20
8 Comments

End your content with a custom ask, but make sure you provide real value upfront.

There's an art to cross-pollinating your growth channels, I feel most people don't quite get this right, myself included (hah). However, I'd like to point to a couple of examples that I believe work well.

What do I mean by cross-pollinating?

Most people put effort into growing more than one marketing channel, those channels can compliment each other by referring to one another, constantly and naturally.

When I did Ministry of Testing, it was something like this:

  • Email: to point people to our website and community
  • Twitter: to have conversations, point to our discussions, and our community members
  • LinkedIn: a 'group' and then later a 'page' to have conversations, pull people into our website, community, and email.
  • Community forum: have discussions and to point them to our email list.

Bear in mind that when I did Ministry of Testing, it was pre-many-of-these-fancy-tactics, but I still had the philosophy of what the best people do today:

Always provide value up front, many times and before asking for anything.

And...don't be annoying.

Just because pop ups convert, it doesn't mean you should do them.

Just because sending multiple emails to get more sales increases your income, it doesn't mean that's a good thing to do.

Just because it's recommended to put a uniform email subscribe at the bottom of each post, it doesn't mean you should.

The tactics change, the principals stay the same

For every time someone shouts that a tactic works, there are a million other people trying it out and failing badly. We just don't hear about it.

One problem is people often forever chase the tactics, rather than the habits or the principles. I do believe that sticking with good principles means that you'll most likely continue to find growth, the tactics may change over time (as the world naturally evolves), but the philosophies stay the same.

The other problem is that we forget that we quickly become immune to things:

  • Ads worked for a while until we lost interest, ignored them, and then used tech to block them.
  • Pop ups were ok for a while (perhaps), but got annoying pretty quickly.
  • Email subscribe forms at the end of posts worked for a while, until we became blind to them.

The principles can still work

I'm not here to give you a deep guide, but I will leave you with two examples (that I'm 99% sure have inspired from each other) of how these principles can still work in practice.

That area on a page of leaving something like an email subscribe form at the end of a bit of content to encourage people to do something is still useful and can drive conversion, we just have to be more creative to get the results we want.

For example...

Don't just stick any call to action at the end, customize it, or make it personal so that it stands out with relevance.

This is one from @momoko where she embeds a tweet at the end of her post to encourage people to follow, like, or share the tweet.

Monica Lent is awesome

@harrydry applies the same technique. Here is an example.

Harry Dry is awesome too

It's not the same for every post. The content is adapted and sometimes he just doesn't do it.

Harry also does it the other way around, at the end of a Twitter thread he'll post a link back to his post:

and also his email list:

There is no one way

As with all these things, tactics and success will vary, but I believe this kind of customized approach can work much better, not only for conversions, but to also be seen more as a human being, as someone that cares and doesn't have an entirely automated process.

Thanks for reading

I like to write about all things community, growth, and indie hacking.

Follow me on Twitter for bite size snippets.

See what I did there?

  1. 5

    Haha. Quite surprised more don't do this. Takes many different forms.

    e.g. I've seen people use Twitter to push to IH / HN.

    • Provide all the value exactly where they are
    • Congrats, you've built up goodwill
    • Use this goodwill to ask them to share your content
    • Make the process as frictionless as possible (embed tweets etc...)
  2. 2

    Am I right in thinking that Harry from MarketingExamples was the gentleman who built the Kanye West themed dating app?

    Great tips Rosie!

      1. 1

        The man, the myth, the legend :)

  3. 1

    This is a strong foundation and yes most people don't connect the dots, even myself. I need more reminders!

    I also wrote an example recently if anyone wants to check out a growth loop by a writer - point 2 on https://kevoncheung.com/building-in-public/what-else (Rosie is point 3 haha)

    It is amazing how Twitter -> Newsletter, Newsletter -> Blog, Blog -> Guide.

  4. 0

    Could you summarize it shortly, how could I benefit from this with www.locospartygame.net ?

    1. 1

      It is already pretty short @@

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments