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Neil Patel is renowned as a marketer and entrepreneur. As co-founder of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg and Hello Bar, he has found enormous success: he was even named a Top Online Influencer by the Wall Street Journal, and a Top 10 Online Marketer by Forbes.

If you have a few minutes, watch the video below to hear Neil ruminate on how to drive traffic to your site through creativity. We’ve also outlined the major points below for your easy perusal.

Tap Into Your Creativity

Believe it or not, Neil Patel’s first entrepreneurial effort was a failure. He was self-admittedly young and naive, assuming that the adage “If you build it, they will come” applied to Internet marketing. He soon learned this was untrue, and then went broke paying a professiona...

Any entrepreneur trying to fund their startup is well aware of the benefits of raising capital. Large cash infusions enable you to reach the market quicker, add more resources, and launch with a burst of speed.

But are there any benefits to not raising capital? What happens when you avoid taking on capital and take your time to build a company?

There are lots of hidden benefits to building slowly, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best way to grow. More important is how you consider the benefits of avoiding capital and use them to your advantage.

Avoiding Dilution

If you refrain from taking on investors, you keep more equity. It’s an obvious truth that can be difficult to reconcile with the aforementioned benefits of taki...

Not so long ago, my post-work routine looked like this:

After a particularly grueling day, I’d sit on the couch and veg for hours, doing my version of “Netflix and chill,” which meant keeping company with a cold pint of ice cream. I knew the ice cream, and the sitting, were probably a bad idea, but I told myself this was my well-deserved “reward” for working so hard.

Psychological researchers have a name for this phenomenon: It’s called “ego depletion.”

The theory is that willpower is connected to a limited reserve of mental energy, and once you run out of that energy, you’re more likely to lose self-control. This theory would seem to perfectly explain my after-work indulgences.

But new studies suggest that we’ve been thinking about willpow...

As entrepreneurs, time is our most valuable asset. Every moment spent on a time sink is a distraction from the strides that we could and should be making with our core businesses.

But here’s the thing. Early-stage entrepreneurs are also notoriously cheap. Often revenue-strapped, we’re pumping as much money as we humanly can into the products and services that we’ve committed ourselves to developing.

At any given time, we walk a line between two things: spending money and doing more ourselves. As many of us will tell you, this is not an easy line to walk. I once burned through $20K on a vendor that I shouldn’t have hired. I also spent 15 hours a week on administrative tasks when I should have been working with an administrative assistant.

O...

I going to share the story of the creepiest, least appropriate guerrilla marketing tactic I’ve ever come across. I’m not going to name the startup founder who did it, nor am I going to tell you identifying details about his company. I just want to make sure that no founder trying to get ahead hears a story like this and thinks, “Oh, that’s a great idea!”

No. It is not a great idea. It’s terrible.

Let’s rewind. The other day I came home to a package on my couch. Now, this isn’t a rare occurrence — I order off of Amazon as much as the next Millennial American — but I didn’t recognize the return address. “Weird,” I thought. “What’s this?”

My boyfriend poured me a glass of wine and I absentmindedly ripped the package open while telling him abou...

Remember Pokémon GO? Of course you do because it was all you heard about for a few quick months in the summer of 2016. With millions of people downloading and playing the game, retailers and restaurants leapt at the opportunity to sponsor in-game experiences. Players flocked from location to location to virtually battle one another or to catch new Pokémon, and numerous companies were able to cash in on quick marketing wins.

There’s a lesson here, though. It’s most likely been a while since Pokémon GO was part of a recent conversation. Chances are that businesses are also no longer investing a significant portion of their marketing budget into the app’s in-game advertising opportunities. Short-term wins absolutely exist, but instead of...

We're so damn distracted by "growth" that we rarely ask ourselves what it is about growth that even matters.

You know who cares about growth? Our investors. The media. Our sewing circles of other Founders.

You know who cares about quality? Our team. Our customers. Our partners. You know, the people that we should be solely focused on.

There's a time and a place to focus on growth, but all too often our focus on growth comes directly at the expense of our focus on quality. And that's a dangerous place to be.

We need to have a discussion around making our startups better, not just bigger.

Size Doesn't Equal Quality

A couple of years ago, Basecamp Founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said something that always stuck with me when ...

Paying people with equity is synonymous with startups.

Founders love being able to buy things with Monopoly money and newly granted shareholders dream of a huge windfall someday. And that sounds awesome.

But the problem is that equity isn't like cash — it's far more valuable, yet we tend to spend it like it's free. We later come to learn that equity is not only expensive now, it's way more expensive later as the company grows, and we now hold less of it.

What's so bad about paying with equity?

It's not a bad idea if we value it properly. But that's the problem. Equity, especially in the early days, is often spent with little consideration for it's long term value.

"I'll design your mobile app for 10% of the company" might sound like a dea...

In late 2006, the much younger and more naïve 21-year-old version of me graduated from the University of Melbourne. I was full of optimism, elated by hope that the career I was about to embark upon would bring me a deep personal satisfaction in life. Between 24 and 29 years of age, I took home on average about $250,000 per year. In 2016, at 31, I took home exactly zero dollars.

For a lot of people, seeing an annual payment summary like this with their own name on it would probably trigger a rush of adrenaline equivalent to skydiving from ten thousand feet. They’d probably be thinking: “Hey, I’ve done well for myself!”

I remember seeing this and feeling nothing. Not because I thought it wasn’t enough, or because I felt like I didn’t deserve...

Some people dream of starting a successful startup so they can strike it rich, sell the company, and retire on a beach sipping mojitos. Others entrepreneurs nurture their one big idea and dream of creating a stable company that they guide through its growth for many years to come.

But the serial entrepreneur is a person with dozens, hundreds, even thousands of business ideas, who relishes the challenges and excitement of starting a new venture. Many serial entrepreneurs start one company after another, waiting just a couple of years for it to become stable before passing on the reins and diving headfirst into another startup.

The popularity of serial entrepreneurship has spawned a new business trend: the startup factory, or startup studio.