We hand-picked the best growth hacks from a selection of 2105 articles and the top 100 growth hackers.
All the hacks you’ll ever need are here! We have applied some of these growth hacks ourselves. If executed properly, they have the power to hack, I mean literally hack your business’s growth.
Before you start, make sure to track your progress. Growth hackers eat, breath and love metrics!
Setup (if you haven’t) Google Analytics to track traffic customer activation data.
Then we will need Kissmetrics or Mixpanel to gather data about conversion funnel.
This is a cool bonus tool called HotJar – if you are early stage, this tool helps to make video recordings of your customer experience on the page to spt bugs.
Pick a growth hack, execute, measure, improve and automate. Simple as that. Along the way test your assumptions based on your data and see how wrong (or right) you actually were.
For easy access, we have divided hacks into 6 convenient RRR sections (pirates and growth hackers love ’em)!!
If you are not sure what’s AARRR, Dave Mclure will explain.
Time to hack!
Acquisition
Social Media
Content Promotion
SEO
Apps
App Store
Paid ads
Activation
Re-targeting
Conversion
Email Marketing
Retention
Churn
Customers
Referral
Revenue
Acquisition Growth Hacks
Mind blowing email hunting strategy – it’s almost too good to share
Cost: 0$ (the good stuff starts at 49$ per month);
Growth hack type: Small volume but high conversion rate hack;
Expected outcome: Increase email amount and reach for email marketing;
Difficulty level: Easy;
This is great! With this hack, you can export employee emails created for any company’s domain. You can even see how active the emails are.
This tool can do wonders for B2B business sales.
Step by step approach:
Signup to Emailhunter.co.
Gather the list of companies that could be your potential customers (& their domain names) and start hunting decision maker email addresses.
Disclaimer: this is your chance to create carefully crafted corporate email campaign – do not spam.
Credit for this one goes to Vincent Dignan from Magnific.
You can even go a step further and check on Linkedin how close these people are to decission maker position.
Depending on your sales cycle you can reach out too the exact person you need.
Get your tool on every Product Hunt alike page
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: High volume & high ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and customer feedback;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Product Hunt can get you off to a good start. It’s a good one. Here are 14 more product directories where your tool must be.
Free and with large audiences – a must try for early stage startups!
Step by step approach:
Betalist, Designer News, Lifehacker app directory, Chrome Webstore, Hacker News, StumbleUpon, Reddit, GrowthHackers, HackerNews, Inbound.org, BizSugar, Voat.co, Digg, & Tumblr.
Don’t treat this like a 5-minute task – these tools can be extremely powerful. Put some effort in it and ROI can be tremendous.
Example: Read how IDoneThis did went from 0 to 5 000 users.
To amplify the results remember you have to get as many upvotes as possible in the firs 24 hours – share on SM.
Commenting as a growth hack
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume but high conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Medium (hard to scale);
In the realm of Growth Hacking, everyone is familiar with Sujan Patel’s work, and this fella was able to generate 513 leads just by commenting on blog posts. Not spamming, nor link building but building credibility and delivering value (so they come back for more).
Step by step approach:
First of all find the relevant blog posts, Google – “blog posts headline” inurl:blog.
Only high quality blog posts are worth your time –
Either check how many comments the post has and if it’s more than 5-10, go ahead and find how you can add value.
Or, use Moz extension to track site’s Domain Authority and comment to sites with DA above 20.
You can also comment on the most popular & relevant Slideshare presentations as well as Amazon book reviews.
Here you can learn from Sujan Patel himself.
Tell your story on Podcasts
Cost: 0$;
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in awareness and understanding of your product or service OR build your brand image;
Difficulty level: Medium;
The Graph was made by the good people of Copyblogger.
In the past 2 years the percentage of people listening to Podcasts has rocketed – this is one of the best channels that can help to build your brand or share the “WHY?” of what you sell.
Step by step approach:
The growth of this story telling approach has been tremendous. Podcasts are no longer the low-quality basement talks but shows that can influence your career.
