Introduction
- Your product is the base number, and growth hacking is the multiplier. There are times when fixing the product matters more than all the growth hacking in the world. And there are times when you need the multiplier
- We recommend that you pick one channel first, and get that channel working
- These methods don’t work well if they’re done only part of the way. You have to be all in. You have to be thorough. There may be times when things become monotonous and boring. That generally means you’re on the right path. Don’t give up or try to outsource or automate too early. Even the best marketers spend an absurd amount of time doing repetitive and boring things to get what they’re doing off the ground. It just comes with the territory. Do the work, and you will see the results. There’s simply no way around it
- Stop. Slow down. Do everything manually. You have to watch every process intensely in the beginning to know what is working and what isn’t. You need to have your ear to the ground to understand what the feedback is. Do a small experiment, make it work on a small scale, and iterate quickly. Once you’ve really nailed it (and only then), start to scale. And scale big.
- When considering the long-term work you’re doing, remember that you’re building equity in the Internet
Chapter 1: The Thought Process
1. Understand who your customer is.
2. Find out where people like your customer tend to congregate.
3. Figure out how to make contact with them where they are.
- User acquisition
1. Creating something desirable enough that some subset of the human population wants it
2. Getting in front of those people in the right way
- What is Johnny’s day like? Who does he hang out with? What websites does he visit? How would I describe what Johnny is into? What does Johnny do? What’s his daily routine? What websites does he use? Instagram—that could be interesting. So assuming that Johnny is on Instagram, he probably has a bunch of friends that are too. After all, Johnny isn’t everyone, it’s just his type we’re looking for. How could I find them? Who does he follow? What words does he use and what kind of photos does he post? How can I find all these people?
- Went on Instagram, found Johnny, looked at his photos and hashtags, found a hashtag that would really resonate with people like Johnny, found somewhat of an influencer on that hashtag, reached out to them
- Start by figuring out the type of person you want to reach and where that type of person congregates
- Sending an e- mail to 15 million random people will probably be less effective than engaging in a real conversation with a dozen of these folks
1. Get in the mindset of the people you want to reach.
- Making assumptions and playing around can get you a long way, especially in the initial stages
- The most enlightening thing to do is talk with someone who falls in your target market. (Ideally, you are that person)
2. Find where the people you want to reach congregate
- You’ll want as large a group of your target market as you can get
- You’ll also want that target market to be as specific as you can
- One of our favorite ways to track groups is by focusing on a keyword or hashtag that a specific demographic has unintentionally adopted
- The interesting thing about following this process is that in doing so, you incidentally figure out what your marketing should look like. In this example, the words that stick out are artisan, dapper, and craftsmanship. Now we can go into creation mode with a greater understanding of how to build a world that our target audience wants to be a part of
- Our end goal will be to get in front of the market we’ve discovered. But more important, we have to create a home where they can land once we find them
Chapter 2: Instagram
- Conversion funnel: learns who we are, downloads the app/visits the website, uses twos every day
- Pop up offering 10% off when the store opens if they drop in their email. Email that the store is open and they have a one-day, 10 percent off coupon
- Tag people, comment on their photo, like their photos, send a DM, follow them
- Follow and then like 3 photos had a 25% conversion of a follow back
- We followed this process for a week before setting the product live, and by the end of the week we had ten thousand followers
- It did get tiring spending literally all day liking photos on Instagram, but it was all worth it come launch day
- Be very, very selective about whom you follow. Make it a tight network and as directly targeted as you can
- We want to find influencers who don’t know yet that it should be expensive
- Accounts with between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand followers are virtually never approached for shout-outs. Because of this, they have no price set for a shout-out, and we can often buy shout-outs from them for cheap
- I’ve purchased dozens of shout-outs from accounts with fifty thousand followers for five to ten dollars
- Your numbers may be slightly different, but $10 per shout-out serves as a good starting point
- The first tool we’ll use to find influencers is Audiense
- Perhaps the best (and definitely the cheapest) way to structure these types of deals is to shoot for some sort of affiliate structure. If my production cost on a tie is twenty dollars, and I sell it for eighty dollars, let’s agree to split the sixty-dollar profit with the influencers
- The more we post with a hashtag and the more hashtags we use, the more we’ll be seen
- A great way to find popular hashtags is using TagsForLikes (http://www.tagsforlikes.com/)
- Posts also show up for hashtags in your comments so if you drop a bunch of hashtags in quickly you can show up at the top of hundreds of hashtags
- Two cheater posts
1. Double tap if you X!
2. Tag someone who Y!
Chapter 3: The Perfect Landing Page: Starting a List
- The money is in the email list
- Layout
1. A really strong headline
- One sentence a five-year-old can understand
2. A complementary and supplemental subheadline
- The child asks, 'What does that mean?'
