Marketing Examples

Good afternoon comrades!

My Marketing Examples newsletter reached the 42,000 mark!

I explained how I grew my newsletter to 20,000 in this case study.

TLDR. My newsletter is my content marketing. I share it across the internet. And then ask if people would like to subscribe.

And... to be honest, the strategy hasn't really changed.

If there's a lesson, maybe it's go all in. I've haven't started a podcast. I stopped doing YouTube. I've turned down every consultancy gig.

Oh, here's something. I did change my newsletter popup. I wanted to make it vibrant. That improved conversion by 40% or so!

And The Hustle featured me in their newsletter. Which gave me a lovely boost!

4 months ago I told myself 50k for the year would be awesome. So I've got 8,000 more to go! The race is on.

If you'd like to learn more about marketing from one real world example each each week perhaps you'd like to subscribe. It's a friendly place.

Thanks for reading :)

Previous milestones I’ve wrote some long strategy about how to do Twitter.

But I feel like that can distract from how simple it can be. This tweet is the formula I followed:

So I decided why should people follow the account: to learn marketing from real examples.

And I started posting. My style started off as a rip off of Steve Schoger. and slowly morphed into my own thing.

And then I spent 14 months doing literally nothing other than coming up with marketing examples to share. It's pretty much a full time job.

If there is a lesson it's keep going. Because it only gets easier.

Back in the day I'd publish a tip and get 10 new followers. Now one can add 1000 followers.

Thanks for the support. Over and out.

Hola. Buenos Dias.

My Marketing Examples Twitter account hit 50k followers!

Same strategy as it always was:

• Every article is broken down in a thread.
• Quick visual tips.

I also changed the name:

Marketing Examples → Harry's Marketing Examples

Explained my reasons here:

Anyone from the UK is probably aware of the public rallying behind Joe Wicks P.E. livestreams over lockdown.

The amount of press and new YouTube + Instagram followers he got will return tens of millions of pounds down the line. I believe he's already signed a multimillion deal for a new cookery book.

If Joe made The Body Coach a faceless company there is absolutely no way he'd have the publics backing in the way it transpired.

Obviously this isn't the case for every company. But when you're in the content creation space there's a lot of advantages to having a real person at the helm.

Imagine if you scratched J.K. Rowling's name of the Harry Potter books. And instead it was authored by “Bloomsbury media”. Not as magical!

There's definitely cons as well:

• Harder to sell
• Confusing for existing followers
• Less of an “authority”

But I just didn't see them as close to outweighing the pros.

Anyway. That's a wrap from me. I'll do a write up in a couple of months about the effect of making the company more personal.

Cya at 60k :)

So my marketing newsletter crossed 27,500 subscribers. Still with an open rate of 50% somehow. I thought I’d do a little update.

It feels like yesterday when I was getting 10 new subscribers a day. Today I’m averaging over 100. And 1000 a week!

The benefits from hard work compound over time. You’ve just got to stay in the game long enough to reap them.

My high level strategy

People say “bet on YouTube, bet on TikTok, SEO, etc .”

But the only thing we know for sure is that it’s only going to get easier for people to share stuff.

So my energy goes into writing the best stuff I can and trusting word of mouth.

And it works. Whether thats a subscriber on Twitter telling their followers. Or Dave Gerhardt and Neil Patel on their podcasts.

I could work quicker. But that's the short term strategy. The long game is being the best and trusting people will talk about it.

That's why I will overtake Hubspot one day. SEO won't beat the PEOPLE 😂

It's all in the small details

Let me give you an example.

I was writing about Grubhub’s link building. It was Friday. I’d been working on this article all week. I really wanted to publish it and enjoy my weekend. But the conclusion was flat.

So I worked on it Saturday morning and found the words to sum it up.

That's the power of good SEO.
 Plant an orchard. And you're eating fruit everyday.
The long game is the shortcut.

Anyhow, I ended up getting 4 or 5 messages specifically about the conclusion. 4 or 5 replies equates to more like 400 or 500 people who appreciated it.