1 out of every ~6 people you see on the street is listening to podcasts.
Search for “(your industry) inurl:/podcast/” on Google, pitch your brand and start scheduling the podcasts
Make sure they mention company’s name and/or your’s in the title and during the podcast.
Here‘s everything you should know about the podcast as a hack and how to use it.
Be part of a Youtube channel (SEO tips included)
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low to high volume and eventually high ROI;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Easy;
What’s the main difference between video creation on Youtube and blogging? Videos gain popularity over time but blog posts lose it.
Moreover, Youtube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine and you are not there.?
Step by step approach:
One tip I have heard pretty much summarizes the “Youtube success” (if you can follow it 99.99% of the time you will succeed):
“Keep uploading!” – CaseyNeistat. Before he reached 3M subscribers, he uploaded a video for EVERY SINGLE DAY. For 3 years straight. That’s hustling.
Gather a group of 3-5 friends and make it happen:
There are 5 types of videos you can choose between – tips, product demos, testimonials, webinars & vlogs.
Having a video in your newsletter, blog post or facebook post facilitates engagement and CTR.
FYI: time spent on your page is an SEO ranking factor and videos usually increase that.
Ultimate guide how to create successful Youtube channel here but Youtube SEO is summarized in this Slideshare (the good stuff starts from slide 16).
Brag when your customers love you
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume/low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Got a good review, share it! Make it part of your SM strategy. Note: bad reviews will be part of your life – what matters is how you handle them, not how angry is the customer.
Step by step approach:
Put your page on one of the review pages:
For local businesses: Yelp or Google my business;
For products: Amazon reviews, Which, Facebook reviews and Trustpilot;
Get the review listing in front of your users and share your “fame”.
Create a daily challenge.
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume/low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in trustworthiness and builds your brand;
Difficulty level: Medium;
I read about a designer, fresh off the college, with very little experience who started creating Logo a day for big brands. Mark Cuban was one of his first targets. Each day the logo price grew by 1$ (1st day = 1$, etc.) soon reaching solid pay per hour.
Step by step approach:
Figure out what will create value for others. Create clever GIFs, add a backlink a day, landing pages, newsletters, infographics – pick one!
Come up with the time-frame and easy to understand pricing mechanism.
Show what you have to offer to the most important influencers in the selected industry. Start free.
Keep creating until it takes off and don’t give up.
Here‘s a cool video guide from Aaron Draplin.
Create a research of why your product works
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume and high conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Shows the need for your product;
Difficulty level: Medium;
Create a painkiller – pour some salt in the wound and then show you are the cure.
Step by step approach:
Take your product and actually prove that it can do the stuff you are promising. Get the social proof from other customers and put it in numbers. Show what improved, by how much, and how your product helped.
Put the findings on one easy to understand A4. Share it, email it, print it, distribute it. Make sure to get it in front of your target audience.
These papers are called whitepapers and they are the best sales decks.
Here‘s a Wiki-how approach for creating a whitepaper.
Build your brand with PR
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Potentially high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, and build your brand image;
Difficulty level: Medium;
For bloggers and journalists, their name is one of the most precious assets. Whenever you get a smaller publication to write for you, your brand gains recognition and you can aim for bigger & bigger publications.
Step by step approach:
Start by pitching your service or product to publicists in your field with 3-5k followers and each time you get a publication – double the follower count.
My favorite tool to get in touch with influencers is Ninjaoutreach.com.
But if you are on tight budget follow our “Mind blowing content promotion with Google+” strategy.
Prepare a great “WHY?” someone should write about you before reaching out – you beat the odds, great track record, offer a freebie if they write abut you, etc.
Get free PR – make others to write for you
Cost: 0$ (Yes, it can be free);
Growth hack type: Low to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and brand awareness;
Difficulty level: Medium;
Help a reporter out – get them a story. It’s a win-win: you, interesting and charismatic entrepreneur (sell yourself), he/she, a reporter looking for a story. It’s the perfect match.