3. A statement about the major benefit your product provides (what problem do you solve?)
- 'Why would someone need that?'
4. Benefit bullet points
5. A conversion button
- 'Download E-book'
6. Testimonials and data
- Load this up with data and testimonials about how incredible your product is
7. The long conversion
- Use the same button as you did above, but at the bottom
Chapter 4: SEO in One Day
- The sites with the most links were— theoretically—the best sites
- For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t our brand or company name
- At least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords—very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win
- Finding long tail keywords
1. Use ÜberSuggest, Keyword Shitter, and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords.
- Keywordshitter.com
- Try to get a solid list of five to ten keywords to start with
- Ideally, you’ll have over fifteen hundred options to work with after completing this process
2. Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level.
- The Google Keyword Planner https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
1. Get Search Volume Data and Trends
2. Paste in your list of keywords
3. Click 'Get Search Volume'
4. Export data to Excel with 'Download'
- SEMrush.com
- As a general rule, the maximum level of “difficulty” or “competition” (Google sometimes uses the words synonymously) you should go after will be determined by the number of links you have.
- Number of backlinks and maximum difficulty
- <30 = 40
- <100 = 40-50
- <1000 = 50-70
- 1000+ = 70+
- Sort the data by difficulty or competition, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site
- Sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick five keywords that seem like a good fit
3. Search for those keywords with the SEOquake browser plug-in installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty.
- https://www.google.com/trends/
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seoquake/akdgnmcogleenhbclghghlkkdndkjdjc?hl=en
- You might look into writing an article for Entrepreneur.com
- Search your keywords and see if you'd be able to make it to the first page
- On-page SEO checklist
- Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag.
- The title tag contains fewer than the viewable limit of sixty-five characters (optional but recommended).
- Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag).
- If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc.), your keyword or synonyms are in most of them.
- Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contains your chosen keyword.
- Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description).
- There are at least three hundred words of text on the page.
- Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the home page).
- Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy.
- Your keyword (or synonyms—Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page.
- Your keyword density is between .5 percent and 2.5 percent.
- The page contains “dofollow” links to other pages. (This just means you’re not using “nofollow” links to every other page.)
- The page has original content not taken from another page and is dissimilar from other pages on your site.
- Off-page SEO = links = backlinks
- Search Traffic -> Links to Your Site
- More -> Who Links to You the Most -> Download This Table or Download Latest Links
- https://ahrefs.com/
- HTML links look something like this: <a href=“http://www.somesite.com” title=“keyword”>Anchor text</a>
- The relevance of the anchor text matters. Generally speaking, you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible
- If you’re ever creating links, you should use something generic, like the site name or the full URL
- Generally speaking, you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly messy link structure
- In an ideal world, every page would link to every other page on its same level
- This can easily be done with a footer that feels like a sitemap or “recommended” pages
- Almost every site has a page at url.com/robots.txt
- This is just a plain text file that lets you tell search engine crawlers what to crawl and what to not crawl
- If you don’t want Google to crawl a page (maybe it’s a log-in page you don’t want indexed or a landing page) you can just disallow it in your robots.txt by saying “disallow: /somepage.”
- If you don’t add a trailing / to it (e.g., “disallow: /somepage/”), it will also disallow all child pages
- Technically you can specify different rules for different bots (or user agents), but it’s easiest to start your file with “User-agent: *” if you don’t have a need for separate crawling rules
- You can disavow links in the search console to combat against attacks from a competitor
- Use nofollow if you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a “nofollow” link. Google says it discounts the value of those links
- <a href=“http://www.somesite.com” title=“keyword” rel=“nofollow”>Anchor text</a>
- If you’re going to change a URL but you don’t want its link juice to disappear, you can use a 301 Redirect. A 301 will pass a majority of the link juice
- With two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=“canonical” href=“https://www.someurl.com/somepage”>
- The easiest way to build high-quality links are what SEOs call Web 2.0s. That’s just a way to say “social sites,” or sites that let you post stuff
- Twitter bio, GitHub readme, Youtube description, WordPress blog, Blogger blog, Tumblr, HackerNews, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org
Chapter 5: Your First Drip of Traffic: Becoming an Authority Site
- Comments must be contextual, only mentioning your company when it naturally fits in, and they should learn something by reading your comment
- People will click and respect your company because you're a thoughtful person who likes to contribute
- BuzzBundle
- People want comments on their tweets, videos, etc.
