Facebook’s content reach has been reducing over time as their Stock Price has increased. No kidding, there’s actually a graph which shows how the Facebook business page reach has come down each month as their stock price went up. Your post is reaching out to around 5% of your fans and it doesn’t make sense to fight for visibility on the news feeds.

Using this growth hack, we could actually get visibility on our fans notifications which have a 100% open rate!

HOW TO:

Step 1: Create a dummy Facebook app with the same name as your Facebook business page appended by the app in the suffix. (Just for convenience).

Step 2: Link the app to your Facebook page (Why are we doing this? Because apps can send notifications to people but business pages cannot. Remember Candy Crush?)

Step 3: Whenever you have a link to be shared which needs action from your followers, send the notification to your Facebook fans through the app instead of posting it through your page.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This can be a unicorn hack if used properly (Just like all the other hacks in this website!)

Let’s talk about Content Marketing in this chapter. Title of your content is the most important aspect of your Click-through Rate (CTR). And CTR matters a lot for SEO and your visibility across the internet. So it’s very important to use the best topic and title for your blog.

We are going to pick and keyword and use a Content Idea Generator tool which will give us content topic ideas and their titles to write about.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker.

Step 2: Fill your keyword, it can also be your primary target keyword from your SEO strategy.

Ex. Watches and the tool shows the titles. Following are the titles are given out by searching “watches” ​

“16 Facts about Watches that will impress your friends ​

The Insider Guide to Watches

Why Mom was right about watches”

Step 3: Now select any one of the titles and use to create content around it.

FURTHER INFO

Repurposing content is the new norm now and this tool can help you generate titles and topics to repurpose your content on LinkedIn, Medium, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit or Quora. You should find new channels to re-purpose and re-publish content based on your TA.

Chatbots are really cool and they boost your conversion rates. You will find that a majority of websites don’t have chatbots despite all the buzz.

This is usually because admins or business owners think it costs a fortune to get one of these developed. But there is a way to create a ChatBot for free, quickly.

There is no need for a developer and no coding required. Here’s how:

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.collect.chat. It is a premium tool but it has a free version using which you can launch your chatbots using templates,  collect leads and get feedback right from your website.

Step 2: Sign up and start building a bot.

Step 3: You will have a builder on the dashboard, which allows you to create a chatbot but then you can save some time. Just use templates and edit whatever required to launch. You can choose, colour, widget position, widget button text, upload your own avatar and have a quick demo of your chatbot. 

Step 4: Edit the script as you want!

Step 5: Embed this on your website, it’s very easy. If you have a WordPress website, just copy the script and put it in your head tag. You don’t need a developer to do this.

FURTHER INFO

You can install the chatbots in platforms like Wix, Shopify, even embed it on Medium Blogs and share it on Social Media.

CASE There have been a lot many companies who have had great results by building Chatbots, sharing a few of the case studies in here

1.      Anymail finder: 9 out of 10 big buyers came from ChatBots and their 60% revenue comes from Chatbots

2. MongoDB: Increased net new leads by 70% in three months 3. Perfecto Mobile: Increased website conversion rate by 230%

I always advise Marketers and Entrepreneurs that Growth Hacking can be done in two ways. The first is to do different things than other marketers.

The second way is to do what other marketers are doing but do it differently. For instance, you can either switch from Facebook to a completely new platform which isn’t exploited by other marketers or you can find new opportunities within Facebook that marketers have ignored.

Both these approaches help to reach your goals faster and cheaper and hence are both ways of growth hacking. When you look at SEO or UX, a lot of people speak about the design, technical optimization, website speed, keyword density, which is all great. But one thing which Marketers ignore a lot, and I have seen this personally over the years, is readability.

It becomes a “Growth Hack” when you do something that others are not paying attention to.

So there is a clear difference between your content and everyone else’s content, as you have looked at a very obvious but small detail which others are not looking at. And hence this hack has made its way into the blog. So three simple steps to improve the readability and get the edge above all the other competitors around you in terms of both UX and SEO are as follows:

HOW TO:

Step 1: Check your website readability using a simple tool like Readable. Go to: https://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/ How easy is it for people to read or understand your content, your blog page or article? That’s the question which the tool will answer.

Step 2: Pick any web page to perform the analysis, and put that URL in the tool. Click the ‘Calculate Readability’ button. Now you will have all the readability stats with you.

