What is the best marketing growth hack that you actually used and saw results?
Below is one I discovered in Rhys Morgan's 101 Ways To Get New Users & Clients Online book.
Job Outreach:
- You can use job outreaches to sell your business services. Job outreach entails applying for a relevant job vacancy with a custom yet promotional resume. For example, a search engine optimisation agency might apply for an SEO position.
This hack changed the game for me when finding freelance clients. But I assume any product builder could use it to market their startup or recruit initial users. I literally go through job listing within my field and reach out to founders or hiring managers manually, offering help with a super custom message.
What is your favorite marketing growth hack that you actually used and saw results?
Trending on Indie Hackers
What we are experimenting with at the moment:
So far we paid $500, it got around 8,000 views and we generated 1400 signups from that. That's about $0.35 cents/signup.
how many videos did you pay $500 for & how did you find the influencers (basic search or something else)?
I am also interested in how you found/chose the specific influences and channels!
So far, do you think this experiment was worth it?
So you did not pay them to make a shorter, in video add to talk about your product? No "this video is sponsored by ___. Check them out".
Why did you only allow full video ads?
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
What is your strategy to reach out to YouTube influencers? Did you use any platform or was it cold outreach?
Were the sign ups for a paid tier?
Nope, free signups for our MVP.
Genuine relationship building via community building. You can keep it at a super micro level, it does wonders in SaaS. Invite your power/initial users to a Slack channel and let them engage with you & your product. Do more for them than anybody else is doing. It lowers churn, provides invaluable learnings/insights, it's a product win.
Love this. How many users would you say is the minimum to get a Slack community going? (We have 200 paying users / assume 10-20% (max) would probably join such channel.
This is a really good advice. Thanks!
Happy it helped!
Moved my Google Ads Landing Pages from the external subpages to my company's main webpage.
It increased our conversion by 5-7X (depending on the keyword). Probably worked because we're in B2B and people want to learn more about the company before they contact us.
There's a PR strategy for building backlinks quickly. High DR and DA.
For instance, if you're running a Health product on diet you might want your backlinks connected to that topic.
I found that full service like that is done by https://www.brandpush.co/.
Owning your own cision.com account costs around 6k per year.
In the company I work in, we managed to get backlinks from the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes (tens of times), CNN and etc.
Brandpush is running fake chain of sites. None of their site is legally affiliated with Fox, CBS or CNN.
They’re a middle man for distributing PR releases. They dont need to be affiliated.
No, the sites in the list are not part of FOX, CNN, or CBS. These are group sites sounding similar to high-end media corp.
I did a full search for majority of the sites.
It just pbn of fake media sites.
Fascinating! very interested to try this out once we launch our product! thanks for the great tip!
Have you only tried using this method for larger apps/products? Or also for smaller more indie products?
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Awesome! Thanks :)
Hey @arnasj, James here — an IH moderator. Great comment! If you're interested, I think the community could really benefit from you sharing this as an actual post (just add an intro for context, and maybe a bit more about your personal experience -- you've basically got the body written).
If you end up posting, ping me here or shoot me an email at [email protected] with a link — we sometimes feature these types of posts on the forum, or put them out on Twitter or our newsletter.
If you’re not interested, no worries 😀
Thanks!
Building a community and putting some real effort into it
It doesn't just increase word-of-mouth but also has these benefits:
That sounds like a growth hack that could get you into a "blacklist" pretty quickly.
Most employers put disclaimers not to reach out if you're not serious about a full-time gig. Maybe it's different where you live?
What helped grow really quickly for a B2B corporation was improving the sales cycle with educating the sales team in being brand ambassadors.
Answering real people's questions.
I'd find unanswered questions on Quora, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and more that felt like they'd be reasonably popular based on earlier keyword research (that, or questions that only had SEO-driven answers that didn't really solve the issue). I'd then research, find a solid solution, and write it up in a blog post (either a dedicated post, or as part of a larger piece with an anchor link to that specific section). Then, I'd share the full answer (that's the key part) on the original question, along with a link for more details.
So basically, you're "giving away" the full answer, but that's what makes it work. You're helping the person who asked the question, making that page actually valuable to search results on its own—and that makes your included link more ok. You're far less likely to get your post downvoted or removed, and over time will likely see your standalone post reap traffic and ranking from it.
How do you find these questions and also keep from getting flagged for spam?
I start with keyword research, and try to find topics that I would already want to write about from a search perspective—topics that are reasonably popular, fairly easy to rank for, and would be of interest to people who would also be interested in my product/whatever I’m writing to broadly promote.
Then, lookup questions around those keywords on Quora/Reddit/Twitter/etc., see which ones still need a quality answer, and focus on those.