- You can also send a Tweet and follow them to be a bit more personal
Chapter 6: Getting Press
- Heavy-hitting content sights: Time magazine, BBC, The Guardian, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, Slate, Gizmodo
- All you need to do is find a reporter or blogger who might like to write about you, and e-mail them your pitch
- It should take you less than a day to e-mail up to a thousand relevant press contacts
- We're selling the reporter that we're legitimate and interesting enough that their audience will want to hear about us
- Scraper Chrome Extension for getting emails from websites (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd?hl=en)
- Alltop - blog-ranking website
1. Search for your category
2. Right click on one of the publications and use the Scraper Chrome Extension to get blogs
3. Export to Google Docs
- BlogRank (http://www.blogmetrics.org/)
1. Search for your category
2. Right click on a blog and click Scrape
3. Export to Google Docs
- Is it timely? Is it relevant? Is it interesting? Why would someone like you be interested in reading this?
- In the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Jack Sparrow defined the difference between need and is this way: “That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails. That’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is—what the Black Pearl really is—is freedom.” What Grasswire needs is an Internet newsroom. But what Grasswire is is democratization of journalism and information.
- So in the initial pitch, we won’t go into detail about how the technology works, what APIs we pull from, why the user interface/user design (UI/UX) look like they do, and so on. We’ll talk about the story of Grasswire: what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and why it needs to be done. Reporters don’t often like products, but they usually love missions
☆ A press kit should include the following:
1. Company overview
- The company overview is a simple document that explains who you are and what you do
- Include a tagline, a one-sentence description, three “how it works” paragraphs, and a call to action
- Tagline: Waterproof iPods and headphones for swimmers
- Description: Underwater Audio has developed technology that allows us to waterproof iPods, headphones, and other electronic devices for swimmers.
- How it works: Underwater Audio music players come waterproofed from the inside out. They look, feel, and smell like any other 2GB iPod Shuffle—but they work underwater.
- Underwater Audio seals the iPod from the inside out using a proprietary process, and we have tested it at a depth of two hundred feet (though we don’t recommend Underwater Audio for diving). Dunk it in water, leave it there, and it still works.
- The Underwater Audio player will work with any headphones—though under the water, you’ll need waterproof headphones to create a watertight seal with your ear to have good audio. Our recommended picks are available along with your iPod on UnderwaterAudio.com
- Underwater Audio iPods and bundles are available at UnderwaterAudio.com starting at $149.
- Start by pretending I’m explaining a company to a five-year-old and then make my explanation more technical and detailed from there
2. Founder photos
3. Logos
4. Press mentions
5. Product screenshots, videos, or photographs
- The strategy here is to give them every piece of content they could possibly want, and then let them decide what is relevant for their type of media
- Keep the emails short
1. Introduction
2. One-sentence pitch
3. Offer or ask (sample or press kit)
- Example email
- Hey [name],
- My name is Austen, from Underwater Audio. We developed a process that makes iPods completely waterproof. It’s some pretty cool technology you and your readers might be interested in. We’re at UnderwaterAudio.com, and I have a [press kit/sample/demo] I’d like to send your way to [review/check out] if you’d be interested. Let me know!
- Thanks,
- Austen Allred [contact information]
- No long introductions, no links, no videos, no demos—just, “We’re here. Are you interested?”
- BuzzStream to pull contact information off sites (http://www.buzzstream.com/plans-pricing)
- First, find out if there are one or two blogs that would be your ideal publications. Find the ideal person there, and reach out to them on Twitter
- @username Hey I have something to send you about [your angle]. What’s a good e-mail?