I was surprised but most of the time demand is higher than supply.
Step by step approach:
There must be something that can WOW a reader and thus be a reason for someone to write about you. Figure out what is this 1 thing.
When you are starting out, it’s a numbers game – bigger outreach scope can produce better results and there are a lot of free sites that want your story:
HARO – this is a classic one. It’s free but for 19$/month gives you better visibility.
MyBlogU – Contribute to a story, share a quote or help journalists to brainstorm. Easy to contribute & for most parts it’s free.
PRnewswire – Put your press release up for grabs. Top site.
More sites – Source Bottle, Muck Rack, Media Kitty, NCE, Journo Requests and Pitching Notes.
Integrate with other tools that can serve as an extension to your service
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: High volume and medium CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, customer satisfaction and social proof;
Difficulty level: Hard;
Imagine if Salesforce, Evernote or other cloud tools would offer integration with your tool. That would be pretty neat, right?
That would get your tool in front of their customers and the other way around.
Step by step approach:
Think from the customer’s point of view and try to imagine what service could add to your company.
Let’s say you have an SEO keyword research tool, integration with on-page SEO analysis tool would makes a lot of sense, right? Huge gain for your customers.
Follow the sales basics, reach out, ask for decision maker, schedule meeting, negotiate and hopefully in a couple of months you will have a deal.
Invest in video marketing – “why?” will surprise you
Cost: 0$ if you re-post – 10$++ if you create;
Growth hack type: Low to high volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and customer engagement;
Difficulty level: Medium to hard;
This hack explains why you are making a mistake by not putting a bigger focus on video marketing.
Why?
Data published by Adelie Studies is mind blowing:
Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined;
Having a video on the landing page increases conversion rate by 80%;
Sharing a video on Facebook directly instead of through Youtube will have 10x the reach.
62% of Google searches include video and videos give 157% increase in organic traffic.
Start your own Meetup – interactive way to grow your mailings list
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume but high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and create personal connections;
Difficulty level: Keep it simple;
Meetups are a great way to interact with others who love the activities you enjoy. Moreover friends come and go but meetup groups stay (as well as their emails).
Step by step approach:
Figure out how your brand, company or tool can benefit from a meetup:
Knowledge sharing, informal promotion campaign or a case study with meetup that’s quick and most probably in a bar with a beer in your hand.
You can keep it simple and informal or use meetup as your platform for organizing a decent event.
Later on, you get attendee emails to further engage with them.
Here‘s an ok guide that covers the basics.
Group your content into a book and sell it
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;
If content creation is a large part of your customer acquisition strategy there are high chances that you blog about different niches which are part of one bigger segment.?
Step by step approach:
Let’s say you are an accountant who posts about tax returns, preparing annual reports and invoicing.
Most probably only accountants would ever consider reading your posts. But if you group them into an e-book and call it “Startup Accounting for Dummies” – you suddenly target much larger group of people.
Group your posts, find which customer segment would be interested to read about it and market the content.
Publish it (figure out if you can charge $$ or use it as a tool to get emails). Amazon Kindle offers great publishing tool. And here are 20 more publishing tools.
Create fun to do Surveys
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low to medium volume and medium CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, customer engagement and learn more about your customers;
Difficulty level: Easy to Medium;
Everyone loves fun surveys. I have always wondered “Which GOT character” I am!
With this growth hack, you can learn more about your customers, create fun to do activity for them and generate quite a bit of a traffic while you are at it.
Step by step approach:
You will need a WordPress plugin that allows creating surveys – here is one.
Involve celebrities and influencers – “see who else was a Jon Snow”, etc.
Design for mobile first (71% participants come from mobile phones), pick a couple of acquisition growth hacks and market the quiz.
Credit goes to Andrew Michael, full post here.
Free social media hacks
Use influencer marketing
Cost: 0-50$ per post (discounts and freebies work the best);
Growth hack type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and social proof;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Social proof for us is a HUGE thing. When “important” person in our field will promote a product or service that often converts with ROI that’s well above 200%.