And it made me think. People really do notice the details.

That's all folks

Here's my analytics from around January in case you wanted to see where my subscribers come from. You see “goal completions” on the right. That's new subscribers.

Thanks for reading. In case you want to check out my newsletter for yourself here's a link.

I share a new marketing case study every week. Short, sweet and practical. Any questions, hmu :)

I started my channel last week and made my first video.

I promoted it on my Twitter page, to my newsletter, Reddit, and good ol' Indie Hackers, and ended up with 5.7k views and 1000 new subscribers.

It's an interesting case study in how tough it is to move audiences across platforms. I have 40k Twitter followers, 23k newsletter subscribers and 1k decided to subscribe to the YouTube channel.

My rational behind starting YouTube is all about organic search. I have over fifty high quality written on the Marketing Examples website!

But they're all super short. And not picking up much organic traffic on Google. It's hard for me to compete with big companies, who are writing SEO optimised stuff, with a team of link-builders.

But on YouTube it's more of a level playing field. And the numbers are just as big for the same keywords.

Also, I love the platform myself, and only see it getting bigger and bigger!

Anyway, I'll keep you updated with how it goes.

Viva Marketing Examples!

If you'd like to check out my channel or my first video I've linked em. Any questions or YouTube advice from seasoned pros — hit me :)

Hello Hello!

My marketing newsletter hit 21,000 subscribers!

It’s been a long road. But, a straight road. I found a formula. And stuck to it. Write. Promote. Write. Promote. Write. Promote.

I remember Indie Hackers put on a group chat with 
James Clear last year. He was on 200k subscribers. That number sounded absurd to me. I asked him how he did it. He told me he'd written two articles a week for 5 years.

I realise that I keep doing what I'm doing I'll be on around 200k subscribers after 5 years ...

50% of any success is down to consistency.

My newsletter is my content marketing

If i tried to do content marketing and write a newsletter both would be half as good.

So I work really hard on one article. Try and make it awesome. And then it doubles as my content marketing.

50 hardcore fans and you're rolling

Thousands of articles get published each day:

* 95% barely get read

• 4% do well
• 1% take off

If you've got 50 hardcore fans you can get in that 4% category EVERY time. Cause they'll share your article. And talk about it.

You earn them by going BIG. Writing something so good you can’t get ignore you. Also, by interacting. Taking people on your journey with you.

Thank you for reading. If you'd like to check out my newsletter it's here. Any questions let me know. I'll be back at 25,000!

Friends, enemies!

I bring good news and bad.

I'll start with the good.

The Marketing Examples Twitter account is bouncing. Averaging about 4500 followers each month.

Twitter compounds. My first 5000 on Twitter took 10 months. Now I’ve added that in a month. If you're doing good stuff keep doing it.

Twitter doesn’t pay bills. It’s potential energy.

So, the not so good news. My last sponsor decided to call it a day. Spending was cut as a result of COVID-19. It is what it is.

I’m not down. I’m actually up. Sponsors aren’t the yellow brick road. It’s a good time to focus on monetising myself. A blessing in disguise.

No need for pity - “Sorry to hear...” You can’t go swimming and not get wet. If I'm any good I'll work it out.

Without a sponsor I’ve teamed up with Exploding topics. We're sponsoring each other for a few weeks. So not all bad. Subscriber growth has been doing good as a result.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the day has come.

Google has accepted, that when people Google “Marketing Examples”, they don't want a big “knowledge box” full of stocking-fillers from “Marketing Land”. They want the good stuff, the fine wine, the dulcet tones, from Marketing Examples!

In all seriousness, “MarketingExamples . com” is what's known as an exact matching domain name: people search for “marketing examples” organically. And it's also my domain.

Back in the day this was a smart way of getting free organic traffic.

e.g. you could make a domain “highqualitywatches . com” and rank for the valuable search term “high quality watches”. But then Google's algo changed, and it became much harder to “game” the exact matching domain loophole.

