We are going to use ProductHunt to boost your new mobile app downloads. ProductHunt is a website where you can launch your products, whether your product is new or an existing one.

We used ProductHunt to launch multiple mobile apps for our clients and projects. We usually hit an average of 5000 downloads from each PH launch.

In ProductHunt, either you can launch your app or a ’Hunter’ can launch it for you. A ‘Hunter’ is someone who submits your product on Product Hunt, it’s always better if a hunter launches the product. When you use a ‘Hunter’ to launch your app, you’re tapping into their network of influence leading to a larger number of downloads, more than what is reachable within ProductHunt.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to ProductHunt and go on the ‘Topics’ section.

Step 2: Select the category in which your product is. Ex. ‘Marketing’.

Step 3: Look out for trending products in your category and check the hunters of these products.

Step 4: Go on their profiles, find their twitter account. A quick hack to find their Twitter profiles instantly is to look for the same username that they have on ProductHunt. 90% of the time, if you take their PH profile URL and replace producthunt.com with twitter.com in the URL, you’ll find their Twitter profile. This is because most influencers and early users on ProductHunt signed up on PH from Twitter.

Step 5: You can schedule a series of Tweets to these influencers asking them to hunt your product on PH.

FURTHER INFORMATION

It’s not about launching your product on Product hunt but it’s about getting users from followers of your hunters. Hunters are influencers in Product Hunt, a tweet goes out from their profile when they hunt for your product. Do choose your hunter wisely, look for someone who has influence over Product Hunt and Twitter as well.

Hunters are also actively looking for products relevant to their TA to hunt. So as long as your product solves a problem, does what it says, and is relevant to the hunter’s TA, you will get hunted! And if your product doesn’t meet these requirements, you shouldn’t even be doing growth hacking!

The best strategy in SEO is the one which works. And if it’s working for a competitor, it’s probably going to work for you too.

What’s better is once you know what they’re doing, you can do even better with all the clever growth hacks you learn on this website!

The Keyword strategy is the backbone of your SEO and also your competitor’s SEO. Knowing what keywords your competitors are targeting, you can adjust your tactics accordingly and beat them in their own game.

When you finalize your target keywords, you follow a process for On-Page SEO where you try to fit the targeted keywords in Title, Description, and Heading of the blog.

You also try to have the maximum frequency of these keywords on the page. Just like you, your competitor will follow the same process and with the help of a tool, you can check the above parameters and locations for keywords and make a sense of targeted keywords. In this hack, we will reverse engineer our SEO using our competitors’ strategy.

HOW TO

Step 1: Find all the blogs or pages posted by your competitors in the last 30 days, make a list of these pages.

Step 2: Go to https://smallseotools.com/, and click on SEO Analyzer.

Step 3:  Paste the URL in and click Submit. The tool will analyze the page and give you a result.

Step 4: Click on ‘Keywords’

Step 5: In the Top Keywords Section, note the high-frequency keywords which also appear in title, description, and headers. These are the keywords targeted by your competitors for that specific page.

Step 6: Go to SEO Section of the analysis, have a look at the page structure in terms of Heading and Subheadings. You will be able to make sense of their strategy.

Step 7: Now repeat Step 2 to Step 5 for all the other URLs and you will have the list of keywords targeted by your competitors.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Smallseotools is a good tool but I do not recommend it to use as your primary SEO analysis tool. It may miss out on various new parameters added by Google due to lack of or slow updates. But for this specific hack, it really works great.

“Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer” is what Don Corleone taught us about Competitors.

That’s exactly the advice you need to embrace before you execute this hack. We will use your competitors to find the best-targeted media publications where will find the exact target audience for your startup or business.

HOW TO

Step 1: Search for your competitor on Google and go to the ‘News’ Tab. The news tab will directly take you the media coverage sites so you don’t have to check the SERP for media websites.

Step 2: See the articles about your competitor’s which have got featured.

Step 3: Reach out to the authors of these publications and ask them to add your product in their articles. You can even sponsor the article if needed.

FURTHER INFORMATION

The biggest problem with PR or Media Coverage is that most startups or business like to get their product featured on startup or Entrepreneur websites or Small Business websites.

These websites have most other founders, startups, and business owners as their target audience which may or may not be the target audience for your product or service. This ends up mostly just being done for vanity akin to the number of likes on your Facebook page. Instead, focus on PR on publications made for your TA and not made for other business owners.

We all talk about video in our content strategy but using this workflow you can have a video for almost every piece of content you write without spending much time or effort on the same.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Write a blog with lists or pointers as you usually would.

Step 2: Go to www.lumen5.com, add a link to your blog and the platform automatically generates a quick video to go with your blog. (using AI algorithms).