Step by step approach:
Go through Instagram and search for popular influencers in your industry.
See what hashtags “belong” to the group you want to target.
Make sure to build your profile to be “one of them” and use “4-1-1” growth hack to attract their attention.
More often than not influencers will make it easy for you to contact them.
There are also a couple of tools that can be used to find influencers: Fiverr, Socialblade, Boomopolis, Triberr and Ninjaoutreach (pricey but good).
Here‘s a guide on Influencer marketing that made 4 000$ on the 1st day.
And here‘s how to use Ninja tool for that purpose.
Sell on Pinterest with Rich Pins
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: High volume and low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and sales;
Difficulty level: Medium (Easy if you know the basics of CSS and HTML);
Pinterest have 110 million active users and ~100 billion pins, moreover 71% users are female (more here). Pretty neat stats if your target group mainly consist of woman.
Step by step approach:
Rich Pins provides readers with an option to buy or see your product without even leaving Pinterest.
You can even do the checkout within Pinterest.
Here‘s all the info you might need.
The process of setting up Rich Pins might be a bit more technical if you are not familiar with HTML but thankfully now there are extensions that will do it for you:
In WordPress Yoast SEO will do it for you and here‘s the video guide.
If your sales platform is Shopify this video is everything you need.
Help (never Spam) people on social media groups
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume and high conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Medium (hard to scale);
Imagine if instead of spamming people on social media groups you would help them! Matthew Woodward in his first year was able to make 76 000$.
Step by step approach:
Start by selecting the focus social media network (here‘s the age distribution between social media platforms).
Find the relevant groups in your industry and add them to this sheet.
Write down the problems these people are having, create tutorials and guide them to the solution (here‘s how Matthew did it).
Social media 4-1-1
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium volume and low conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Increase social proof and traffic, if you play your cards right, you can go viral;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Give a meaning to your social media posts. According to Andrew Davis your social media routine should follow 4-1-1 principle.
Step by step approach:
Every 6 posts you post on social media should look exactly like this:
4 posts should be pieces of content targeting the influencers in your fields – re-posts or with tagging the influencers.
1 post should include original, educational content that you have created.
The last one should be sales oriented – discount coupon, cool deal, etc.
Use Buffer or HootSuite to post the content. Or if you can afford Edgar (starts at 49€ per month), a couple of days ago invitation only policy were lifted.
Engage with Linkedin group users – that’s your golden goose of the feedback sessions
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and social proof as well as an opportunity to engage to get constructive feedback;
Difficulty level: Easy;
There are more than 2.1m. groups on Linkedin with professionals who have several years of experience in their field – they are eager to share their opinion, try new tools and some of those groups are “elite clubs”.
All of these groups can be found in one directory here.
The active group members more often than not will also have their email address for your inquiries.
These groups should not be spammed because ~50% of the professionals will share their opinion or test your tool, so don’t advertise but engage.
Benefit from WhatsApp’s 1 billion users
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low to medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and customer engagement;
Difficulty level: Easy to Medium;
WhatsApp has 1 billion active users and I am sure you are not advertising there.
Time to change that.
Step by step approach:
First of all, Facebook doesn’t want you to advertise on WhatsApp so there is not an easy to set up solution.
Create WhatsApp account, add all your customer mobile numbers to Google Contacts, Sync with your phone, head over to web.WhatsApp & create new broadcast (or a group).
Check this infographic to avoid these 5 mistakes and interesting article on WhatsApp advertising – here.
There are also bulk messaging options that I’m currently testing to see if they can be recommended.
Automate (not schedule) your Social Media posts
Cost: Starts at 49$ per month;
Growth hack type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Full (almost) automation of your social media platforms leaving you a lot more time to focus on your business;
Difficulty level: Medium;
The ultimate goal of growth hacking is to automate the processes as much as possible. Now, with the rise of AI, meet Edgar – social media posting automation tool, that helps you to re-post the posts you have in your queue.