Step 3: Check Readability factors and make necessary improvements.

Before you do that, let’s understand the various scores in the readability report created by the tool. There are two sections, the ‘Readability Indices’ and the ‘Text statistics’, we will check the text statistics first.

Text Statistics will give out the score on the following parameters:

● No of Sentence

● No. of words

● No. of complex words

● Percent of complex words

● Avg words per sentence

● Avg syllables per word

To start with, keep the ‘Percent of complex words’ between 10-12% – this will keep your content simple which anyone could understand. Also, too long sentences are not good, try to keep them short. If you read a simple instructable book, it has 6-8 ‘Avg words per sentence’.

When you optimize these ratios, you will see that your ease of reading will become higher, as you are using simpler words and short sentences.

Readability Indices will give out the scores of the following parameters:

Along with scores, you will also see a coloured scale in this index, green equates a good score, yellow is average and red means bad. As soon as you have something on the red scale, go down and check the formulae and make improvements accordingly.

1. Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease – This is based on a 0-100 scale. A high score means the text is easier to read. Low scores suggest the text is complicated to understand. A value of 60-80 should be easy to understand for a 12 to 15-year-old.
2. Flesch Kincaid Grade Level – This equates the readability of the text to the US schools grade level system.
3. Gunning Fog Score
4. SMOG Index
5. Coleman Liau Index
6. Automated Readability Index

You don’t have to know the detail formulae of all the indices. You will realize that as you reduce the number of complex words and make sentences shorter, every parameter will turn into a green index and increase your content readability for users and for Google.

Make sure all these are either in green or Yellow colour scale and as soon as you have anything on the red scale, check the formulae of the index.

Once you have optimized it all, republish your content.

Also if you have content which is not yet published, you can click on the ‘Test by Direct Input’ button. Just copy/paste your content and test it for readability.

FURTHER INFORMATION

The alternative tool for the above one is the Hemingway App (URL: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/). You have an editor in this tool, it’s gonna test grade your readability to good. As long as you have a good scale, you are good to go with the content. It’s also gonna show you why it has ranked something good or not.

The app highlights lengthy complex sentences and common errors. It also shows you the reading time of your content. You can correct all the suggested improvements by this tool and publish your content which will be better than others in terms of user readability and SEO.

While this book gives more importance to achieving growth without a lot of advertising, it’s good to know how to run the best performing ads if you decide to do so.

If you are running Facebook Ads for a specific purpose, like conversions or clicks, then you have to keep on optimizing Ads. Either you will hire an expert or an agency to analyze and optimize your Ads or use specific tools.

These ways, the default ways, only lead to a loop where to keep investing money. So a better way to find Ads that work for you is to look for the best ads in your industry and to borrow and steal ideas from your industry to make Facebook Ads work for you.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.adespresso.com/ads-examples, this is a free tool and they have a huge collection of high performing Ads.

Step 2:  Search for a specific keyword and select the relevant Ad Placements, Industry, Objective, and Attribution.

Step 3:  Now you will have a set of high performing Ads, click on anyone.

Step 4: Check the copy of the Ad, the type of image which worked for them and even you can visit the link in the Ad to study their landing page too. Note down the Special Attributes, where you understand the type of content whether it is a video, a human photo or an animation. Notice the pattern of Ads that are working and create similar ones for you too.

FURTHER INFORMATION

After you are done with Optimizing your Facebook Ads, you can optimize your landing pages with the same tool. Just click on the link in the Ad and you will be directed to the landing page of your competitor’s Ads then you can steal or borrow ideas from that page and optimize your landing pages too.

The idea is not to reinvent the wheel and use what has already driven results for others in the same industry and target audience.

Link building is like gathering votes for your website for Google rankings. It is one of the most important parameters in SEO. To rank for important keywords, you will need as many backlinks as possible.

The idea is to go on top-ranking websites, find broken links and then notify the publisher or author about it.

To complete the workflow, you then send your content replacement so they consider replacing those links with your links.

Here’s why this works: No one wants a broken link on their website. Many authors write content and tag the relevant links in their articles, but a lot of blogs or online platforms shut down, making the links irrelevant and broken. The author rarely checks his content again, so here we are actually doing a favor by informing the author about the broken link.

HOW TO

Step 1: Use a Chrome extension like LinkMiner. Download and install LinkMiner.  We will use this to find missing links on specific domains.

