Visit his blog and you’ll see the words “I’m kind of a big deal.” His blog can be found at quicksprout.com where he blogs about the Internet and success. After reading the short opening paragraph of the page, you’ll agree. Neil is the co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. He has helped companies such as AOL, GM, and HP to make more money from the web. At 21,Neil was named a top 100 blogger by Technorati and one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.
CrazyEgg.com is a service that tracks your website visitors and pages. It helps individuals and businesses determine what people are doing when they visit their website. A “heatmap” tracking page visually shows where people clicked on the site which indicates what is effective and what is not. Getting more granular, it indicates where people click based upon the things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser, etc. KISSmetrics is designed to help businesses increase sales and conversion rates by identifying bottlenecks in the conversion process.
MO:
How did you manage to be such a well-known blogger by the age of 21? Are there secrets to gaining and maintaining a large audience of dedicated followers?
Neil: I helped a ton of other popular bloggers with their SEO. And by doing this many of them ended up blogging on me, which helped me get more dedicated followers.
MO:
Did your blogging success contribute to the success of your businesses in any way?
Neil: It did. Anytime I launch a business, such as KISSinsights.com, I can blog on it. And a ton of my blog readers go over to the service I blog about, sign up, and pay.
In addition to that blogging helps with credibility, which makes it easier to do things such as raising money from investors.
MO:
You’re a young guy. To have consulted with companies such as AOL, Amazon, and some of the other big dogs is quite an achievement. How did you manage to acquire and demonstrate such credibility so early in life to the point that these leaders would turn to you for help?
Neil: By helping out popular bloggers like Mashable, TechCrunch, GigaOm, and ReadWriteWeb, many of them ended up telling others about the results I provided them. And some of those people worked at large companies, who ended up signing on as clients.
MO: You talk about making mistakes and losing money. In one instance, you lost around a million dollars in a failed web hosting investment. How have those loses influenced your success?
Neil: When you make big mistakes, you typically learn from them. And by learning from those mistakes, you usually don’t make them with future companies, so your odds of failing drastically decrease. If I never made all of those mistakes, I wouldn’t have succeeded.
MO: CrazyEgg.com offers visitation and usage data in a way I have never seen presented before. What was your inspiration for the concepts behind your services at CrazyEgg?
Neil: When my business partner and I were consultants, we realized that companies were having a hard time visualizing how website visitors interact with their website. Because of this, we created Crazy Egg to solve the problem.
MO: Similarly, KISSmetrics is unique in that it looks to increase sales by identifying a company’s “conversion funnel.” What exactly is a conversion funnel and what do you do once you’ve identified it?
Neil: A conversional funnel is the steps people take throughout your website before they make a purchase. And once you identify the steps people take, you look at the pages that are causing the biggest drop-offs and you work on optimizing those pages.
MO: What’s next for Neil Patel?
Neil: I just started advising the guys who are behind Airline Tickets and Airport Parking. There isn’t much on those sites, but they are going to create informational websites that are going to change the way people travel. I also started a new blog called Online Poker Lowdown that I am working on.