In my case, the road to No.1 took about 10 months:

It came in two stages:

Stage 1 - Get enough high quality backlinks that Google ranks me in the top 5

Stage 2 - Then it's all about “searcher intent”. Whatever search result people are clicking on more than proportionally Google's going to bump up the rankings.

Fortunately, enough people Googling “marketing examples” where searching for my site that Google had to move it up to numero uno.

It's not actually the biggest deal because the keyword “Marketing Examples” hasn't got the biggest search volume.

But now at least I won't have the awkward exchange when I tell people what I do, they Google it, and they can't see it anywhere!

Marketing Examples email list just hit the 13,000 mark. Here's the last 30 days growth. And a couple of highlights:

Negative subscribers

A week ago I went backwards in subscribers for the first time. 50 unsubscribes. Just 25 new subscribes. A net loss.

Setbacks are opportunities. I learnt that people find long emails daunting ...

Encourage forwarding to balance unsubscribes

My unsubscribe rate is between 0.2-0.4% per email. With a list of 13k this is ~40 people.

To balance unsubscribes I encourage subscribers to forward to friends. If you write great email's good this works:

Quality gets rewarded

The focus of Marketing Examples has always been quality at all costs. The downside is fewer articles and less organic traffic.

But the upside is if you have a reputation for quality you expose yourself to big growth spikes.

e.g. - A fortnight ago Noah Kagan shared my site with his big email list. This doesn't happen to sites which prioritise quantity over quality. A tweet from Courtland comes to mind:

Just get started

if you want to grow an email list just get started is the best advice out there.

Email lists don't “blow up” in the way that YouTube channels do. It's a slow game and it can feel like you're plodding on. But if you plod on long enough you'll make it to several thousand subscribers.

And finally, if you'd like to learn more about marketing from short pratical tips, please do check out Marketing Examples and also perhaps the email list.

Any questions let me know in the comments :)

A couple of days ago I published my most successful marketing article ever. It was about the genius of Lil Nas X marketing strategy.

The twitter thread ended up with more than 7000 likes. It also ended up the 3rd most upvoted post of all time on Reddit's entrepreneur forum.

I was at my parents house when I published the article. We were in the kitchen looking at the numbers go up literally every second. It was surreal. This was the 46th marketing case study I've written. Lucky 46!

Before, I went to bed I checked my phone one last time. Boy, was that mistake. A stream of angry messages stared back at me. It took me a while to work out what was going on.

Basically, another Twitter user had written a thread about the same topic a few months earlier. She'd then seem my thread, thought I'd stolen her work, and proceeded to set the attack dogs on me.

In reality:

• I'd never seen her thread before
• Hundreds of articles have been written about Lil Nas X's meteoric rise before. She wasn't the first. I won't be the last.
• You can't own the rights to a story. That's like saying that only one article can ever be written about Tesla's marketing!

But that's not how “the mob” operates. It takes 5 seconds to reply, “You stole the article ...” And 5 minutes to read both threads and realise that aside from the title, they tell the story in a very different way.

I thought about blocking them, I thought about direct messaging them, I thought about replying with reason. But, you cannot change an opinion using logic if logic wasn't used to form the opinion in the first place. Anything I said would fuel them. So I went with the radio silence approach.

I thought maybe it would slow, but I woke up the next day and the stream of hate kept coming. They even messaged my sponsor trying to to get them to cut ties:

Fortunately my sponsor saw sense. Cheers SEOBuddy:

Enough was enough. I left my phone in the cookie jar, went outside into the sunlight, then into a nearby park. I said hello to a few dog walkers, they smiled, said hello back and I was reminded that humans are alright after all.

It's a 24 hour news cycle. They'd done their best to cancel me, and now I'm sure they've moved onto their next next victim.

When all said and done, worse things have happened at sea. Social media isn't real. I've started to smile about the whole thing. It toughened me up.

“The dogs bark, and the caravan goes by” — Jose Mourinho

(thanks @Arsawatt for the quote)

Viva Marketing Examples. Only way to take me out is to nail me to canvas! Cause the party isn't stopping. Thanks for reading. And enjoy Friday.