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.

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.