Everyone writes blogs and all your competitors are already doing it. And it’s boring

Let’s discuss what you should be doing instead of just writing blogs and generate leads. And don’t get me wrong. I love content marketing. It is great. But it takes huge amounts of effort and time to eventually start getting real results you need.

And for startups, that’s a rare resource: TIME.

Instead, we should use the limited time we have in driving our funnel and pushing it forward. By building a small side project which solves a problem for your target audience and gives it for free and generate leads from it. My studies have shown Side Project marketing getting a 100x ROI compared to blogs which means a single side project has the power-packed potential of 100 blog posts.

Pretty much anything can become a side project. It doesn’t have to be conventional, expensive, or mind-blowing, it just has to be something that really solves a specific problem for your audience. Side projects can be small tools, courses, calculators, curated directories, quizzes, generators, graders or communities. We can design these side projects in a matter of a few minutes. Let’s see how!

HOW TO

So let’s say you want to teach people how to create Buyer Persona, you can write a blog post and have steps to create a Buyer Persona or you can create a tool something like “Make my Persona” by Hubspot. (www.makemypersona.com), wherein the user enters the details of their information and you give them the buyer persona they need.

This is perceived as high value and you also get, 100% conversion on leads as with the blog you can have CTA or link but here you are getting the lead information for the user to generate the buyer’s persona. And this is very easy to make.

Step 1: Find a specific problem faced by your target Audience, look if you can solve it easily by taking information from them and then adding your bits and giving a valuable result.

Step 2: Now go to www.typeform.com and Log in.

Step 3: Pick up any questionnaire template and put your questions.

Step 4: Embed the form on your page, and setup Email triggers or you can also display the results directly after the user inputs their information.

FURTHER INFO

I am not saying stop blogging, it works but startups really don’t have that much time to wait for results, so instead of just blogging, create a side project. Side projects are the new marketing channels for you.

But you don’t want to invest a lot of time in Marketing this side project as you want to focus on Marketing the main product. Following is the success formulae for marketing my side-projects, which I use.

Side Project Success Formulae:

Create a side project + use Typeform Tools + Product Hunt Launch + Twitter Influencers + Email Drip Campaigns + Soft Sell

Once I make the side project, I launch it on Product Hunt. I make sure that I am targeting Twitter Influencers, who can launch it for me as I am going to hack into their networks. As whenever an Influencer launches your product, their followers also get a message with a link to your product. Then I put all these people who sign up for this side project in an email drip campaign.

These people start getting my emails. Typically my drip Email Campaign looks like this.

Email One and two are free value. Email three is a soft sell. Email Four and Five is again free value. Email Six and Seven are follow-ups. (Use the hack in Chapter 20 to get more out of your Product Hunt launch)

CASE STUDY

Crew (an online marketplace for mobile/web creators), created Unsplash as a side project to attract customers to their main business. They listed free HD quality photos, shared the link on Hacker Noon and some more organic Marketing.

All this costs them roughly 20$ and a couple of hours of their time and the results were 50,000 site visits on the same day. The more valuable metric is, Unsplash is the number one traffic source for Crew and has given around 5 Million unique visitors. That’s how big side projects can be.

[Case Study Source: CrazyEgg]

This hack will teach you how to generate unlimited blog ideas. I’ve written about another tool to do this in this book and I’m writing two chapters on this topic as it is a big need.

You need an endless supply of ideas for blogs at all times! The good thing about this tool is that you can generate ideas based on Q&A topics

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.semrush.com/topic-research and enter the topic. Select the location too.

Step 2:  Now you will have a lot of ideas on the topics that you want. (No harm in taking the premium version of this tool as well – it’s worth it!) Select one and write content around it.

FURTHER INFO

Once you have input your topic, the tool divides it into sub-keywords and then lists it in grid formats with ideas for each sub-keyword.

One section of the results page will have blog topics based on questions and further the questions are divided into different types such as

What, How, Is, Why , Where. Now how do you use these questions? Question is amazing way to write blogs on or make videos on.

You can pick up questions which are ‘what’ and ‘How’ and create a two-minute video on them, as they can be answered easily. ‘Is’ and ‘Why’ are a more strategic question, which needs longer answers so you can make longer videos to answer them.