Step 3: Embed the video back into the blog before publishing it.

Step 4: Share the blog and video separately across social media channels and emailers. Measure the increase in engagement, time-on-page, and retention.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You can also use this workflow for curated content. Remember to promote the video separately as well as part of the content. You can have your videos ready and published within 10 minutes and we’ve recorded an overall increase in our content engagement metrics up to 60% when using this workflow.

The one place we never look for customers is inside the customer bag of our competitors. In this hack, we will use our competitor’s network on Twitter and leverage their support inquiries to grow our startup or business. Let me explain this with an example. Say you’re the founder of a travel booking company (assume Expedia) and you want to target your competitor’s (say Booking.com) network. In this case, we will leverage its network on Twitter.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Find Booking.com’s support handle on Twitter. (If there’s no dedicated handle for support, head to the main handle).

Step 2: Go to their ‘Tweets & Replies’ tab and find negative reviews & negative tweets about Booking.com. Additionally, you can use the advanced search on Twitter and filter tweets with negative emotions or sentiment.

Step 3: Respond to all these negative tweets offering a solution to their problem if they switch to your booking website instead. To top it up, offer a welcome discount for all these users to book the same ticket from your website. (Users want a cheaper ticket for sure).

FURTHER INFORMATION

This is a simple OPN growth hacking workflow which you can replicate for any business. Always measure results and see what works best. In this case, you can A/B test different competitor’s networks, different messaging, different copy and outreach methods. Then measure results and scale what works the best.

We selected Twitter as a channel here because of its popular use as a support channel. This makes sure we have many inquiries to work with.

It’s also a good idea to pick your biggest competitor to get a lot of leads fast and then target your smaller competitors.

You can also send direct tweets to the unhappy customers of your competitors outside of their feeds to protect your identity.

Influencer Marketing is where you tie up with an influencer, and they promote your products or services to their followers. Many startups are enjoying huge success with Influence marketing, owing to the fact that you can reach out to your targeted audience and comparatively at a very low price.

But there have been failed influencer Marketing Campaigns too and the number one factor is the selection of the Influencer. Selecting the right Influencer is the most critical part of the campaign but mostly underlooked by Entrepreneurs and Marketers. To select the right Influencers for your campaign, you need to look at the following metrics in the following order of priority. ​

First, check if the Influencer has a similar niche as your business ​Look at the Engagement Rate of the Influencer number of followers of an Influencer Finding the Engagement rate and finding Influencers to compare is a task. Let me help you make it easy. We are going to use two simple tools.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.influence.co and search your product niche. You will have a list of Influencers.

Step 2: Now at the top of the page, filter the list using Location and the minimum and maximum followers count. Remember to pick an ideal min and max no of followers. More followers, the lesser the engagement but more the cost. And cost-wise, in Influencer Marketing, 1 + 1 is mostly greater than 2. Add the Influencers recommended by the tool in your list of Influencers.

Step 3: Now you will have a list of Influencers according to your niche and min-max followers, it’s time to check the most important metric i.e. Engagement rate. 

Step 4: Go to www.phlanx.com and look for the Engagement calculator for your specific social media platform. Ex. ‘Instagram Engagement Calculator’

Step 5: Check the engagement rate of all the Influencers from the list and choose the one with high engagement. Look for at least 3% as the engagement rate.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You can also follow specific Influencers and relevant tags in your domain to find out good Influencers. Engagement rate is the ratio of the total number of likes, comments, shares to the total followers. In simple terms, it is a measure of how engaged are the followers of an Influencer. I personally only look at the Engagement rate and do not worry about the number of followers at all. You shouldn’t either.

A B2B marketer’s day starts and ends with leads! In this post, we are going to look at a method of generating very targeted leads in bulk with a simple tool.

Probably you must have used it for finding what technology a website uses. But in this hack, we are going to use it for quick bulk lead generation.

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to www.builtwith.com and Login.

Step 2: After you log in, select any technology which your target audience websites use. So you select the technology and it will show you the information of all companies which use that technology on their websites. For example, you are selling to e-commerce shop owners, then select Magento or Shopify and you get the list of companies who use Magento or Shopify.

Step 3: The fun part is when you click on the technology of your choice, it will generate a list which you can download for free. And the list will have contact details of those websites using those specific websites. So here are your leads in bulk.

FURTHER INFO

You can repeat this process for any technology and you can also select really specific things like “Wordpress websites not using A/B testing“. It’s a great way for B2B companies to get quick leads, you will get Email Address, Social Media Information, Location and sometimes the revenue and the amount these companies are spending on tech.

All the Search Engines and Social Media Networks are actually big databases and you can run queries on. Think of them as big databases for your growth. If you can work with dynamic operators, you can leverage these databases, filter out all the noise and connect with your target audience.

