Eric Siu quotes: the gamer turned guru’s top tips.
“Entrepreneurs innovate. Businesspeople iterate. Most ‘entrepreneurs’ today are actually businesspeople.”
“The path to a million is finding the one thing that works, and just repeating it. So, I think it’s focus.”
“Another terrible mistake many advertisers make is not measuring their ROI. Imagine running an ad for seven days with no way to check the profitability of your campaigns. Would you invest more money into it? In short, measuring your conversion tracking is a must.”
“The most important tasks are the ones that will determine the future of your company. And it always comes down to two things: people and vision.”
“If you can hire an effective marketer the first time around, your company is financially better off. I, for one, don’t like thinking about hiring over and over again. You’ll lose both time and money if you have to go through do-overs. Best you spend time on hiring now, instead of breezing through the process and paying for mistakes later on.”
“The first step to hiring, is to know what kind of person you need for the role. Marketing needs a wholly different set of skills than say, programming or operations.”
“Hire really good people and get out of their way.”
“You take someone that’s humble, hungry, and smart, and you train them well, and they’ll stay with you longer, and then your costs aren’t going to be that high, and they’re committed to your business.”
“I also like to ask, ‘What is the hardest you’ve ever had to work for something?’ Because I like somebody to take me through the process of, like, they set a goal, it was maybe a big milestone that they had to achieve. They had to work really hard and I want to know like what they consider hard work, because I want that type of person in our organization, somebody that can set a really high-level goal. Maybe it’s a three year goal, but something that they have their eyes on and they’re really motivated to achieve it. I love asking those questions.”
“I think also the reason why I also want my touch on every kind of every candidate at least right now is so they can understand what my vision is, and what I see happening with the company, and they can tell that I also care about their future as well. It’s not just about, Eric wants to hit his goals all the time. So I think it’s that mutual kind of trust. I think that’s really important and the more trust you can show the people, the better.”
“I just read this book on my trip back from Japan. I literally finished it in a couple hours and that’s really rare for me. It’s called The Coaching Habit, and it’ll change the way you lead people forever because I think entrepreneurs… we just were used to getting things done, but instead of trying to prescribe answers to people and give advice all the time, it teaches you how to tease the answer out of people and really coach them up.”
“There’s a couple of books, I mean, Powerful, is from, I think, Patty McCord, from Netflix. It’s all about Netflix’s culture, so that’s a great book. There’s another one called The Culture Code. You can check that one out, too. And I also really liked Tony Hsieh’s book—this is back in the day—Delivering Happiness. It’s still a book that I remember. And then, there’s another book that he recommended, called Tribal Leadership, which talks about the different levels of how your culture is.”
“I think focusing on one thing, making it work, and then, letting it compound, and then, being patient with it. Obviously, be smart. If it’s a dud, it’s a dud. I know most people have a sixth sense about it. But I think that would be the one thing. Because, everyone says it. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates; all these people. But not enough emphasis goes on focus.”
“A favorite quote? I like this Winston Churchill one—it’s always kind of up in the air: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.'”
“If you actually do good work, you’ll get referrals and begin to develop a name for yourself.”
“If you wanna compete, you wanna be the best.”
“Once you learn the system, you can figure it out.”
“I think if you are really good as a marketer, you should be charging for a pay-for-performance model.”
“A lot of experiences—learning from other people’s experiences has led me to where I am.”
“Search engines are constantly evolving their algorithms to ensure that the highest-quality content is surfaced in response to user queries. And as far as they’re concerned, receiving a high volume of quality links from external websites suggests that your content falls closer to trustworthy than spammy on this spectrum. Failing to invest in content puts you at risk of being left behind.”
“You’ve probably noticed that a lot of link building and SEO guides focus on creating high-quality content. There’s a good reason for that: it’s far easier to build links to top-quality content because that’s what gets shared.”
“Businesses and individuals are constantly in search of quality material to link to so that they have something of value to offer their website visitors. As you’ll notice, few people link to a homepage, product page or shopping cart.”
“Content marketing refers to creating and sharing content (articles, blogs, infographics, videos) for the purposes of driving traffic to your website and moving visitors through your marketing funnel in order to acquire new customers. Link building is when you get other websites or blogs to link to your site’s page in order to improve your search engine rankings. The engines crawl the web looking for links between your webpages and other websites to decide how valid your content is and thus where your page should rank in their search results. If you want to invest in link building, you need high-quality content resources.”
“High-quality content is: well-researched and provides accurate information; speaks directly to your target audience; contains impeccably written copy; uses supplemental images, graphs, videos or infographics, when appropriate; is as complete and up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing. Succeeding with these five points requires that you start the content creation process with in-depth research. Without this background, you won’t know what’s truly ‘high-quality’ within your niche.”
“Find link-worthy content. Make something even better and reach out to the right people.”
“Build out a framework to repurpose content, especially when starting out.”
“One of the first places I turn for new article ideas is the ‘Top Content’ area found within my Google Analytics account. There, I’m able to access a quick list of the posts on my site that have been viewed the most often, providing me with some interesting insight into the subject matter that my audience finds most interesting. How do you choose which content idea to deliver? Refer back to your marketing goals to see which of these content ideas is most relevant to what you want to achieve.”
“Distribute as widely as possible. Not all people are hanging out on iTunes all the time.”
“A lot of the stuff is just business, as usual, and it’s just kind of sticking around for longer, and that’s how you reach a lot of listeners or visitors to your site.”
“A VP at Facebook recently reported that 90% of content will be video by 2020. Take a look at your Facebook newsfeed now. How many videos do you see? How about Snapchat/IG stories? Videos are everywhere. Take advantage of it now while your competitors are still in the dark and you’ll have a leg up.”
“I worked in tech before I left marketing for an online education startup called Treehouse. Long story short, we basically were about to run out of cash, but now the company is a $100 billion dollar company. And then from there, I had the unique challenge of, being able to save a failing company instead of a stagnant company. I decided to take the challenge because, you know, what am I going to lose, right? But one year into it, I actually ended up taking over the entire company. So I own the whole thing now.”
“I’ve just really enjoyed teaching people so, all the stuff I learned around marketing and other entrepreneurs, I have the Growth Everywhere podcast for that. And then Marketing School is just where I get to nerd out with my colleague Neil Patel… and just nerd out on those things and kind of hold ourselves accountable to staying good at marketing as well. And then beyond that, right now we have a SaaS tool that we’re working on. I have my hands in many different cookie jars, ’cause I like working on different things.”
“You probably don’t know the real ‘why’ behind your actions. Most people stop at their first answer. But you have to ask why to that answer. Ask it again to your second answer. Understand the five whys process to understand yourself.”