Step by step approach:
I will assume that you know which of your posts are performing the best. If you have your data, setting up Edgar will be quick.
The principal behind Edgar is that it learns what content performs the best and blasts out this content periodically.
Just now “invitations only” policy were removed and Edgar is available to everyone – learn here.
Content Promotion Hacks
Create headlines that grab attention
Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate, traffic and grabs attention;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Struggling with headlines? Folks from Buzzfeed.com and Sarah Peterson, the Sumome badass, made a guide for headline creation.
Step by step approach:
Buzfeed has made THE list of words that headlines should include to get them shared.
No.18 will blow your mind – it’s here.
Sumome created a list that will get your headline needs covered depending on the occasion.
49 ways to improve your headlines.
Mind blowing content promotion with Google+
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium volume and low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and people in your network;
Difficulty level: Middle;
Google+, really? Yeah, hear me out, because this really works.
Google+ is perfect for outreach and content promotion. It makes content promotion fast.
Step by step approach:
Prospecting: Run this query – site:plus.google.com inurl:about “contributor to” businessinsider.com. You love it already? Just wait, it gets better.
Organizing outreach: You can add all the contacts in easy to view circles, one for – Businessinsider, TechCrunch, etc.
Reaching out: In Google+ you can share the updates with your circles – that’s outreach made easy.
Full credit for this technique goes to Paul Shapiro – full article is here.
Influencer email marketing that scores the dough
Cost: “Content promotion with Google+” is free or with Ninjaoutreach.com it’s 0$ for 14 days (after 49$ per month);
Growth hack type: High volume and high conversion;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and people in your network;
Difficulty level: Middle;
We all know how important is to get your content in front of as many influencers as possible but it gets harder and harder cause everyone is doing that.
You must build network of friends that are happy to share the content and here’s how.
Step by step approach:
You build the list of influencers following the steps laid out in “Content promotion with Google+” hack or do the Social prospecting with Ninja tool.
Engage before reaching out: Follow on Twitter (or on SM that makes more sense), 2 tweets, 2 blog comments, 2 blog shares and the reach out to say Hi.
Before publishing the content see who would be interested in receiving your article.
Then send the influencers who would love to read your piece of art:
Credit goes to Alex Turnbull from Groove who made 1 000+ subscribers in 24h with this technique (full post here).
Pay to get your content in front of the “Big Shots”
Cost: ~10$ per day;
Growth hack type: Potentially high volume and ROI;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and backlinks from AAA class publications;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Facebook and Linkedin offers targeting that allows you to target employees of AAA class publications and it works (it’s not cheap tho – for cheaper and a bit more creative option see growth hack “Mind blowing email hunting strategy”.
Step by step approach:
Head over to Facebook to boost your ad (here)or to Linkedin to create paid ad (here).
What’s the difference you might be asking? – The price, Linkedin is more expensive but often converts better.
Select the publications that are relevant and would be interested sharing or republishing your article.
Credit goes to Paul Shapiro.
Get your content spread like a wildfire with these 3 tools
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in content shares/likes/pins;
Difficulty level: Easy;
This growth hack examines 3 web-based tools that will get your content shared.
It’s a cheap hack so don’t expect much but it gets the job done.
Step by step approach:
Lincolider, Viralcontentbuzz and DripRevolution are the communities with content creators and growth hackers like you.
These communities work as a “share for share” principal. Where the ones who contribute the most have the chance to earn tokens=money.
Sharing is not compulsory.
Submit your content to content aggregating sites – it’s a free traffic
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;
There are websites that display A LOT of content and they let people submit the pages they would like to see there and read about them. It’s like your sock drawer just for articles. Moreover, they update real time and when you publish a new post, people will see that.
Step by step approach:
You submit your page to these content aggregating sites and it updates hourly to display your news. Like RSS just without RSS.