- I like to send tweets to two people, but refrain from tweeting at fifty people. First because that’s annoying, second because the other reporters will see you blindly reaching out, and third because you’ll be suspended from Twitter for spamming
- It’s worth spending twice as much time to find the right person
- I try to send five hundred e-mails per day if I’m working a full day. Yes, it’s a full day’s work to send five hundred e-mails. That’s because you should try to understand who the person receiving the pitch is and speak specifically to them. If you’re copying and pasting and just hitting “Send” on every e-mail, you’re doing it wrong
- If you don’t receive a response after a few days, follow up. But don’t be annoying about it. Remember that running a company is a marathon, not a sprint. You may want to get coverage from these reporters again. So be cordial, don’t burn any bridges, and be grateful if anyone writes about you
Chapter 7: Twitter
- If a product we’re marketing doesn’t get 50 sign-ups (not to mention 150 new, active Twitter followers) every day, I know I’ve done something wrong
- Twitter allows accounts with fewer than two thousand followers follow up to five thousand people. Those with over two thousand can follow a thousand people per day (so long as the number of people you follow isn’t more than 110 percent of the number of your followers). In other words, you can, by brute force, get a split second of attention from up to a thousand Twitter accounts daily. Set up your profile right, and that traffic drives through to your product or landing page, and interested parties can sign up from there
- Let’s say you have a 10 percent follow-back rate (though in my experience, you will get a higher percentage of follow-back than that). That’s one hundred new followers per day, three thousand new followers per month, and thirty-six thousand five hundred new followers per year
- FollowLiker helps you follow the people you want (http://www.followliker.com/)
- You can expect to see at least a hundred new followers per day, and at least fifty clickthroughs to a landing page in a bio
- Using FollowLiker on a personal profile will pretty much destroy the enjoyment of using Twitter
- Use TweetDeck to reply quickly to searched tweets
☆ One of the things you’ll notice in hacking social networks is that vanity matters. If you tell people they’re awesome, they’ll want to share that with their followers to make it clear to everyone else that they’re awesome
- We’ve seen people do the same thing with affiliate reviews, rankings of influential people, “here’s what I learned from Person X” articles, etc. If there’s an influencer in your industry you want to get at, this is among the best ways to do it
Chapter 8: Pinterest
- Pinterest is a discovery engine
- Once you are invited to pin on those boards, as long as you don’t become overly spammy (be careful there—many will ensure that you’re not just pinning products from one company), you can pin on that board indefinitely—at times showing your pins to as many as hundreds of thousands of people
- Pinterest content has a long shelf life
- PinGroupie (http://pingroupie.com/)
- Navigate to my category of choice and then sort by “Repins p.1,” which means repins on the first page. Generally speaking, the more repins there are on the first page, the more active the audience of a board is
1. Create a legitimate and active account, constantly interacting with others in your space.
2. Create great pins with a tacit endorsement comment.
3. Join group boards (by invitation or board swap), and leverage those audiences as best as you can
Chapter 9: YouTube
- YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world
- Use Google Display Planner which is used for AdSense—Google's display arm
- Set the bidding to “vCP,” set the filter to “Video,” select “Placements,” and make sure “Video” is selected. Google and YouTube will suggest a few additional keywords that are video-specific
- Check out YouTube Autosuggest with your keywords
- In the description, lay in three hundred to five hundred words of text with a two-to-five percent keyword density. You can test for keyword density at http://smallseotools.com/keyword-density-checker/
- Make sure to include closed captions. Not only does YouTube give us a little boost for caring about the hearing and vision impaired, but studies have shown it uses those words to determine which videos are most likely to rank
- Before you upload a video, make sure to name the actual file with your keywords. So if your keyword is how to get abs, you would name the file “how-to-get-abs.wmv” (or something like that) before you upload it
- A good thumbnail goes a long way
- YouTube will give a boost to videos if the viewer of the video clicks through to another video
- Make sure there’s plenty of clickable content within our video, leading YouTube users further down the inescapable path of eternal YouTube watching
- “AfterRoll.” This includes basically the same people who were in the video (or the same theme) with some after-the-video begging to check out other stuff. The best ones we’ve seen have people pointing to different buttons that lead to behind-the-scenes content or other videos
- Sneak in little invitations to like the videos at the most opportune times
Chapter 10: App Store Optimization
- Apple’s ranking algorithm looks for keywords in the title, keywords in the description, and ratings
- Ask people if they enjoy the app. If they do, ask them to rate it. If they do not, ask them for feedback
- Ask for feedback at the right times and in the right places (in-line tends to work better than pop-up)
- How to find keywords we can own:
1. Looking for a keyword
2. Seeing what other keywords Apple suggests
3. Finding how many people are searching for that keyword
4. Seeing what other apps come up when you search for that keyword
- You’re looking for apps likely to have fewer downloads, fewer reviews, and to be less optimized than yours when you search for a key term
- Competitors hack:
1. Create a list of competitors.
2. Find the names of those that don’t have an app.
3. List them subtly in our app’s description “Comparable to Company A” or “The best app alternative to Company B.”
Chapter 11: How to Win at Paid Search Marketing
- The system is designed to reward the people who are willing to put in extra effort
- The market leader for pay-per-click (PPC) because the traffic is intent-based
- Someone is looking for what you're selling
- Focus on AdWords
- The price you pay is based on two things: the keyword you’re bidding on and the quality score
- Ranks ads based on AdRank = Quality Score × Maximum Bid
- If we want to start winning bidding contests cheaply, we need to focus on quality score first
- 22 percent ad relevance (how relevant your ad is to the keyword)
- Are you using the keyword (or related words) that you’re advertising in your ad?
- 39 percent landing page (how relevant your landing page is to the keyword, as well as how long visitors stay on your site)
- Google likes to see how long people stay on your page and how quickly they’re hitting the “Back” button
- We’ll need to create new landing pages that are optimized for each keyword we’re bidding on
- Create several pages that match keywords exactly
- 39 percent expected clickthrough rate (CTR) (when your ad appears on Google, how many people click on it compared to the other results)
- Around an 8 percent CTR is good, a 3 percent is bad, and a 15 percent is great
- The headline, “Hilary Duff’s Bikini Falls Off—You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next.” That headline had one of the highest clickthrough rates of any news story ever, and it’s pretty obvious why that’s the case. There’s suspense, curiosity, a celebrity, and—in this case—the allure of sex
- Blendtec’s “Will it blend?” campaigns are among my favorite ever on YouTube, but rumor has it they also performed shockingly well on Google. Turns out if you’re googling blender, people will click on an ad that says, “This blender is so powerful, it grinds an iPhone into powder.” Be creative, and you can get higher CTRs
- “The fifty-dollar test”
- For the fifty-dollar test we’re going to create twelve ads with different titles, different headlines, and largely similar keywords and landing pages
- Try limiting your use of specific keywords, as this could sway the results. We’re trying to isolate the text of our ad to the greatest extent possible
- Give each ad group a budget of three dollars per day and let it run for a couple of days
- We’re looking just at CTR
- Double down on and try variations of the ads that are working as many times as you’d like. Doing this will save you thousands in future advertising expenses
- If you have a budget of $110 for testing, you should be able to test about thirty-six ad variations.
- Day one will have twelve, day two will have twelve that are more optimized than the ones on day one, and day three will have twelve that really let us drill down on exactly what copy we should be using in our ads.
- At this point our CTR should be very high
- The single most important aspect of advertising on AdWords is keyword selection
- If you can find keywords no one else is bidding on, it doesn’t matter what the competition is doing or paying; you’ll be playing the game in a different arena
- We’re looking for two things:
1. Keywords that no one else is targeting
2. Keywords that people who buy are searching
- List of keywords that signal commercial intent: https://github.com/growth-austen/intent-keywords
- List of negative keywords: https://github.com/growth-austen/negative-keywords/blob/master/README.txt
Chapter 12: How to Track Almost Anything
- Test every assumption
- URL builder (https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/)
- Direct usually refers to when people navigate to your site from a bookmark or by typing in the URL, but in practice it ends up being much more than that. If Google can’t tell where a source came from, it just buckets it as “direct.” This either means some site or app is stripping the referrer before it gets to you (as some link shorteners and mobile apps do) or that you’re not using your UTM parameters correctly. We’ll have the best information when the number of “direct” visits are as low as possible, and the best way to do that is to use UTM parameters
- Event tracking: ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ‘category’, eventAction: ‘action’, eventLabel: ‘label’, eventValue: value});
- Use FullStory to see how people interact with your site
Chapter 13: Live Presentations & Sales
- Live presentations are a terrific way to get in front of influencers who will push your product via word-of-mouth to early adopters
- It's a win-win-win. You get a room of prospects paying full attention, your audience gets value, and event organizers get great content
- Identify who your target audience is to find conferences and organizations to present to
- Presentation titles:
- “Master the Art of Professional Periscope”
- Master the Art of Writing Things Down
- “The Secrets of Building Brand Relationships”
- The Secrets of Writing Things Down
- “Want to Double or Triple Your Pageviews? Get Organized!”