Step 2: LinkMiner will help you look at all the outward links and will test which ones are broken or non-functional.

Step 3: Look for ‘404 errors’. [A 404 error means that the page you were trying to reach on a website couldn’t be found on their server].

Step 4: If you don’t have relevant content to the broken link, write valuable content.

Step 5: Tweet or Email the author about the broken links and also let them know about your content. When they get rid of the broken link, they have your content to link to now. That’s the backlink you wanted.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

Link Miner has an added feature where it scrapes all the links and make a .CSV file of it. This helps you sort multiple broken links.

A lot of times, you write a very good email to your prospects and you are all ready to get more sales. But the email lands in the spam of your prospect. It’s probably the worst thing that can mess up your email campaign open rates. Let’s find a way around and ensure that the emails go directly in your prospect’s mailbox.

To start, we need to understand why your emails go to spam.  It is either because your content looks spammy, or because you don’t have the required certificates. It could also be because there are broken links in your email or if you’re listed in any top DNS-based Blocking List, which free email providers refer to.

The trick is to check your emails before sending them and make sure they will end up in the inbox of your prospects.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.mail-tester.com.

Step 2: You will see an email address, copy that.

Step 3: Now open your email box in a different tab, and send that email to the address you copied.

Step 4: Go the previous tab and click, “Check the score”.

Step 5: Resolve the problems stated by the tool, if any, before sending out the campaign.

FURTHER INFORMATION

The tools may change, but the basic idea of this hack is to take that extra step to find the real reason behind the problem.

Businesses look at PR as an expensive affair and the fees that the PR agencies charge will make you believe that.

Get PR for your startup or business by connecting directly to journalists

The hack to get PR at a low cost is to skip the publications and connect directly with the journalists. Use relationship building over huge budgets.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Google your competitor’s name or a keyword describing what your startup does.

Step 2: Toggle to the News tab. You will see a huge list of the most recent related articles.

Step 3: These are the journalists you want to pitch. (Remember: More than 80% of journalists prefer being pitched by email).

How to get their emails:

● Method 1: Use EmailHunter.co, Lead411.com, or AnyMailFinder.com.

● Method 2: Find them on LinkedIn. Look at the “Summary”, most of them will have a direct email address to connect.

● Method 3: If they have a personal blog, subscribe to the newsletter to get their email address.

FURTHER INFORMATION

There is another way to build a database of journalists’ email IDs using one of the tools mentioned in our post Try it out!

If you have a target company or business that you want to approach, here is a simple hack you can use to find the best way to reach them.

In this hack, we will use “Our Locations” pages aka OPLP = Other People’s Location Pages to scrape email addresses for B2B prospecting.

We will use a special Google search string to find email addresses of concern gatekeepers from any specific location.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to Google.com and search the exact phrase, “Our Location” And “Email”.

Step 2: In the SERP you will find the locations page of companies, where the company has listed all of their offices, along with email IDs of each of their offices.

Step 3:  Now it’s time to extract these emails, open New tab, and Go-to

https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/Apps/Email_Extractor/.

Step 4: Select the ‘web page’ tab and copy-paste the URL of the page and click extract.

Step 5: The tool will extract the emails in a .CSV file.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You can add more search strings to have specific results. For example, If your target companies are web development agencies, “Our Location” AND “Email” AND “Web development”.

Another fast method to rank for your search keywords. It’s not as easy as the Workflow in the last blog but, using this workflow, you can actually start ranking for the keywords with your own content.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Find the keywords you want to rank for.

Step 2: Research the search results and find the highest-ranking content in your niche.

Step 3: Write a new version of the best of the highest-ranking content. For example, if there’s a blog about “Top 10 Ways to Grow Your Online Gifting Store”, write a blog on “Top 25 Ways to Grow Your Online Gifting Store”.

Step 4: Time for the fun part! Go to this website:

http://openlinkprofiler.org/ratelimit/domain.com

and change the domain to your competitor’s domain which is ranking for the search results.

Step 5: The website will give you a list of all the content which is linking back to their content (which is ultimately helping them rank on search). Step 6: Reach out to everyone who’s linking back to the top results.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Send them the following email:

“Hi first name, … I just wrote a similar article you mentioned. It’s like [Name of the article] but more thorough and up to date [URL]…”.

Usually, around 20% will link back to the article which is usually enough for you to land up on the first page for the search results!