Reels should be 11 to 17 seconds long if their focus is entertainment. 38 to 51 seconds long if educational.

Carousels should be 7 to 10 slides long, but you have to use a hook on slide 1 AND slide 2 for it to work well.

LinkedIn
Short-form videos should be 40 to 46 seconds long.

Long-from should be 3 to 4 minutes long. 

Text should be 20 to 38 words long if motivational. And 291 words long on average if educational.

X
Text should be 14 to 21 words long if motivational.

9 to 35 words if entertaining.

173 words long on average if educational.

TikTok
Videos should be 18 to 31 seconds long if entertaining.

And 42 to 54 seconds long if educational.

YouTube
Shorts should be 28 to 33 seconds long if entertaining.

And 41 to 57 seconds long if educational.

Long-form videos performed the best if they were on average 7 minutes and 9 seconds long.

Facebook
In most cases the reach sucked no matter what the length of the content was… :/

It sucks but it is what it is.

Use the above data as a guide, and don’t add fluff to your content to stretch it out. It will crush your reach.

And don’t cut your content to make it shorter if your content is amazing.

The data above should be a guide. Being off a few seconds or words isn’t a big deal.

Stop posting professional pictures online.

Your social media profile isn’t supposed to look like a professional art gallery.

To prove it to you, we analyzed 100,000 photos on social media to see if there was any difference in engagement. 

And we looked at both professional photos and normal ones.

It took a little while to do as we had to have pay humans go through the photos and let us know if the photos were professionally taken or not… and shockingly it’s not as simple to do as one may think.

Can you guess what the results were?

Professional photos had 20.8% fewer likes and 35.1 fewer comments.

Now there were a few rare cases where professional photos (and normal ones) did really well… such as posting an engagement photo, a wedding photo, or a baby gender reveal photo…

I think you get the point.

But overall people resonate more with normal photos.

Don’t overthink it. Especially if you are a large corporation.

Sure, you still want your images to be clear, the angles to be right, and even the lighting to be good.

But you don’t need to hire a professional photographer to take pictures.

People want casual photos that are “real” as they tend to be more relatable.

Here’s the ideal posting frequency for each social network (you’re not going to like the Facebook data).

We analyzed 332,490 social media accounts in the last 30 days to figure out how often you should post on each social network to gain the most followers and engagement...

X
Post – 3 plus times a day

X’s algorithm doesn’t restrict future reach if you post crap content.

Post as many ideas as you have and use this platform to test what works, take what’s working, and post that on the other social platforms.

From the data we looked at, videos in general also didn’t perform as well as text on X.

Instagram
Post/Reels – 1 to 2 times a day

Stories – 2 to 4 a day

Live - at least once a week

If you post more than 2 times a day on Instagram we see it affecting the previous posts negatively.

LinkedIn
Post – 1 a day

If you want to post on LinkedIn 2 times a day make sure you spread out your post at least 7 hours. 

If you post them too close to each other, it affects the previous post's reach. Hence the recommendation was once a day.

TikTok
Post – 1 to 3 times a day.

Worse case you need to post at least every other day.

If you don’t, you’ll find that it will take too long to build up momentum and your future videos won’t do as well even if the content is good.

YouTube
Post – 1 short a day and 1 long-form video a day

Ideally spread them apart for at least 5 hours.

By posting a combo of both your account will grow faster.

If you post too frequently on YouTube and the quality of the content isn’t up to par, you’ll find that all your videos won't perform as well as they should.

Facebook
For this network, we couldn’t find patterns on what’s causing the most growth.

The majority of the accounts weren’t doing well no matter how little or how much they were posting on a daily or weekly basis.

Now, even though the above shows you how often you should post, keep in mind that the most important element is the quality of your content.

Don’t just post because you know you need to post, make sure your content quality is top-notch.

The prompts I use to get ChatGPT to write content like you

One of the biggest issues with AI writers is they don’t write content like you do.

If you have a premium account of ChatGPT you can fix this.