- Want to Double Your Productivity? Write Things Down
- “How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon”
- “Generate and Pitch Ideas like a Boss”
- “10 Ways You Can Use (E-mail) More Effectively”
- “The Secrets of (E-mail) Masters”
- “How to be Fantastic at (E-mail) in 10 Easy Steps”
- “5 Trends in the (E-mail) Space That Will Change the Industry”
- “Hacking (E-mail) 101: Everything You Need to Know”
- The five-to-seven-word title must pique interest
- It won’t matter how good your content is if you can’t pitch it well enough to draw attendance
- Presenter's tool-kit questions
- Title: Provide a descriptive title that tells attendees what you will be teaching about (50 characters or less)
- Class Tweet: In 140 characters or less, tell attendees what your class is about. This needs to be just as compelling as your title. You might also list three questions attendees will know the answers to by the time they leave your class.
- Skill Level: Indicate the preferred skill level for your attendee.
- Technology Skill Level: Will your attendees need to have any prior experience with a certain type of technology in order to understand what you will be teaching?
- Technology List: List every tool, software, app, platform, gadget, or device you will be addressing or demonstrating in your class.
- List of Conferences: Keep a list of all the conferences you have presented at. Build it like you would a résumé.
- Presenter URL: How will attendees contact you easily? Is your Twitter handle available so that they can tweet while you are speaking?
- Content: spend a weekend on industry blogs and forums. Reddit Subreddits related to your niche are good too
- PowerPoint presentation: Google Slides is great for this, and it’s easy to use. You could select the
black background with the white writing theme. (It’s easy to read and looks way cooler than the standard white with black words.) On Google Sheets, you can also drag and drop GIFs. Use Reactiongifs.com and type in “I am happy,” “I am angry,” and so on to find good ones
- No more than six words per slide
- Try to replace the um’s with pauses. It instantly makes you look more professional and confident
- Put your Twitter handle on every slide to ensure a steady stream of tweets
- Put your e-mail address on the last slide with the text e-mail me for slides
- Booking presentations:
- Type your niche into the search boxes on Meetup and Eventbrite
- Copy and paste the following message as a private message to the organizers: “Hi, I’m a big fan of your Meetup. I give a talk on ‘10 Ways to Improve X’ (insert your title here, obviously) that I think your audience would love. Do you have any upcoming events where I could share this presentation? I have a large network that I would be happy to invite to the event as well. Let me know—I’d love to be involved!”
- E-mail and tweet at them at the same time: “Hey, just messaged you about getting involved with your group. Let me know what you think. Thanks!”
- A surprising number of big conferences have open calls for speakers. On average, applications are due for these about nine months in advance, and they tend to get booked quickly
Chapter 14 - Content Marketing
- There are two sides. to content marketing:
1. Writing great content
2. Getting it seen
- Write for Reddit
- Write something good enough that if it were placed on a Reddit-like site, where people heavily scrutinize your work and have the option to upvote or downvote it, it would go to the top
- Building a media company is maybe 20 percent content and 80 percent distribution
- A mediocre article with great distribution is far better than a great article with no or mediocre distribution
- James Altucher provides quality content all year long, and specifically and explicitly asks his customer base to do something three to four times per year
- If you can hit the right audience with the right sharable message at the right time, you can see explosive results
- Cross-posting to Medium and LinkedIn. Just copy and paste the whole thing and put it on every channel you easily can
- Look for social news sites you can cross-post to. There are almost always industry-specific niche sites that are hungry for content. Try googling [industry] social news and see what happens. You may be surprised at how many there are out there
- he skyscraper technique, popular among SEOs, consists of building an article that includes the best bits of other people’s articles. For example, “20 Design Tips from the World’s Best Designers.”