Here are the most popular sites (if not all of them) and their submission forms:
Feedly (submit here), Fark, News360, AllTop, BizSugar, AffBuzz, Inbound, Blogarama, Blogrific, BlogCatalog, Discover and PopURLs (submit here). & Paid options: Blokube (~2.5$/month), Blog Engage (~25$/month), EatonWeb (~35$/month), BlogSearchEngine (~30$/month), SpillBean (~25$/year)
16 content aggregating sites – go ahead and score some traffic!
Republish your content
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Potentially a high volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility – double the reach with one content;
Difficulty level: Medium;
If your target is to reach as many people as possible across multiple platforms with this great blog post you have create – this growth hack is for you.
Firs of all republishing content rarely if at all results in Google penalty. Google’s Matt Cutts, aka Head of Web Spam, said it himself.
It’s 16 growth hacks in one.
Step by step approach:
At first, you might want to start with publishing platforms where submitting content is made easy. This is our list:
Turn your blog post into ppt and post it on Slideshare.
Then Linkedin, Medium and forums related to your field.
There’s more – StumbleUpon, Reddit, Growthhackers, HackerNews, Inbound.org, BizSugar, Digg, & Tumblr.
Submit your post as an answer to people’s questions @ Quora, Yahoo Answers, Wiki-how and Jelly.
For most of these tools first 24 hours are the most important to generate the buzz.
You can also try to contact large publications that accept re-published content. Here‘s the guide.
Disclaimer: republished content might rank higher on Google than the original.
SEO Hacks
Audit your SEO – SEO is not a gut feel but science
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium volume & medium ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Hard;
When was the last time you did SEO audit? Never, right? Because proper SEO audit is just so expensive.
Yeah, same here!
With this guide, you can DIY – save money and get traffic.
Step by step approach:
SEO audit consists of 3 parts – technical audit, on-page or content audit and off-page audit.
All this explained in one unbelievably detailed guide by UpCity here – it’s as good as it gets.
Improve your On-Page SEO
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;
SEO starts with keyword research (I will assume you know that. No? Ok, here‘s the guide.) and then sprinkling these KWs in all the right places.
Here’s how!
Step by step approach:
It’s actually really simple, your focus keyword should appear in – H1 and H2 tag, your KW should be 0.4% to 4% of all the words, in at least one alt tag and in URL as well as sprinkle the content with KW synonyms. That’s it, easy, right? The best guides on this topic are here:
Ahrefs made a research and analyzed 2M KWs to show what matters the most when it comes to On-Page SEO.
Backlinko folks took a different approach and designed the “perfect” blog post structure – it’s here.
Do No.1 ranking factor – Get Backlinks
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: High volume & medium ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Medium;
According to analysis of 1M ranking factors No.1 & No.2 ranking factors were getting a lot of and high-quality backlinks. So backlinks are the most important thing in all this SEO conundrum.
Here’s how to catch all the backlinks.
Step by step approach:
After years of SEO experience, at the moment I use only 2 techniques – Ninja technique and Skyscraper technique (check 3 hacks bellow).
This is probably the most covered topic in SEO field. On the World Wide Web these are The articles for the inspiration:
34 great techniques here;
The biggest guide out there can be found here;
Make Google to ignore some backlinks
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Low volume & medium conversion rate hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;
By link disavowal you let Google to know which backlinks of yours to ignore. This can increase your traffic by ~22.2% (see more here).
Step by step approach:
There are two options:
1st option is with Google disavow tool (Moz guide available here).
2nd option is with Linkody (guide available here). This way you can save a bit of your time as with Google you would have to track backlinks manually.
With Linkody you will be able to see LNF (Link Not Found), 404 pages, Landing Page Errors, Unreachable Sites and all your landing page errors, that will allow you to fix all the issues on the spot.
Use videos to score backlinks
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;
There are clear benefits why site owners and influencers would choose to link to a video – that’s easy to perceive information. But there are two things you should know depending on which video hosting platform you are using.
Youtube: This platform earns all your backlinks. But there is a growth hack to fix it.
Wistia: Your site earns all the backlinks.
Step by step approach:
Youtube: Get the URL of the video and copy paste it as one of your competitors in Linkody dashboard.
