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Expert Growth Marketer #AMA -- I'm happy to help :)

Hi, I’m Hailey, cofounder of Growth Marketing Pro, the largest growth marketing blog on the internet.

We built it into a 6-figure passive income business in 18 months with SEO alone (without spending a dollar on ads). I also lead & advise Growth at venture-backed startups in San Francisco and around the world, generating millions in revenue.

I'm in the weeds working on my new SEO tool, GrowthBar, planning to launch on Product Hunt in July, and I've been getting such helpful support from the community, I would love to give back.

Ask me anything about marketing, I'm happy to help!

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    Thanks a lot for your post on Indie Hacker. I read all the questions and your answers to them, they helped me a lot.

    I currently work with UrbanYogi and lead the marketing efforts. We are currently working on our PR Strategy and Affiliate Program for Growth. I have a few questions related to your answers on the post. If you could answer these, it would be of great help to me.

    1. We monetise the blog through affiliate partnerships with marketing tools/companies we use and love. We also do some growth marketing consulting.
    • When you say this, as a company do you partner only with big tools/companies which have a minimum revenue kind of thing? I am planning to reach out to wellness and mental health blogs for affiliate partnerships and want to understand if this is the right time or should I wait for sometime.

    2. http://www.houstongolden.com/2018/08/how-to-break-the-internet-with-pr-hacking/

    • The link is broken, can you share any other PR Hacking resource that you think would be helpful.
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    Hi @HaileyFriedman! Thank you so much for posting this! I've just started reading your SEO growth strategy blog and I'm already learning a lot. I'm just reading the backlinks section and I wanted to ask: do links on social media like Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube comments etc count to boost your SEO?

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      Not really. Maybe a little bit but no I wouldn't focus on social media as far as SEO goes.

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    I have 2 questions as well:

    • How do you get backlinks to boost your SEO for the specific articles?
    • What is your way of making sure that the blog post will index better then competitors? Any quality or word count metric that you look at? Picture per blog post?
  4. 1

    Hi @HaileyFriedman, thanks for doing this !

    I have 2 questions :

    • I'm a freelance junior growth marketer. Do you think that I can evolve in my career only by freelancing or should joining a company would be more beneficial ?
    • You say that you've grown Growth Marketing Pro to 6 figures. How are you monetizing the blog ?
    1. 1
      • It depends on what kind of experience you have to date. Have you worked at a company before or have you been freelancing since the start of your career? One of the best pieces of advice I got early in my career was to join a company where I would have a boss / people I could learn from. I ended up joining a startup and Mark Spera was my boss. He became my mentor, taught me so much and today he is my cofounder at Growth Marketing Pro and GrowthBar. Joining a company is a great way to meet other marketers, learn from them, and continue to work together throughout your career.

      • We monetize the blog through affiliate partnerships with marketing tools/companies we use and love. We also do some growth marketing consulting.

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        thanks for the detailed answer ! I have worked in a company before but there was no marketing department so I didn't really have a mentor... I haven't met/seen anyone I would want to work with yet, but I'll keep my eyes peeled for interesting opportunities.

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    Hi @HaileyFriedman - thanks for participating. Will have a look at Growthbar :) I have a question re using SEO to grow your site so successfully: did you find more success churning out optimised content day in day out? Or through using tactics such as the Skyscraper technique (doesn't have to be this, just one example of a technique). Would be good to hear your thoughts as the regular content can be time-consuming to produce. Thanks!

    1. 1

      Yes to the skyscraper technique. Google is smarter than all of us and Google's job is to provide the absolute best content to anyone who asks a question on the browser. The only way Google will rank your content is if it's at LEAST as good as the other content ranking on page #1, but ideally 2-3X better than anything else that exists. That means creating extremely high quality content and often longer content. That's one piece of it. Another piece of it is backlinks -- this is super important. Read this blog post for the 7 strategies we use to make SEO work for us https://www.growthmarketingpro.com/seo-strategy/

  6. 1

    Hey @HaileyFriedman,

    Thanks a lot for doing this post! Appreciate the efforts!

    I am currently building my product, ruttl which is almost in the final stages of getting launched. Our biggest target market are the design firms and/or people who are into web designing and development.

    Although I have a social media marketing plan and email marketing plan in place, can you share how I should get more users on board?

    If you need to view the landing page, you can visit this link.

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      First off, I love the site and your gif on the signup page (who did you use to make that?). If you can add some social proof logos above the fold that would be even better for optimizing conversions.

      The first thing I would do is conduct market research using GrowthBar https://www.growthmarketingpro.com/growthbar (and I'm not just saying this b/c I built the tool, but I actually built it because it shows me the data I need to see when I'm trying to figure out how to grow a business).

      I would look at my competitors and see what they're doing to grow.
      What are their top organic keywords?
      What are their top paid keywords?
      Are they running Facebook ads?
      What sites do they have backlinks from?
      etc.

