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!

Instagram is a high-return social channel, especially for the B2C focus. It is a great channel to tell visual stories, so missing out on Instagram is not an option.

Instagram profiles with around 1000 followers have the highest engagement rates which reduce as the number of followers increases. This means profiles with 10,000 to 100,000 followers have much lower engagement rates than profiles will 1000 to 2000 followers. This is good news because it’s easier and cheaper to use micro-influencers than macro-influencers. Here’s how you can leverage micro-influencers:

HOW TO:

Step 1: Make a list of micro-influencers. (Micro-Influencers are easily-approachable and Budget Alternatives to Advertising or Macro-Influencers).

Step 2: Outreach to micro-influencers in your domain through Instagram or Email (Many influencers will have their email ID in their bio or a link with their email ID on their Instagram profile) to promote your brand.

Step 3: Finalise a Cost Per Engagement (CPE) or Cost Per Action (CPA) price with them instead of a flat fee model.

Step 4: Track performance metrics through actions.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This is a simple OPN growth hacking workflow which focuses on the fact that many micro-influencers are more effective than a single macro-influencers since data shows that Instagram reach reduces with the number of followers of an account. We have found Influencers to have around 45% response rate to Instagram DMs and emails which makes this workflow even more effective.

80% of the views come from only 20% of your content. Why? Because only 20% of our content is useful for your target audience. This workflow helps you focus on that 20% and increase it to improve ROI.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Go to Quora.com and find popular questions around your topic.

Step 2: Schedule links on Twitter (or any other channel) to a bunch of Quora posts on Buffer with their questions as the body of your Tweets.

Step 3: If a tweet gains 3x above average interaction rates, write the post answering the question on your blog or website.

Step 4: Post the link of the answers (your blog links) to those questions on Quora.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This workflow helps you validate your content ideas but not only that, you don’t have to think about content ideas anymore. You already know what content would work!

An ‘Exit page’ is the last page accessed during a visit. That’s where the visitor ends the relationship with your website. Most marketers ignore Exit Pages. But what if you could turn those people who are about to leave into email subscribers? Customers? Lifelong fans? Here’s how:

HOW TO:

Step 1: Go to Google Analytics and find the most popular Exit Pages on your website.

Step 2: Go to your website and create a Popup (an “Exit Popup”) and set up the popup on all the exit pages.

Step 3: Offer a free calculator or worksheet or cheatsheet (or even your Side-Project if you have one) in exchange for the user’s email ID.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You can use one of these tools to create an exit popup:

● GetRooster ( http://www.getrooster.com/ )

● GetSiteControl ( https://getsitecontrol.com/ )

● ExitMist ( http://exitmist.com/ )

Exit popups can increase Visitor to Conversion Ratio by almost 100% or even up to 300% in some cases. A/B test from your exit pages to get the best results.

When it comes to scouting influencers, It’s either the money or the ego. For this hack, we’ll use the Ego.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Choose a blog topic for your niche which can include your CTA.

Step 2: Make the topic about Influencer Opinions. Example, “Top 25 Digital Marketing Influencers share their thoughts about Inbound Marketing”.

Step 3: Create a typeform or Google form asking Influencers for their opinion. Note: Your question has to be specific, so they can answer it in under 50 words (the less, the better).

Step 4: Tweet or email the link of the form to top influencers.

Step 5: Curate all the inputs from the influencers and for the ones who don’t fill the form, pick one of their public tweets on the related topic.

Step 6: Once published, don’t ask them to promote your content. Just thank them for helping you out and send them a link an hour or so after you publish it.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You will be surprised at the amount of engagement a single influencer share can get you. Try this out and if it works for you, jump into a more intense influencer marketing campaign. And next time, make sure you reward the influencers for their contribution!