In a couple of minutes you will be able to see all the websites that have referred to your video.
Then you have to reach out to these websites and ask them to refer to your website instead.
Wistia: It allows you to control the embedding process thus you have to do none of the above and you can focus on marketing the content.
Video shares = backlinks.
Skyscraper technique – this is how we do it
Cost: 0$ (or 9.90$ for the Webmasters Plan);
Growth hack type: High volume, low cost and high conversion rate hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and networking;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Let’s say you wrote this “one of a kind” piece of content.
Now, imagine if you could find all the articles that are linked to similar posts and contact them. That would be cool, right? Well, you can.
Step by step approach:
Find all the articles that are somewhat related to your article.
You have written 300 mind blowing tricks to do XXX. So, find all the articles that are inferior to your post. Google it.
Add the domains hosting these articles to your Linkody account as your competitors and let the tool will find all the links.
For each article, filter by its URL to find all the links that point to it.
Export these links to CSV and do the outreach with the tool of your liking (I recommend Ninjaoutreach).
In case if you are struggling with this hack – let me know in the comment section.
Apps Hacks
Promote your Android App in Google search with AdWords
Cost: 0.01$ per view and at least 5$ per day;
Growth hack type: Mid to high volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase your App installs;
Difficulty level: Hard;
Let’s say I need a hotel in NY and so I “google it”. 1st result that appears is directly from Booking.com APP, a click on it brings me straight to the Play Store where I can download the App.
Want to learn how to set it up?
Step by step approach:
The concept of making this happen is really cool to say the least. Watch this 2 minutes video to get the details. And it works both to increase the traffic and later to re-engage with the users (see “Re-activate your Android App users with AdWords”)
Here is a detailed guide to make it happen (20 quick steps).
If this is your first time with Adwords – make sure to schedule a free Skype call with Google Adwords little helpers, they are really helpful.
Promote your App (& promote on your App)
Cost: Can be free for Android but for iOS they give you 100$ credit and then you pay (currently available only in U.S)
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase your downloads;
Difficulty level: Medium to hard;
These solutions are designed to help your App to be discovered.
Step by step approach:
For Android:
AdModb allows you to cross-promote your app free of charge. It’s a win-win kind of a deal. Read more here.
For Android and iOS:
AdMob Mediation is Google’s solution (AdSense for mobile) that lets you display ads on your App, read more here. Similar solutions are offered by – Avocarrot, Chartboost (for mobile games) or Smaato.
For iOS:
Apple’s solution is Search Ads, it helps your App rank higher – more here. Costly but you get a free credit to kick it off.
Post your App on these 100 directories – 100 hacks in 1
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium to high volume and low CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, exposure and amount of backlinks;
Difficulty level: Easy;
Justin McGill made a list of 100 App directories (both Web and Mobile) for you to go all crazy and get your tool free exposure.
Time to do some posting!
Step by step approach:
You can find the list here – getting your tool there will give you the exposure and backlinks (both do-follow and no-follow), which is organic traffic.
Go through the list and submit your app to these directories one by one. Free traffic and a lot of users testing your creation.
Don’t forget to thank Justin.
Get your App a couple of prizes (there’s The Oscar for Apps)
Cost: 0$;
Growth hack type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, exposure and social proof;
Difficulty level: Easy;
App prize niche is saturated at the moment and everybody wants to build the Oscar for Apps. Think of these events like Podcasts with prizes and a lot more money spent on branding. Interesting, right?
Here’s how you can benefit from this.
Step by step approach:
When you Google “App Awards 2016” there are 127m. results & here are the best awards from the first 2 pages:
BestMobileAppAwards (deadline 31/12/2016), GlobalMobileAwards (deadline 23/11/2016), Gaming-awards (even is on 07/02/2017), Design100 (opened from 2017), ForFrench (opened from 2017), MobileVillage (opened from 2017), <a href="http://kapiawards.com/2016kapi-2016kapicategories/2016-best-childrens-app