First, use this prompt:

***Start prompt***

Please analyze the writing style on [insert URL of a blog post you wrote]

***End prompt***

Next, I want you to use this prompt:

***Start prompt***

Now I want you to analyze the writing style on [insert URL of a blog post you wrote] and [insert URL of a blog post you wrote].

***End prompt***

Lastly, you’ll want to use this prompt to create your article.

***Start prompt***

Use the same writing style that you found in the above URLs that you analyzed.

I want to write an article about [insert topic] that includes stats and cite your sources. Make sure you cover information that most websites don’t talk about. 

The article should be tailored to [your ideal customer].

The article should focus on [what you want to talk about] instead of [what you don’t want to talk about].

Please mention [insert your company or product] in the article and how we can help [your ideal customer] with [the problem your product or service solves]. But please don’t mention [your product or service or company name] more than twice.

***End Prompt***

Keep in mind this works best if you are having ChatGPT analyze blog posts that are at least 1000 words in length.

If you also haven’t written any blog posts, but like someone else’s writing style, you can have ChatGPT write articles like them, just use their blog post articles for prompts 1 and 2.

Why is it important to tailor content to the ideal customer?

How can I use blog posts to prompt ChatGPT?

If you are going to use AI to write content you can’t forget about DRIVE.

Without DRIVE, you’ll find that AI will just crank out content that no one will read.

It’s why we find human-written content outranking AI-written content 94.12% of the time.

So what’s DRIVE?

DRIVE stands for data, review, insights, visuals, and energy.

Here’s how to use it to make your AI content get read.

Data – it’s hard to prove a point if you aren’t backing it up with data.

You can use Scholar GPT to help you gather data or you can just use prompts. Make sure you integrate data within your content and cite your sources.

It helps reinforce that you know what you are talking about.

Review – you need to review, edit, and fact-check the content AI produces.

AI produces a lot of inaccuracies. 

This causes people to stop reading, and bounce away (click the back button), which signals to search engines that users don’t care to read your content so they shouldn’t rank it high.

Insights – what insights do you have that others don’t?

Share your personal experiences within your content. It not only makes it more personable, but it helps build up your authority.

Plus it makes your content stand out from other AI content as it is tough for AI to integrate personal experiences.

It's also the same reason why Google loves when content has experience, expertise, authority, and trust. They rank content higher when it contains those elements.

Visuals – whether it is images, videos, or even audio… use visuals and rich media to help get your message across.

Everyone consumes content differently and just having blocks of text with no visuals makes things harder to read.

Energy – no one likes reading dry content, put some life into the content.

You can show your energy by using humor or storytelling or just by writing in a conversational tone.

Just think about a college lecture… when the professor has low energy people tend to stop paying attention.

Also, remove any fluff in the content. It really takes the life away.

If you know SEO you have a huge advantage in social media marketing.

We analyzed 25,000 social posts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X.

Can you guess how long social content typically gets traffic?

Well, from the posts we analyzed, 98% of them got little to no more views and reach after 58 hours.

And to make matters worse 73% of the views and engagement happen in the first 24 hours.

But if you create content, why would you only want views for the first 24 hours or even 58?

Well, there is one big difference with the 2% of the posts that continually got traffic after the first 58 hours.

Some of those posts got more views and reach even 30 days after the content was published.

And the commonality wasn’t the social network.

Sure it is easier to get long-term traffic from YouTube, but it’s also possible on TikTok, Instagram, and other networks.

So what’s the big difference?

There were actually 2:

1. The content was on evergreen topics – in other words, the content was still useful a month or even 2 months or a year from now.

2. The content was on popular topics – if you do keyword research and create content on popular topics you’ll get more traffic.

This is why if you know SEO you have an advantage for continually getting more social media reach.

Because a lot of SEO revolves around keyword research and creating evergreen content.

The prompt I use to generate 20X more keyword ideas.

Anytime you do keyword research for SEO or paid ads, you go to a tool and they give you a list of ideas.

But a lot of the time these tools can’t think outside the box like AI.

Instead, they keep giving you the same regurgitated keywords as all the other tools do.

So I go to Answer the Public and type in a keyword.

For this example, let’s use the phrase “digital marketing”.

I then scroll and find all the relevant keywords for my business.

