How to Get Your First 1,000 Visitors Without Spending a Single Dollar (Neil Patel)

Here’s a clever content marketing strategy from Neil Patel that he promises can deliver 1,000 visitors to a new site.

In this article I will explain Neil’s content marketing strategy, comment on what I think are the pros and cons of each step, and then provide suggestions on how I think it can be improved and whether the 1,000 visitor promise is realistic or not.

The “First 1,000 Visitor Strategy” Explained

Neil explains how to get 1,000 visitors to a new site without spending any money in the following video. I’ve included a text explanation of the steps along with some commentary and analysis below.

Step 1 – Identify Your Target Audience

Neil says the first thing you should do is identify your target audience using the following criteria:

• Where do they hang out?
• What do they read?
• What are their interests?
• What are their fears?
• What are their goals?
• What are their motivations?
• What is their typical age?
• What social media channels do they engage with the most?
• Is there a particular gender that is most dominant in your niche?

The list of questions that Neil provides is a mix of both traditional demographic categories (i.e. age, gender) and psychographic data (i.e. interests, fears, goals, motivations, etc.). Demographic analysis focuses on external and physical qualities of a person whereas psychographics is interested in internal motivations which influence a person’s decision making the most.

But there’s a problem with Neil’s suggestions – if you have a new site, how are you going to get demographic and psychographic information?

There are a couple options:

1) You can do expensive and time consuming research

2) You can make your best guess

Since this content marketing strategy is all about getting 1,000 visitors for free, let’s throw out option 1. Instead, you are just going to have to make your best guesses.

Is guessing really all that helpful? Yes, it can be.

Instead of writing content without having any real notion of who you are speaking to, having a type of person in mind can focus your writing. It will help you write in ways that put the problems and desires of others foremost in your mind.

Step 2 – Identify What Your Ideal Audience Wants

Neil’s next step involves analyzing the online feedback and dialogue already occuring around the content you want to create to help you get into the minds of your potential audience. Here is what he recommends:

• Amazon – Look at books in Amazon that relate to your niche. Look at 2 and 3 star reviews and what people are saying is missing from the information they read. Take notes and use that disatisfaction as indicators of what you want to write about.
• Quora – Go to Quora and look at questions people are asking, answers that are given, and votes received. The highest voted answers give you an indication of what people want in regards to content.
• Reddit – Go to sub-Reddits on Reddit.com and look at what is popular. Look for what posts are getting upvoted.
• These sources give you ideas on content that will work well in your space and what is missing that you should write about.

Overall, this is a fairly good methodology to get you access to immediate feedback from your potential market. However, this research could be exceptionally time-consuming.

Here are some things you can do to avoid spending way more time on this than you should:

1. Determine the scope of the content you are creating. If you are writing a PhD dissertation, you can spend months on research. If you are wanting to write a 10,000 word guide on a topic, you need to limit yourself. Decide on a number of hours to spend on research and then allocate those hours to each of these three resources. It doesn’t have to be an equal amount of time – one or two of these sites might be much more profitable for you than others.
2. Outsource the research. You may not want to do this the first time, but if this proves to be a viable strategy that you want to repeat, outsourcing part, or all, of this research will really help you get through it quicker. You can hire and train a person to research all these sites or just one. Use places like Upwork to find workers with inexpensive rates and write very clear step by step instructions on how to sift through these sites, take notes, and then present their findings to you in your preferred format (or you can create a training video and visually show them exactly what to do).

Step 3 – Create the Most Epic, Mind-Blowing Resource on These Topics

• Use ideas from your research to create your content. List out everything you have learned.
• Go to Ubersuggest, input keywords related to your content, and look at the “Content Ideas” report to see what’s popular and what’s not. Popularity gives you an idea what content is being linked to, what is being shared socially, and what is getting search traffic. Look at what is not being covered in these popular content selections.
• Read comments on the popular blogs posts and pages in the “Content Ideas” report to see what people are complaining about, recommending, etc. that isn’t being covered in this content.
• Write 25 headlines for your content resource, eliminate 20, take top 5 and run a poll in an online community (like a Facegroup group) on what people think is the best.

Step 4 – Create a Gated Content Upgrade to Encourage Social Shares

• Create a PDF, mini- course, or guide that people must share in order to get using a plugin like OnePress Social Locker to facilitate the process.

In the course of 6 minutes, Neil presents a multi-step content research, creation, and promotion strategy. Let’s look at its strengths and weaknesses and how we might improve on it.

Pros

• The approach starts with target audience analysis that includes both demographic and psychographic factors to help focus your research and writing.
• Content creation is based on actual market research. Anytime you can build content around what the market is telling you, its a win. Nice to see suggestions that go beyond the typical keyword research models. Clever leveraging of existing resources (Amazon, Quora, Reddit, Ubersuggest).
• The goal revolves around creating the best content resource in your industry. This has the potential of really launching a new site as a thought leader in the marketplace. Additionally, if the resource does well, it can continue bringing in traffic for years and can always be updated along the way.
• The gated content upgrade using social shares to unlock is clever. However, this only works if the resource can attract enough visitors that a small minority of them will share to get the gated content. Additionally, if their social audience isn’t interested in your content, the share may not help much.
• Neil is incorporating strategic moves in every step. I really like that he is trying to leverage each step of the process for maximum effect from creation all the way to promotion.