- The end strategy is to get the article in front of these influential people and let them share it out of a sense of ego
- BuzzSumo scrapes the web, trying to find the content that is doing the best
- http://buzzsumo.com/
- Search your niche or industry
- We’ll write an article that includes quotes or sections from famous people in our niche, and we’ll use a few techniques to automate reaching out to these people to let them know it exists
- Once you have the article written, with the name of the author in it, use ContentMarketer.io to automatically scan your article for the names of people you’ve mentioned, and e-mail and tweet them from within the ContentMarketer.io platform. Since we’re targeting influential people, ContentMarketer.io will generally be able to find them, and there’s a relatively good chance they’ll retweet, share, or drop your post in their weekly e-mail because you’re complimenting them. This method can give your traffic the initial traction it needs to take off. From here, it should get shared and begin the viral spiral if the content’s good enough
- www.ContentMarketer.io
- Guest blogging is a somewhat necessary evil for a growth hacker. Its main benefits are SEO bonuses (links from legit sites are one of the strongest SEO signals), extra traffic, and brand awareness— impressive to stakeholders in your company (investors, online communities, competitors, potential customers and employees, etc.)
- Blogs for guest posting
- The Huffington Post
- TechCrunch
- LifeHack
- Tech.co
- TechnoFAQ
- KnowTechie
- Tech News Beat
- AptGadget
- TheFutureTech
- Business.com
- SportsBlog
- BlogHer
- HubSpot
- Social Media Examiner
- MarketingProfs
- AllBusiness.com
- SEMrush Blog
- Social Media Today
- Every other major blog runs to the same content-hungry system. All you need to do is e-mail, saying, “I like your [blog/site], and I’d like to write for it. I’ve attached a post about X.” As long as the post is fairly well written, they’ll usually publish it. A lot of people put “Write for The Huffington Post” in their bio, but it really means nothing. The Huffington Post currently publishes around a thousand articles each day, and most of them are garbage
- The best strategy is to e-mail the correct contact and tweet them at the same time to let them know you’ve just e-mailed them, increasing the chance they will read your e-mail. Make sure you put a great title on it, of course
- Use Ninjaoutreach.com to find influencers in your niche, reach out to them, and share your article. Some will post or share them or at least be intrigued by them
- You can also use Onalytica. On Onalytica, you copy and paste your article in, and they’ll scan it for keywords and then find influencers who have used those keywords recently. So you can reach out and say, “I saw you’ve been writing about Bitcoin recently. I just wrote an article on how I think it will develop this year. Would love your thoughts! Please share it with your community if you like it. Thanks!”
- Target the right people, try to reach out to a lot of them at once, and expect a small percentage to convert
- Ask anyone whose company has been successful: there is always an innovative marketing technique early on as part of their story
- v@magnific.com
- austen.allred@gmail.com
> Secret Sauce by Austen Allred summary
- One channel at a time
- It will be monotonous and boring. No way around it but to do the work
1. Understand who your customer is
2. Find out where your customers are
3. Figure out how to contact them where they are
- Follow and like people's photos on Instagram
- 50-100k followers posts can be bought for $10
- A great way to find popular hashtags is using TagsForLikes (http://www.tagsforlikes.com/)
- Find long tail keywords with keywordshitter.com
- Use The Google Keyword Planner https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner to estimate traffic
- Use SEMrush.com to determine the difficulty
☆ Create a web of pages for SEO
- Heavy-hitting content sights for press: Time magazine, BBC, The Guardian, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, Slate, Gizmodo
- Less than a day to e-mail up to a thousand relevant press contacts
- Scraper Chrome Extension for getting emails from websites (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd?hl=en)
- Use Alltop and BlogRank to find relevant blogs for your category
- Talk to reporters about what you're doing, why you're doing it, why it needs to be done rather than how it works and the technology behind it
- Hi My name is Austen, from Underwater Audio. We developed a process that makes iPods completely waterproof. It’s some pretty cool technology you and your readers might be interested in. We’re at UnderwaterAudio.com, and I have a [press kit/sample/demo] I’d like to send your way to [review/check out] if you’d be interested. Let me know! Thank you, Austen Allred [contact info]
- No long introductions, no links, no videos, no demos—just, “We’re here. Are you interested?”
- Reach out to them on Twitter
- Sends 500 emails per day
- Follow up after no response after a few days. Don't be annoying. Don't burn bridges
- Use TweetDeck to reply quickly to searched tweets
- If you tell people they’re awesome, they’ll want to share that with their followers to make it clear to everyone else that they’re awesome
#SharedFromTwos ✌️