In a startup, if there is anything that saves your time and money, go ahead and do that! In the old blog, we have saved your money and time in optimizing your Facebook Ads and now it’s time for those Landing Pages.

The Process is simple: First, get an idea of what kind of landing page you need to build. second is the checklist to make sure if your Landing page is highly optimized and high performing. Third, analyze if what you did in the first and second part is correct or not, using a Landing Page Analyzer.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to https://instapage.com/blog/landing-page-examples.

Step 2: This is the collection of best Landing Page examples which have converted well. Go through all the Ads and just pick a few from your industry. Understand what exactly is working for them and make a note of the lessons from these Ads.

Step 3: Go to https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-checklist.

Step 4: This is a Checklist of the best practices for Landing Pages. Make sure that you follow the checklist when designing a landing page.

Step 5: Design your landing page considering the notes from Step 2 and 4.

Step 6: It’s time to analyze your newly made landing page. Go to https://unbounce.com/landing-page-analyzer/

Step 7: Submit your URL and fill the required details. You will get an in-depth report of your landing page. If needed, make changes to your landing page.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Once you have an optimized landing page, you don’t have to worry about your landing page is converting or not.

As now you know you have followed all the best practices and now you can focus on A/B testing your Ads and spend more time and energy in there.

There might be cases of tweaking your landing page but the basics and foundation will be absolutely correct. The reason I am so confident about the process is that all the resources and tools in the chapter come from the best in class in what they do – InstaPage, Hubspot and Unbounce.

The idea of this hack is to pre-optimise your landing page with best practices even before you start your campaign.

For free bulk lead generation, I have suggested you use Builtwith.com, but it has a free use limit and you will hit it someday.

So we are going to discuss an alternative to builtwith.com. That tool is techlookup.hunter.io, it is a side-project by hunter.io. You probably must have used hunter.io for finding email IDs but this is a side tool which can help you find websites in your industry.

Similarly to BuiltWith, you can search websites using a specific technology, say WordPress, and further filter by industry too.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to techlookup.hunter.io.

Step 2: Type the technology you are looking for, then click on the ‘Create my list’ button.

Step 3: You can add more technologies, select language, industry. Fill in your Name and Email ID. You will have a .CSV file with the names of websites matching your search.

FURTHER INFO

One of the applications of this list is that you can go on hunter.io and find email IDs of employees of these companies and start your drip campaigns on them. This tool has a database of 1.4 Million websites, which is a huge number.

Even the best of us need inspiration from time to time, especially when it comes to writing new blogs & finding blog topics.

So here’s a tool you need when you have the blogger’s block.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator.

Step 2: Insert three nouns around which you want to write about. Ex. growth marketing automation

Here is the result by the tool,

“14 common misconceptions about growth”

“5 tools everyone in the automation Industry should be using”

“The worst advice we have ever heard about marketing”.

Step 3: Now you can combine a few of your ideas, keywords and the topics from this tool and write about them. Now you will never run out of blog topic ideas

FURTHER INFO

Using this method, you can generate new blog topics in less than two minutes. The hack is that you don’t have to put more time in generating ideas instead put your time writing great content.

Facebook is a great place to find leads.

In this hack, we will target other people’s posts on FB groups and use them to generate links for our business. I personally love this one and use it a lot. Here’s how to do it:

HOW TO

For example, let’s say your target audience is Digital Marketers.

Step 1: Go to FB and search for a specific keyword followed by ‘email’ and ‘comment’, in our above example. Search for, “digital marketing email comment”. You will get posts with these search entries in the result.

Step 2: Now it’s time to extract the emails. Just copy the comments and go to www.verifyemailaddress.io and paste the text and click on the button extract. You will have a .CSV file of all the email IDs.

Step 3: Go to your email Marketing tool and add these Email IDs and add them in your drip campaigns.

FURTHER INFO

You can do a lot of things with Facebook Search! Repeat the search with different keywords and generate leads.

Usually, I do not recommend a hustle for followers That just not my way. But the process that we are going to see in this post is actually fun. The basic idea behind this is, “engagement for engagement”.

You can even do this if you’re old on Instagram and wish to increase your followers.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Go to the most recent section for the hashtag you chose to target and choose the top picture.

