Neil Patel is a 21-year-old online marketer entrepeneur online-trepeneur who maintains a myriad of internet projects including Crazy Egg, Serph and Siteblimp. He was featured as a “Wizard of Buzz” in the Wall Street Journal because of his status as a certified Jedi master with Digg.com and the social media field.

Why did I interview him? For tips, of course. Neil was kind enough to offer BipolarNation.com some insight, advice, and even some code:

BipolarNation: In “Anger Management,” Jack Nicholson’s character asks Adam Sandler’s character who he is. Adam Sandler replies by telling everyone his name, and Jack Nicholson says that he doesn’t want to hear what his name is, he wants to know WHO he is. Then Adam Sandler starts naming his qualities, his job, and Jack Nicholson says he doesn’t want to hear those things, either. With that in mind, who are you?

Neil: Tough question, I am probably going to answer it wrong just like Adam Sandler did. I am a 21 year old Indian kid who loves to eat Taco Bell and watch movies. During the day I spend most of my time on a computer and during the night I spend most of my time sleeping.

BipolarNation: First, how would you describe your life?

Neil: I definitely view myself as a normal guy who is no different than the computer geek who lives next door. I eat lots of fast food and during my spare time I go to college just like most people my age.

I don’t really see myself [as being] successful and [I] feel that I have a long way to go before I get my big hit.

BipolarNation: When did you first get into computers, and were you always trying new ideas?

Neil: When I was around 11 or so I got my first computer and used to surf the web and pretty much be passive. As I started getting older I learned how to download stuff and start selling software/movies to make some money. After I learned that you can’t make too much money doing that I started playing with websites and trying to learn how to create successful online businesses.

BipolarNation: You’re currently attending college. Give me the reasons it would be a good idea to stay in college.

Neil: There are only two reasons why I think it is a good idea to stay in college. The first is that my parents are paying for it and if I dropped out they would be very upset. I don’t really want to make them upset because I currently live in their house.

The second reason for staying in college is because when I have kids I want them to go to college and the last thing I want them saying is “but you did not go to college”.

BipolarNation: Now, give me the reasons you want to leave college.

Neil: My main for wanting to leave college is that I could make a lot more money if I could focus all my time on working and worst case if everything fails I know can already pick up a decent paying job without having a degree.

BipolarNation: Can you tell us about your current online projects, and what you do?

Neil: The main three projects that I am currently involved in are Crazy Egg, Serph and Siteblimp. Out of all these projects I spend most of my time on Crazy Egg which is going to have some cool new useful features within the next year. I can’t go much into each project, but I guess everyone is going to have to stay tuned to find out what is going to happen next.

My role for these products is to help come up with new ideas as well as promote the products.

BipolarNation: What has been the hardest part about running your online projects?

Neil: The hardest part about running online projects is to build a large user base and keep costs low. You are always going to have competition and it takes a lot of time to roll out features, so you have to get creative to get mindshare.

BipolarNation: If someone with little to no online marketing or internet experience said “teach me how to make money online so that I never have to work another 9 to 5 job,” what would you tell them to do?

Neil: The first thing I would tell them is making money online is not easy as it sounds and in most cases it is a lot harder than a 9 to 5 job. The most important thing to realize when doing an online business is that you should not stop when something fails, instead you need to learn from it so that you don’t keep on making the same mistakes over and over again.

As for telling them what to do, the best thing to do is usually something they are already interested in. If you do something you love the chances are you are going to be more successful compared to if you were doing something you hate.

It is very possible for most people to setup a successful online business that allows them to stay at home, but it requires a lot of leg work. Nothing is easy and in most cases you will not be able to leave it alone for months if you want it to continually grow.

I wish I could tell you a magic answer, but there is none that I know of. The only way I know how to create a successful online business is to put in a lot of hard work and time into it.

BipolarNation: What would you do to improve BipolarNation.com? Any tweaks? Major ideas?

Neil: Here are two quick things you can do.

1. Go into your header file in WordPress and replace the title code with this.

[Gave me code]

2. Install the Head Meta Description plugin.

These two small things should help make your site a bit more optimized for the search engines. As for major changes you may want to analyze what content your readers like and what content is popular on social sites like Netscape and Reddit. After analyzing your content and also the content on those social sites you can figure out if you can potentially get your posts on those sites thus increasing the popularity of your blog.

[Editor's note: I'm working on this.]

BipolarNation: Can you tell me what you have learned from the online marketing industry’s leaders?

Neil: The main thing I have learned from industry leaders is ethics and best practices. Every once in a while I learned some neat SEO trick, but in most cases these tricks are learned from first hand experiences.

BipolarNation: Who are your influences – not just in online marketing, but in general? Who do you look up to?

Neil: Two people who influence me a lot are Shoemoney and Andy Hagans because they are both brutally upfront and honest with me. I like when people just be themselves and tell it how it is, even if it hurts you.

As for someone who is not in the industry, Bill Gates is someone I look up to a lot. Although many people hate him, I admire him because of what he does with his money. I don’t know of anyone else that donates that much money to fighting cancer.

BipolarNation: What part of your success has surprised you?

Neil: Nothing has really surprised me yet, but that could be because I personally don’t think I am successful yet.

BipolarNation: What do most people NOT know about the internet that could change their lives if they had experiential knowledge, as you do?

Neil: Most non-technical people do not know about social media sites and I feel it could change their lives drastically. If you are looking for breaking news or world news the best place to find this kind of stuff is on sites like Netscape, Digg and Reddit.

BipolarNation: Lastly, if I looked up “Neil Patel” in on Wikipedia 100 years from now, what would I see?

Neil: My crystal ball does not work too well, but I hope you would see my life story. Hopefully it would start off with all my failures and then lead into all the successful things I have done. And most importantly I hope it would talk about how I affected the world in a positive way. If I could do even 1/1000 of what Bill Gates has done with his money to help fight diseases, I would be happy.