Beware of Neil Patel and His Companies!

Neil Patel, one of the most popular faces in the digital marketing industry, is actually a big scammer. He is selling lies in good packaging and people are buying them. I used to respect Neil because of his digital products and the knowledge he shares everywhere.

But after I discovered his true methods, I lost all my faith in him. Neil Patel is a hypocrite. He tells everyone to avoid black hat SEO but he is actually providing the services of the same. His blog might look interesting and his YouTube channel might get a lot of views, but it doesn’t mean that Neil’s own services are ethical and trustworthy.

I have worked with him. And from my experience, I can guarantee you that Neil is running a big level scam and he is lying openly. The tactics he shares on his blog are useless and his biggest tool to cheat people is his consulting business.

Take my word for it; do anything but hire Neil Patel for your business’s marketing.

You might get impressed by all the stats he keeps rubbing on everyone’s face and how he paints a picture of being a ‘serial entrepreneur’ and a ‘digital marketing expert’. The reality is quite horrific and different. He has built his empire on criminal activities and stealing people’s money.

His services are the worst ones in the market. I won’t say that he isn’t a marketing expert. No, Neil Patel knows how to market his brand and reach more people but he uses that knowledge and technology for the wrong activities.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who think of Neil Patel as an inspiration, I used to be one of them, but he doesn’t deserve that respect. He is a sham and I hope this article will give you a glimpse of the same.

In case you don’t know who Neil is:

Before I begin to describe my experiences, it is essential that you get familiar with Neil first. If you already know who Neil is, you can skip this section.

Neil Patel was born on 24th April 1985 in London. His parents moved to Orange County Cali on 1987. According to his bio, he lived in a middle-class family where his mother was an unpaid teacher and father a normal guy with a 9-5. He says that his uncles were rich people and they always rubbed their wealth on his parent’s faces, and this leads him into entrepreneurship.

Neil Patel is the owner of KISSmetrics, NeilPatelDigital and QuickSprout.

All of them are major digital marketing companies. They provide you with software solutions and consulting services to help your brand in digital growth. I haven’t tried his software, and I’m not planning to, but I have tried his consulting business.

I promise you, it was one of the biggest mistakes of my business to hire Neil Patel Digital. I have explained my experiences in detail in the next section.

He makes a lot of claims on his Quora answer on “Who is Neil Patel?” but I don’t think that most of those claims are real. He speaks a lot of bullshit on his Quora answer and I’m not going to just say all that here.

I have to say that this guy is freaking rich, but what I don’t like is his sources of revenue. He cheats people online and makes false promises, which is something that should be addressed as soon as possible. He has built a huge brand on the internet and he uses it to bait more customers.  In fact, many people think of him as a thought leader in the digital marketing arena. Before I got cheated, I also used to think of Neil as a respectable and authoritative person. I was very wrong.

How Neil Patel’s Agency Cheated with Me

Ok, I have had two bad experiences with Neil Patel and his companies. I will explain each of them in detail so you can be certain of how pathetic and depraved Neil Patel’s businesses are. My first experience was with Neil Patel Digital, his internet marketing agency. My second experience is actually indirect. My sister had bought one of his courses and realized how pathetic Neil Patel’s courses are.

First, let me discuss what happened to me.

I used to run an eCommerce store on athletic gear. It was going good, everything was ok but I wanted to increase its growth. I had reached some sort of plateau and I wanted to climb higher. The problem was, my competitor always used to rank higher than my site, no matter what I did.

I thought about learning a little more of SEO, but one of my friends, who was also working on my site, recommended me to contact Neil Patel. I have known about Neil Patel since 2011. I already knew a little about Neil Patel at that time. He was a respected guy in the industry and there was no reason for me to doubt his expertise.

If you’re like, “Come on, that’s not possible”. Trust me, if you’d visit his website right now and take a look at his branding and marketing, you’ll also get fooled. It’s really difficult to see through his lies and realize that his whole marketing business is a sham.

Well, I went to his website, NeilPatel.com, which was founded recently at that time, and browsed through the various articles present. I was already impressed because Neil Patel’s content is present on KISSMetrics, Search Engine Journal and other reputed platforms. I contacted them and got a reply quickly.

I discussed my project requirements with them and everything was going good. They first took an advance of $45,000 for marketing my business. I didn’t hesitate at first because it was Neil Patel, the biggest digital marketing brand.

Now that I think of it, I was acting like a fool all the time. I didn’t hesitate to check the credibility of Neil Patel’s services. I didn’t hesitate to pay them the advance because I thought they are going to deliver results. I was a fool to trust this guy so easily.

They got started on my project and did a little tweak here and there. They developed a strategy for my website, audited the current SEO health of my site and then, suggested a few implementations. During the first few days, I thought I had hired a bunch of robots to work with me. They used to work fast and hard. The problem was not this, it was something else.

They did some implementations and within 2 months, my website was ranking on the number one spot for the keywords I desired. I was glad, way more glad than I should have been. I thought I had made a good decision to hire Neil Patel and his agency. I happily paid them the rest of the amount (around $55,000) and told them that it was great working with them.

They gave me a few suggestions and I started following them. Everything was going good but within 2 weeks of my site reaching the top, it vanished from the search rankings. My site’s organic traffic count dropped all of a sudden. I thought it was some error but no, Google had PENALIZED MY WEBSITE.

This freaking guy had done some malicious activities to push my site’s ranking. I should have known that Neil Patel was a fraud. But they acted so coolly and professional, that it became nearly impossible to see the reality behind their lies. Google penalized my website for using black hat SEO tactics. All my marketing efforts and strategies went in vain.

When I did a little research, I found that my website was getting traffic from irrelevant places and the kind of traffic it was getting was not useful in any sense. All the SEO success Neil Patel had promised to deliver was false.

Not only that, his team had filled my website with useless and crappy content so it will rank for keywords with more ease and accuracy.  To be honest, they used a lot of illegal tactics to promote my website. All they cared for was showing me some results so I will pay them readily.

At least I thought that because when I contacted Neil Patel’s agency about my project, they told me that it must have been a cyber attack from one of my competitors. They started telling me to hire them again so they can fix this issue and get my site on the number place in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They were acting as if I was some ignorant baby boomer who had never used the internet in his whole goddamn life!!

They thought they could fool me with all the jargon-filled nonsense about cyber attacks and technical SEO. When I contacted another digital marketing agency for my website, they first laughed at me for using black hat SEO and then they told me that they will repair the website but it will take some time.

Neil Patel himself says that SEO takes 21 months to show results. But he is a hypocrite. His agency is looking for ways to get money from businesses. He has created this fictional personality of being a good guy and a digital entrepreneur while in reality, he is nothing more than an online scammer.

He boasts a lot about his expertise on his website and how he is able to rank so high. This helps him attract businesses like mine so he can work with us. Beware of Neil Patel because he is not a simple fraudster.

He took around $95,000 from my company and gave me fake results for the same. His SEO implementations were supposed to enhance the growth of my company. But instead, they only depreciated it further and increased my expenses. They are so arrogant that they thought I will fall for their tricks again. They have contacted me many times after the incidence of the progress of my website and how they can get me back on the number one place.

But I have already suffered enough losses. And that’s not all. My sister also lost a lot of her precious time and energy because of a Neil Patel product.

Quick Sprout University – A Synonym of Disappointment

You know enough about Neil Patel for understanding what quality he would provide in his “university”. His latest product is ‘QuickSprout University’ which is supposed to teach people about getting crazy traffic to their website and get followers. After my experience with Neil, I didn’t even think once before blocking all his websites, but my sister signed up for it as she didn’t know about my incident.

And just like I expected, she realized her mistake soon enough. She purchased this product because she wanted to learn more about search engine ranking and other marketing stuff.

The ‘marketing expert’ Neil is not the coach in the Quick Sprout University! It is some guy called Brian Dean. This fact itself is a big betrayal, as this course is marketed by Neil himself and no one will think that Neil will NOT be the coach of the course if he is selling it.

The QuickSprout University covers social media, email marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, conversion optimization, reputation management, link building, SEO and conversion optimization. It has many videos which start with a funny intro, however, there is NOTHING ELSE of value. The maximum length of the videos is around 6 mins and there are only a few written articles provided. They don’t have any kind of introduction video which shows what they will be teaching in the course and explain who the hell Brian Dean is. But that’s not all.

Neil makes simple and easy to understand content, but this time his content is WAY TOO SIMPLE. So simple that it does not provide any f*cking value to the user.

This University is just one of the worst products I have seen from Neil but it seems that this guy doesn’t want to improve and just uses his brand to fuel his lavish lifestyle.

There is NO support in the QuickSprout University and their “money back guarantee” is extremely shady as there is no one you can contact if you want your money back. The videos’ length is so short that it does not provide value and don’t explain any topic in depth. And the lack of any organization makes it really difficult to navigate through this course. Finally, who the f*ck charges this much money for a course that provides little to no value!