The trick is then in actually providing the real answer. You need to answer the question 100% on Quora/Reddit/forum, where anyone could read the answer and walk away without clicking your link and still be happy. Then your link can include “extra info”. For example, I’ve used this promote software roundups in the past—and say someone asked on Quora what the best CRM for real estate agents is, I could give a clear answer around that, and say that it was based on my experience reviewing 50+ CRMs and link to the full roundup article as a reference. In that way, you’re giving the full value of the question answer, and the link adds additional value for those who want to dig deeper.
And then, it’s hit and miss. Don’t do it too much, answer some stuff that’s purely helpful/not self-serving at all, and make sure every answer you add has a really high quality bar, and you’ll likely be ok (Reddit and many private forums are harder, Quora’s in the middle and increasingly filled with lower quality stuff, Twitter’s the easiest but you only get a handful of people and each interaction has lower long-term value).
Oh one more thing: Don’t directly promote your product. This works best when your content is one step removed from your product. At Zapier, say, we could write about CRMs that people would then automate with Zapier—and you could promote that content on say Quora by essentially promoting other people’s products, on this longtail hope that in the end it’ll still help your own product. But it does take time and luck :)
oh wow this is great info, thanks so much!!
What's I've focused last year and will keep doing:
over the last year, incoming traffic as more than double
Can you elaborate in the "create online tools around each cluster" step? Are you talking about Mini-Products around a certain topic?
yes. Concretely my product is: https://www.filestash.app/ which makes a Dropbox like frontoffice for any cloud storage mechanism. My clusters are composed of each cloud storage group I support:
FTP: https://www.filestash.app/tags/ftp/ which contains guides, and online tools around that cluster: "ftp online tool" and "ftp test tool"
S3: https://www.filestash.app/tags/s3/ which contains guides, online tools around that cluster: "s3 client online" and a few apps like this zendesk app (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/556662/s3-by-filestash/) and this trello app (https://trello.com/power-ups/61a4b5b24d93b654c9656071)
SFTP: https://www.filestash.app/tags/sftp/ ... another cluster
WebDAV: https://www.filestash.app/tags/webdav/ .... yet another cluster
LDAP ....
when an article does well in a cluster, it seems to push up the overall cluster as well. Concretly my webdav online tool never took off but somehow after creating a article that did well around "nginx webdav" and doing proper internal linking, I now get an upward trend toward the original online tool I wanted to drive traffic in the first place
Wow, really interesting! So essentially, you are creating some sort of SEO empire around all the relevant keywords.
Do you cross promote your articles/tools on other channels? What about keyword research, do you use any tool for that?
Thanks for your answer!
pretty much. No much cross promotion, probably should though. For tools:
Cool, thanks for the links!
Submitting a high-quality blog post to an actual online publication (versus just posting to my blog).
Probably got 10X the traffic to my website that way.
Interesting. What types of online publications have you done this with? Do they allow you to post it to your blog as well, or do they have the rights to it? Thanks!
Who has the rights depends on the publication.
I submitted a few pieces to Startup Grind several years ago. Got tends of thousands of views in just a few months, tons of web traffic. One article in particular probably led to ~$300K in revenue for my startup.
I post similar pieces to my blog weekly but have never got close to this amount of traffic. These publications are often looking for content.
Got it, thanks Nick!
My best marketing tactic at the moment is to make custom solitaire games using an embed generator I've made (https://online-solitaire.com/embed) for different sites. Then I write the site with the game to hear if they want to implement it.
THIS! Embeds are the holy grail. What's your business model? Enabling companies to create custom games for their community? Seen a lot of this lately in the NFT space
I don't know if I'd call it the holy grail, but it's definitely something 🙂. The business model is ads. After 5 games, ads start to appear on the right side of the screen. The embedded games is simply to get other sites to write about me, so the games that people embed on their sites have no ads and are otherwise free to play.
Where have you seen it in the NFT space?
I mean SEO-wise there aren't better ways to gain backlinks.
I did a CNFT project a month ago and implemented a Bingo game using our artwork. After that, several other NFT project owners asked me if they could buy the game for their project. Then I realized that custom branded games for NFTs are quite a thing already. For example, Claymates used a custom Flappy Bird game to keep the community engaged.
Damn... that sounds interesting. Any chance you could link to the bingo game? I'd love to see it. Would love to see the Claymates game as well.
https://www.cardanohipsters.io/bingo
That's the bingo game. Clicking on "play now" will start a single player game. The interesting part is the multiplayer game, which was played every day for one month with Discord community members.
Can't find the Claymates game atm, they probably made it unavailable after the mint
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.