      I would think about what people are searching who want your product / tool.
      I would interview a few customers of yours or of competitors to hear how they found out about X tool and how they talk about the problem you're trying to solve.

      Next I would identify which are your target keywords, read this for our ultimate guide to keyword research: https://www.growthmarketingpro.com/keyword-research-and-tools/

      And once your funnel and email marketing onboarding campaign is in place, I'd probably start hitting them with an SEO strategy https://www.growthmarketingpro.com/seo-strategy/ , testing SEM, and seeding the internet (reaching out to people who already rank for your target keywords and asking them to mention your product in their content)

      I usually don't start with social media, but your product is visual so there might be a strong approach there, consider Pinterest?

      Have you heard of Dribbble? Seems like a lot of designers are on there, and I'm sure there are more. Can you scrape their names & use a tool like Hunter.io to find their emails and send out cold emails to them? Reach out to those people on Linkedin? Retarget them on Facebook?

      Just some quick thoughts...

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        Thanks a lot for the detailed answer Hailey!
        It was filled with a lot of ideas I can try out for sure.

        As for the gif on signup, I built it myself. I run a design agency called Brucira.

        I will make sure to check out growthbar! Thanks again for all the help!
        Cheers!

  7. 1

    Hi Hailey,

    Thanks for the AMA.

    I'm the Founder of Listnr (https://www.listnr.tech/) - We help users start a Podcasy without recording anything/HQ Voiceovers.

    I wanted to know what would be a good go-to strategy for B2C products in the Media Catagory.

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      First off, love this concept :) I've thought about it a few times myself.

      I would probably start by making a giant list (or a few giant lists) of the biggest bloggers in various niches. Starting with ones that are more self-help, educational oriented. That could mean personal finance bloggers, health & wellness, mindset, marketing/business. Once you have the lists you will need to enrich it with their emails and Linkedin URLs. You can do cold email outreach & linkedin connections w/ messages. You can also use LinkedHelper to reach out to anyone with Blogger in their title or on their profile.

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    Any tips on reaching out to reporters and getting PR?

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      Hiring a PR agency is one way to get press attention. By leveraging the agency and their premium relationships, you can succeed in garnering top tier press. But you can get scrappy and a bit more creative with press and comms strategy in a way that a traditional agency might not and get a big return on your investment. Using scrappier tactics will help increase coverage, spread awareness with key influencers, and build relationships at a fraction of the cost of a traditional PR agency. Most small companies are surprised to learn they can move the needle so much and so fast! Remember, that any “organic” third party validation will produce customers better than ads will nine times out of ten.

      1. You need to find influencers in your industry. You can use a combination of tools and/or a virtual assistant to gather a list of journalists, bloggers, podcasters or influencers and their contact information.

      2. From there, you can send personalized messages at scale in order to secure interviews, featured stories and product reviews. The result is that you will likely get a good number of takers and coverage at minimal cost. Follow instructions here: http://www.houstongolden.com/2018/08/how-to-break-the-internet-with-pr-hacking/

    2. 1

      Hi @Chipotle - I know this wasn't aimed at me, but I'm participating in this thread so thought to point you this way www.moderndispatches.com. You can download the step-by-step guide to targeting journalists and getting media coverage (I'm a seasoned journalist and PR so have some insider tricks :) I hope this helps - thanks!

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        Cool thanks I just downloaded it too :)

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          Nice - let me know if you've any feedback.

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          Do let me know if you've any feedback to make it better. As a PR person, much of this is second nature, so if there's anyway I can make it clearer let me know.

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    Hi Hailey, thanks for doing this.

    SEO newbie here: I blog every month and did that mostly as a portfolio, in that case Medium worked well for me.

    Now, as an entrepreneur I need traffic from my blogs as well, having no desire to learn SEO at the moment. Would you recommend me to keep using Medium or should I move to another tool?

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      Wordpress would be ideal for SEO

      Shoot me an email if you need SEO consulting / execution [email protected]

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    Hi there! I admit I don't know much about SEO (I'm in high school) but I think you are the right person to answer this question: How can I grow on Instagram without spending money on ads and whatnot? I am planning to launch an Instagram page documenting my journey writing sci-fi short stories and eventually monetize it via selling e-books. I've read all of those carousel posts by these Instagram "guru's" and they aren't really helpful...

    I know about consistent posting and hashtags and exclusive story value, but how can I attract fans? (Not followers) Anything I can do to grow my page a tad bit faster would be much appreciated!

    1. 2

      To be honest, I haven't done much around growing an instagram following, but I know there are tools that allow you to automatically follow a user (you can filter based on interests or geo tags and things like that) and then it will automatically like 3 of their most recent pictures, sometimes it will send them a message. And this seems like a great tool to use to grow a following quickly. I'm not sure if Instagram has figured out how to block tools like this from working but I would look into it if I were you.

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