Neil gets away with a LOT of stuff and it seems QuickSprout Uni is just one of those things. I’m very surprised at the number of DUMB people who trust Neil Patel even after buying his useless content. When my sister realized her mistake, she wanted a refund but guess what? There is no support on this whole freaking website and thus, there is NO WAY you can get a refund.

This whole business model is based on trapping innocent people into buying his expensive course and then not being able to get a refund. The worst thing is that only a few intelligent people will realize that Neil is tricking them.

Insulting Women in his ads

Neil Patel does not have any values other than money and getting more followers on social media. However, he crossed all the limits when he published an advertisement which was just offending. Here is the ad that I’m talking about:

Shocked? Well, everyone in the internet community was shocked as well. He ran this advert on a large scale and it was promoted like his every other ad campaign. The issue with this advertisement is completely obvious, he isn’t just saying that sex sells, but he is also implying that the girl in the advertisement is so helpless and slutty that if Neil wouldn’t have hired her, she would be posing naked for magazines. This is pure sexism and an insult to all the women. I think this advert perfectly showcases Patel’s real mentality towards women.

What do you think, by the way, was this advertisement appropriate or Neil shouldn’t have even launched it in the first place?

A Fake Brand to Hide His Lies

There is no way that you found out about Neil Patel from any other sources but from his social media accounts. I can guarantee that. Why? Because this guy spends A LOT of money on marketing his social media profiles and uses blackhat marketing techniques to keep his profiles as much as visible as possible.

If you are the 0.1% who believes that Neil Patel is a white hat marketer then this section is going to hurt your feelings mate. Because that simply isn’t true. Neil Patel uses black hat SEO marketing tools to keep his social media rankings higher than his competitors.

Many people believe that Neil is posting organic content and that is why his rankings are so high, but that is not that case. I have explained his social media profiles down below:

YouTube

Neil Patel has around 300k subscribers on YouTube but most of his subscribers are actually from dummy accounts that he bought in the early days of YouTube, when the YT security was not very high. These accounts are VERY EXPENSIVE but money is not a problem for this guy, cause he is making a lot of it from selling his useless courses and services.

Many people are going to question saying,” How can you say that Neil is using fake subscribers? What proof do you have?” So for that, I’m going to leave a screenshot down below, which is of Neil Patel’s YouTube videos page. And as you can see it merely has a couple of thousand views, whereas an organic channel has much more views.

For example, here is a YT channel with a similar number of subscribers and as you can see he has much more views than that of Neil Patel, Why? Because he is not using fake subscribers!

Instagram

Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms however, it is not as old as YouTube. Thus, it is way more difficult to get fake followers and likes here. And that is why Neil Patel only has around 10k followers. This also explains why he only got around 7-10k views on his YouTube videos, it is because that is his reach.

He mainly uses Instagram for running spam adverts, as a lot of young people use Instagram and they are easy to manipulate (especially for a guy like Neil).

Twitter

Finally comes his Twitter, which is not as new as Instagram and Neil have taken full advantage of this fact. He bought followers on Twitter when it was new. As you can see he has been in social media for a long a*s time, he made his Twitter account way back in 2007 and Twitter was not quite mature back then. So Neil must have bought followers using illegal dark web websites.  His tweets are just promos of his YouTube channel and courses. And the screenshot below shows that he does not get much engagement here as well (which is a big red flag for dummy followers).

All in All

This freaking guy thinks he can rob many businesses by pulling off such ridiculous stunts. What he doesn’t know is that not everyone will fall prey to his marketing schemes. People aren’t blind, Neil. And he should know that better than anybody else as he spends so much time on the internet.

It took me a lot of hard work and patience to get where I was. Neil Patel’s agency not only took $95,000 from me but also ruined all of my hard work. I just hope that no other business or start-up has to suffer because of this digital scammer.

Hasn’t he done enough?

Sources:

1. https://growth.org/discuss/should-neil-patel-take-down-this-ad-is-it-sexist-downright-offensive
2. https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/hiring-neil-patels-firm–KkY8HHnkItL61OwQ29f
3. https://thedirty.com/city/san-diego/neil-patel/#post-2265370
4. https://www.affiliateresources.org/quicksprout-university-review/
5. https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/49s70w/shots_fired_at_neil_patel_failing_at_marketing/
6. https://avertscams.com/quick-sprout-university/
7. https://neilpatel.com/about/
8. https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Neil-Patel