Best growth hack you've found?
I'd love to hear the best growth hack you've used that worked for you! What have you done to move the needle when you're under resourced or time poor?
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I'd love to hear the best growth hack you've used that worked for you! What have you done to move the needle when you're under resourced or time poor?
I got a significant boost in traffic (and recognition) by building a small widget. It pulls data from my niche site ("metacritic for LEGO sets") so other sites can embed the rating. When a large LEGO site embedded it on their page, smaller sites followed suit.
My site isn't large by any means, but it now averages between 150-180 uniques a day. One third of that comes from the widget, one third from search, and one third from other. All of the categories are climbing (slowly), but I wouldn't have the search footprint I have today without the widget.
Here's the widget: https://brickinsights.com/widgets
This could be translated to the classic "provide value to people and share it"-advice, but it's a specific technical implementation that's pretty fun.
I definitely like your widget approach.
I'm doing a similar type of approach for product warranty data but working on creating unique reviews and data vs aggregating it.
I've thought that making a widget would be a good idea to give product review sites and reviewers the ability to have warranty analysis data without having to do any work beyond the widget. So glad to know this approach works :) Thanks for sharing!
It certainly worked for me, but the key was to build a relationship with the owner of the other site before offering the widget to him. Good luck with your idea! :)
So well implemented! :) How did you go about with your first cold email/message to a prospective site? Would love an example of what's worked for you.
In my experience there's no real formula. Just be genuine and talk to people. That said, here are a few types of outreach mail I've done:
My first outreach to the larger site was actually me fixing something the site owner didn't prioritize. He had a bunch of links leading to external sites that might've had instructions for different sets. I built a couple of scrapers that checked if they actually had instructions, and gave the list to him (in the form of an API). It improved his site, so he implemented it. We talked a bit back and forth every now and then, made some improvements, and that was it.
Then, when I returned a couple of years later and said I'd done the same thing but for reviews, he gladly used that widget.
I've been in touch with the actual reviewers too, of course. That outreach generally goes something like this:
Hey, I've built a site aggregating reviews. Since you produce quality reviews, I've included your site. You can see your statistics here^ and there's nothing you need to do. Let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback!
Sometimes this results in silence, but most often it results in gratitude that they're included and some back and forth about how we can help each other. Sometimes they include the widget or writes a post about my site, sometimes nothing.
It helps that us AFOLs in general have a great community and sense of camaraderie. Nowadays I've included most of the quality LEGO reviewers out there, so new ones generally get in touch with me first and not the other way around.
^ Here's an example: https://brickinsights.com/statistics/reviewers/7
That's incredibly helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time for the insightful response 🙏
Love this! Product and idea... thanks for sharing.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Yeah, but to be honest I think I might've missed an opportunity. Instead of making the widget container a link (later to be replaced with a div containing an iframe) I made it a div (later to be replaced with an iframe). I imagine I'd get a better SEO footprint if I'd gone with the link instead. At least that's the theory.
That said, I have noticed a pretty significant difference so I'm not sure it matters that much. Google seems to be finding the iframe URL, and since the site at that URL has its canonical set to Brick Insights set URL, I've gotten most of my set pages indexed in a pretty short amount of time (along with a pretty decent rank when people search for lego review [set number]). That's pretty great, considering I've got more than 16 000 sets indexed.
Details, details. Still, the widget has been a huge win.
Definitely... Facebook groups (and LinkedIn groups)
I've had clients generate 1,000s of visits and 100s of leads from smart group engagement.
In many ways leveraging Facebook groups is more powerful than creating and maintaining a Facebook Page for your startup. The key is to be upfront about who you are, create value, then share what you've created and what you want the community to do.
There are dedicated startup Facebook groups that welcome conversations about your recently-launched product or company, but you should seek out communities of potential users for your product.
Many of these are local - so if you're targeting new mums, you'll want to search Groups for 'new mums London', 'new mums Brighton'...
My blog here details some other ideas: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/6-free-ways-your-startup-can-build-audience-today-oliver-meakings/
Hi Olly, what Facebook groups do you recommend specifically?
Figuring out the right buyer persona for a B2B startup by using automation tools such as PhantomBuster to get data in an excel rather than going through each manually.
The key is to (in)validate hyoptheses quickly and not spend a lot of manual effort on a specific type of audience. Once the audience set is found, you could find something that would add value to them and share it over LinkedIn.
We used something similar and got 1000+ subscribers from the exercise (wrote a piece for 300 subscribers initially)
Link: https://www.rightmixmarketing.com/onlinemarketing/how-to-gain-subscribers-in-short-time/
Let me know if you found this of value :)
Hi Aimee,
I don't have one for you, but I would like to +1 your question. I'll be following the answers to see what the experienced growth hackers say.
We're working on some new things to execute on now but that's the highlights of what's worked so far. I hope it helps! 🤓
How did you grow your FB group? :-)
Blueprint:
By doing the above, people started talking about our group in other groups and word of mouth spread easily 🙂
Nice!!
Fake it until you make it!! :)
If you tell me a little bit about your business I'll give you some hacks that could work for you.
Hey, I'll bite if you're willing!
I'm building an app called AvoToast. I lost 50lbs using apps like MyFitnessPal, but my biggest pain point was they're really not useful for planning meals ahead of time. The weeks I'd plan (on paper), I lost the most weight, and the weeks I didn't, I usually plateaued. So AvoToast is focused on building meal plans for user so they can lose weight better. I'm about ready to launch in the next week or two, but I'm not sure where to start outside of sharing a lot of the recipes on the app on Twitter/Reddit/Instagram and DMing people that I think could benefit.
Thanks in advance!
Would love to hear your thoughts on growth. Could you DM me on Twitter?