Step 2: Follow that account, go to their photos, and like their most recent three.

Step 3: Comment on one of their photos. If you’re already working on follow-for-follow you’ll see that the follow-back percentage will increase to around 25% when you target these people.

Step 4: Using the Repost app, give a shout-out to people from this list who follow you back. By the end of 3 weeks of this workflow, you would have gained at least 5000 followers.

For automation of your likes, you can use “Ever liker” free plugin for chrome.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Start using HASHTAGS on your Instagram Stories to boost visibility, you can add up to 10 hashtags on a Story, but take care not to clutter your content. You can shrink your hashtags or even hide them behind an emoji, sticker, or GIF.

Usually, Email ID’s are the first step in your funnel, and that’s the best way to get in touch with a company or business. If you know the companies that you want to target and their websites, then this hack can help you find email IDs of all their employees for free.

HOW TO

Step 1: Make a list of the Companies you want to target.

Step 2: Go to http://leadsfinder.io/ and type companies name in the box. There are many tools that get you email IDs but this is free as it is built using a crowdsourced database. The tool is not very popular now, so you will have a first-mover advantage.

Step 3: Get the email IDs of employees of these companies.

Step 4: Import this list into your email Marketing Campaigns and start sending emails. Send 2-3 Emails as free content or value addition and then they start buying from you.

FURTHER INFO

Tools make your work easy and you should look at tools which not a lot of people know about and that gives you an edge over others. The problem with finding Email IDs of big companies is that you don’t know who is responsible for what. There is one more tool from leadsfinder.io which is Name2Email. It’s a side project from them and an extension which works within Gmail.

You just need to write the name and Company name in your ‘To’ section and it will pop up a few email IDs from their database to send the Email. Do check it out and let me know by Email if it works for you! And don’t ask for my email, go find it using this hack.

Ideas are nothing without execution, but it’s too late to just say that.

Now Ideas are nothing without fast execution. Almost everyone, irrespective of what they do, has at least one good idea, but what differentiates the successful ones from the other is the speed of execution.

Likewise, we all get Ideas and keep hovering on them for months and years, but what if we at least test some of our ideas by making MVP (minimum viable product) or for the matter of this chapter a Pre-MVP. You would think it will take a lot of time. But we’re going to change that.

Here’s how:

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to Typeform.com and setup your account.

Step 2: Build your first form and ask relevant questions around your idea hypothesis.

Step 3: Send it to 100 people in your Target Audience.

Step 4: After 3 days, analyze if at least 10 people have filled your form. If they do, start working on that idea.

FURTHER INFO

MVP is a minimal viable product, it is to have as less information as possible having to spend as little time as possible while you get enough data and results to analyze your idea.

The GH to product development is to have a Pre-MVP which is building a type form and then go into a full MVP. Make this your first step in your startup. Even if you want to test new ideas in your existing startup, make this your first step! Execute Fast, Fail Fast!

Instagram uses Hashtags to efficiently deliver the right content to the right people.

Similar to keywords in SEO, hashtags are to be used wisely as they will help you reach your target audience. So selecting the right Instagram hashtags is very critical and this chapter is all about that. Let’s first understand the limits of Instagram Captions.

At the time of writing this blog, Instagram had a limit of up to 30 Hashtags and 2200 characters on the entire caption field. These limits may change and could be different now. But what I really want to convey here is that platforms will always have some limits and you better know them so that you can work around those limits and grow.

And yes, you can work around these limits too with certain hacks but first, we must find the best hashtags. Here’s how:

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.top-hashtags.com and search for a specific keyword in your domain.

Step 2: The tool will give you more similar hashtags and their respective number of posts. Now select a mixture of relevant tags and make a list of them.

Step 3: You can do this research once and then keep using the same hashtags later. However, you will have to save them somewhere in the phone and copy-paste later. 

FURTHER INFORMATION

It’s not necessary to use all the 30 Hashtags in a post. You have to experiment and find the right set for you. I used to have 20 hashtags and then my engagement declined and so I reduced it to 10, and that works great for me.

For a client, we found 3 hashtags to be the magic number and volume. Experiment and pick yours accordingly.

Here’s a tip: Don’t pick all the popular hashtags, as a large number of people are following those hashtags which mean millions of people will be using the same hashtags.