In episode #815, Eric and Neil discuss their failed attempts at content marketing. Tune in to learn from their mistakes. Eric and Neil have committed to throwing a FREE Marketing School Live Event in Los Angeles, once Marketing School reaches 1M downloads in a 30 day period. Take action: Rate, review, subscribe, and SHARE. Check the progress here! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:27] Today’s Topic: My Failed Attempt at Content Marketing [00:40] Whenever a new game comes out, there are marketers who jump at the chance to write guides for the hottest releases. [00:57] Eric was one of those people and when Portal 2 came out, he made a website that served as a guide for the game. [01:05] He then decided he was going to write crappy articles and then get a bunch of links from black hat websites. [01:27] His traffic spiked, but then after a week, Google caught on to him and his site and traffic ceased. [01:44] Neil’s worst attempt at content marketing was creating a form called, “Traffic and Conversion”. [01:58] He got hit by a webmaster notification tool that said his content was spammy. [02:04] He realized a lot of people were spamming his form, so he cleaned it up. [02:11] The lesson he learned was that user-generated content doesn’t rank as well as original, curated material. [03:19] It takes time to build a following and a lot of it comes down to promotion. [03:31] Content and links are the most important factors of SEO. [03:45] You have to figure out how to promote your site, product, content. Etc. [03:57] Promotion always matters. [04:00] Another of Neil’s failed attempts was with a site “Online Poker Lowdown”. [04:05] He ranked on page one for the term “online poker”, but it dropped because there was very little useful information. [05:00] Quality matters! [05:06] If your content sucks, you will lose your ranking. [05:45] Instead of hustling, create content about topics you like. [06:19] That’s it for today! [06:24] Go here to see how many downloads the show is getting. Also rate and review to help Eric and Neil meet their goal of 1 Million downloads per month. Hopefully, we’ll see you at the live event in L.A.! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu