Why am I trying to get away from content marketing? If I want to grow my traffic to the level of Hubspot’s blog and get over 6 million visitors a month I would have to write content on things like “how to edit videos.” There are two problems with content like that. So, my team and I made a decision last week that I should only write one blog post per week, share my personal experiences, and get away from writing generic marketing content that I’ve been blogging about for years. But within a few days, people learned that they could get CPC data for free using Ubersuggest and traffic started to spike. But I didn’t stop there… Once I learned the power of free, I realized that I can probably grow the NeilPatel.com website to 3 or 4 million unique visitors a month by just giving more away for free. It’s easier than writing 7 blog posts a week and all I have to do is take what people love and pay for and give it all away for free. Conclusion I have no idea how many visitors I’ll generate by doing this, but if something as silly as giving away CPC data for free can double my traffic/usage, I don’t see why I won’t be able to generate 5 or 6 times more traffic by giving away top-notch features for free. You don’t have to be first to market to do well. For example, Google generates over $100 billion dollars a year and most of that comes from revenue from ads. The tools I mentioned above don’t even generate $100 million a year, yet the majority of the people click on the free organic listings in Google.
It was generating 117,425 unique visitors per month at the time I purchased it and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tool, the concept is really simple:
You put in a keyword you want to target via SEO or PPC, and it gives you more keyword ideas. That way you can grow your traffic by going after more keywords.
Most people thought I bought the tool to just redirect the traffic to NeilPatel.com so I could get more backlinks and rank higher for all of my search terms.
If you do the math it would come out to roughly 14 dollars a link.
But NeilPatel.com already had 3 times more links than Ubersugges.
And let’s face it, I already rank for most things marketing related… so the links don’t really help that much.
And others thought I was buying it because I wanted to redirect the traffic and net another 117,425 visitors a month.
But very little of Ubersuggest’s traffic was from countries that I generate revenue from.
For example, out of the 117,425 monthly visitors, Indonesia was the most popular region at 28,491 visitors a month and the United States only made up 13,492, visitors.
Full transparency: I didn’t buy it for either reason.
NeilPatel.com already had enough backlinks, and I already generated well over a million unique visitors every month.
Instead, I bought it as part of a huge experiment.
I wanted to see if I could grow my traffic without content marketing.
Why am I trying to get away from content marketing?
I rank for everything under the sun when it comes to marketing. Seriously…
Here’s my search traffic in the last 30 days (and I bet I will get a 40 plus percent lift in the next 30 days, but that’s for another blog post so stay tuned).
If I want to grow my traffic to the level of Hubspot’s blog and get over 6 million visitors a month I would have to write content on things like “how to edit videos.”
There are two problems with content like that. First, I wouldn’t be able to monetize it.
Second, and most importantly, I am not an expert when it comes to video editing so I shouldn’t blog about it.
I’ve also thought about writing about entrepreneurship, but I don’t really enjoy it as much.
And because of that, my lack of passion will show in the content when I publish it.
In general, if you aren’t passionate about what you are writing about, don’t waste your time. Your content will suck, and people will be able to tell.
So, my team and I made a decision last week that I should only write one blog post per week, share my personal experiences, and get away from writing generic marketing content that I’ve been blogging about for years.
Plus, it’s more fun to share stories than it is to write a blog post showing you how to use Twitter.
But there was one big issue.
I couldn’t move away from writing one blog post a week because the blog is what generates all of the leads for Neil Patel Digital (my ad agency).
I had to find something that could continually help generate more visits without me requiring to blog 7 days a week.
And although it took me over a year of experimenting… I found it.
So how are you going to grow your traffic now, Neil?
Remember how I mentioned Ubersuggest at the beginning of this blog post?
Well it was one of 7 experiments that worked out.
I took the old Ubersuggest that looked like this:
And I paid a developer to add a new skin and include CPC data. The product now looks something like this:
But here is what’s interesting: The moment I released the new Ubersuggest, the usage on the tool stayed the same.
But within a few days, people learned that they could get CPC data for free using Ubersuggest and traffic started to spike.
If you look at the graph above from Google Trends, you’ll notice that the usage died shortly after people found out I acquired it because they felt…
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