This post is a deep dive on this topic. I have compiled a list of Search Strings for you, which I call, “Link building on Steroids”, as I primarily use it for Link building. So Whatever business you have whether service or product you will be able to perform link building, brand awareness essentially getting in touch with the right audience.

LIST OF SEARCH STRINGS

Find Industry Specific Questions
industryName + site:quora.com
industryName + site:wiki.answers.com
industryName + site:answers.yahoo.com

How to use this:

Search with your specific Industry and you can connect & answer questions from your target audience. The operator we are using here is, site: which will only return from that specific website.

Find Websites Which Review Products
ProductName + intitle:review
ProductName + intitle:ratings
ProductName + intitle:comparison
ProductName + intitle:price comparison
ProductName + intitle:compare
ProductName + intitle:recommended

How to use this:

Intitle:review will give you links to blogs or articles which have a review in their title, you can use this to look out for whatever you need in the title URL. Using the above search strings you can find Bloggers, publications or websites who write about products from your industry and you can reach out to them and ask to include your product. This not only will give you a backlink but will give you sales too.

Discover More Niche Directories

ServiceName + “submit site”
ServiceName + “submit url”
ServiceName + “intitle:directory”
ServiceName + “intitle:resources”
ServiceName + “directory list”
ServiceName “inurl:list”
ServiceName + “intitle:list”
ServiceName + “inurl:directory”
ServiceName + “inurl:resources”
ServiceName + “add url”
ServiceName + “submit url”
ServiceName + “suggest url”
ServiceName + “suggest a url”
ServiceName + “submit site”
ServiceName + “submit a site”
ServiceName + “submit your site”
ServiceName + “add a url”
ServiceName + “add a site”
ServiceName + “add listing”

How to use this

You can use all of these search strings to find new directories and submit your site there. The important thing about finding directories this way is that, your competitors will ask for directories from agencies or freelancing Marketers who will provide the same listing to everyone. But using these search strings, you will have an updated, new and different list which will give you an edge over your competitors. 

Ex. ​real estate + “add your listing”
​real estate + “submit a listing”

FURTHER INFO

Operators are special Characters and commands that extend the capabilities on regular text searches. Ex. “”, putting a keyword in the phrase will give results as an exact match of the keyword.

Guest blogging is not dead.

Guest blogging is a win-win engagement for both the publisher and the blogger.  Collaboration leads to growth and everyone wins. But this can be a tough task.

The most important step is to first one: To find relevant publishers looking for guest blogs. This hack solves that problem. We will use three search strings for this hack, where we will submit your blog in directories and post to relevant blogs.    

HOW TO

Step 1: Go to Google and search, “Submit your blog”. This will get you to the links where you can submit your blog to a specific website or directory or a publication.

Step 2: Open the relevant links in the SERP and submit your blog entry.

Step 3: Now we will use a second search string for guest blog posts in your domain. Go to Google and search, “Submit your post” AND “your keyword”.  Ex. “Submit your post” AND “Digital Marketing”.

Step 4:  Open relevant links in SERP, you will land-up on pages of publishers where you can submit your blogs. Write a good post on the topic mentioned in the page and submit.

Step 5: Go to Twitter and Search, “Looking for” AND “Guest bloggers”, you will land up on tweets where people are looking for guest bloggers.

Step 6: Now sort relevant tweets, reach out to them and submit your blog.

FURTHER INFORMATION

To get traffic to your website, the most important part of guest blogging is submitting to the right audience. Otherwise, it is just branding and vanity metrics for your startup’s growth journey. So in this hack, we’re basically looking for keywords which bloggers will put in their blog if they want guest blogs, which is eventually nothing but thinking in their shoes.

CASE 25-27% of the traffic on my websites is driven by my guest blogs. I’ve designed a pipeline using the Google search string and Twitter search string which drives around 10 new guest blogging opportunities every month. These are very few blogs, less work, but bigger publications. You can start with smaller publications and used the published blogs as case studies for bigger ones as you climb up the ladder.

This helps you stop worrying about your content calendars so you can focus on the real stuff (which is growing your startup, of course!)

HOW TO:

Step 1: Make a list of the top publications which regularly publish content in your niche or content relevant to your target audience.

Step 2: Go to Hootsuite and find their “RSS” Feed for the Scheduler.

Step 3: Include the RSS links of all the publications from Step 1.

Step 4: Decide the content frequency and add hashtags using the RSS tool inside Hootsuite (From Step 2).

Step 5: Choose the social networks to post this content to.

FURTHER INFORMATION

That’s it! It’s that easy. Now you have a constant content pipeline for social media shares.