I own an agency called NP Digital, so the keyword suggestion of “digital marketing agency” that Answer the Public provided is a good fit.

I then take that keyword and use this prompt with ChatGPT:

Please give me keyword ideas based on the word "digital marketing agency"

In your case, you would just replace “digital marketing agency” with the keyword for your industry.

And ideally, you’ll want to give ChatGPT a keyword that is at least 3 words as the results tend to be much better.

And here is what ChatGPT spit out:

1. Digital marketing services
2. Online advertising agency
3. Internet marketing solutions
4. SEO optimization company
5. Social media management agency
6. Pay-per-click (PPC) management      services
7. Content marketing agency
8. Email marketing specialists
9. Digital branding agency
10. Web design and development firm
11. Lead generation services
12. Digital marketing consulting
13. E-commerce marketing agency
14. Video marketing agency
15. Mobile marketing solutions
16. Reputation management company
17. Influencer marketing agency
18. Local SEO services
19. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency
20. Analytics and data-driven marketing firm

15 out of the 20 keyword recommendations were useful to me and I’ll end up using them.

I then follow up with the prompt:

Now please provide variations that are informational, transactional, and navigational.

You'll get roughly 30 more ideas (10 for each bucket) and I usually find 5 to 10 more good ones from that second list.

Try it out.

Good marketing doesn’t require tricks.

It’s not about using a single word that'll skyrocket ad click rates.

Or using a tool that will magically do everything for you.

It’s about understanding your audience first.

For example, Stanley Cups didn’t do well until they understood that their real audience was women, and they wanted their product in a variety of colors.

That one thing made Stanley go from $194 million a year in revenue to $402 million in just 1 year.

Not SEO or paid ads...

This is also why Jeep doesn’t sell cars. They sell an adventure.

Or how Amazon sells convenience and affordability.

And how Nike motivates and inspires you to accomplish your goals.

Spending time on tactics, strategy, and even “tricks” is fine (assuming they are ethical).

But first, take the time to understand your ideal customer and what they want.

Because without that, no marketing plan or strategy will produce the results you want.

If you are going to post content, this social network will give you the most love.

Before I tell you which social network will love you the most, let’s look at the user count of each one of them according to Statista.

Facebook – 3.049 billion
YouTube – 2.491 billion
Instagram – 2 billion
TikTok – 1.562 billion
LinkedIn – 1 billion
X – 619 million
Pinterest – 482 million

Now let’s look at how many pieces of content are uploaded to each social network per day:

Facebook - 350 million (Truelist)
YouTube - 3.7 million (Wyzowl)
Instagram – 95 million (Zippia)
Tiktok – 34 million (SignHouse)
LinkedIn – 2 million (Omnicore Agency)
X – 500 million (David Szyce)
Pinterest – 41 million (Oberlo)

Now let's look at the engagement per social network.

To get the answer, we looked at 3,495,109 posts on these 7 social networks to see which one loves users the most.

The answer is LinkedIn.

Funny enough, people give them the least love because they have the lowest number of posts created daily.

So, if you take the time to give LinkedIn some love, they will reciprocate.

This is the biggest mistake marketers make with keyword research.

There are different types of keywords and they have different types of intent.

For example, I recently have been looking for an electric vehicle, and I recently searched for “Tesla Model S VS Porsche Taycan”.

Now when searching that phrase it’s obvious that I am trying to get the PROs and CONs of each car to figure out which one is better.

On the flip side, if I type in “buy an electric car” it’s clear I am looking to buy one.

But my query isn’t specific enough for a website to just show me one electric car.

Yes, they could in theory do that, but they will get a lot of people bouncing away which will hurt your rankings in the long run.

See, ranking for a keyword is half the battle, but the other half is matching the intent with the right web page and content.

SEO isn’t about ranking a web page. It’s about helping people out and showcasing a web page that solves the problem they just searched for.

So don’t just think about the keywords you want to rank for, but also think about the intent of that keyword.

Look, no matter how many backlinks you build, no matter how fast your load time is, and no matter how good you are at on-page SEO… you’ll never rank well if the keyword intent doesn’t align with your web page.

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