Growing companies as quickly as possible is nothing new, but the term and interest in “Growth Hacking” has seen huge growth over the past few years.
There’s never been a better time to learn how to grow and scale a company online quickly, thanks to the people who test, document and share their growth hacking experiments and results.
Over the past year, we have read through more than a thousand guides on growth hacking to compile this list, which we think are the best 101 growth hacking resources out there.
While you will not become a world class growth hacker by just reading these (you need to test strategies yourself!), you’ll definitely be ahead from most other online business owners if you do so.
If we missed any great growth hacking resources out, feel free to add your suggestions in the comments below.
Growth Hacks
21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics – A great list of 21 small marketing tactics you should have in place for growth. Most are easy and quick to implement.
13 Critically Important Lessons from Over 50 Growth Hackers – Bronson Taylor, of Growth Hacker TV fame, has interviewed over 50 growth hackers. Here he lists 13 of the best takeaways he has learned.
15 Pre-launch Growth Hacking Strategies For Startups – If you have not launched yet, this is a great list of growth hacks you can start doing right now.
6 Tricks That Helped Me Triple My SaaS’ Growth Rate – From retargeting to exit interviewing, Brennan Dunn shares 6 growth hacking strategies in this quick slide deck.
The SaaS guide To Leveraging The Powered By Tactic – Learn how you can possibly take advantage of the “powered-by” tactic some of the biggest tech companies have used in the past.
Learning From A Growthmaster – Advice learned from former Product Marketing Manager at Google and now the Growthmaster at Hipmunk.
The Fundamental Unit Of SaaS Growth – Understand the figures you need to scale growth.
Avoiding The Wheel Of Meaningless Growth – A thoughtful piece on being careful of what metrics you track and celebrate.
Product
This Is How You Get People to Trust Your Product -Some of the biggest tech companies such as Uber, AirBnB etc. would not be able to scale without consumer trust. UrbanSitter CEO Lynn Perkins lays down some solid advice on how you can build trust around your product.
Is Your Landing Page Suffering from Bad Copy? Here’s How to Fix It – How good, or bad, is your website copy? Eric Sloan breaks down 10 landing pages so we can learn from their mistakes.
What to Learn from the Man Who Managed Reddit’s Community of Millions – Erik Martin, who in 2012 was voted one of TIME’s most influential people, offers advice on building passionate and engaging communities.
4 Psychological Insights That Help Build Products – Understanding customers through user research.
Trello – 4 million users. One support guy. This is how it’s done. – A relatively simple setup on how Brian Cervino manages support at Trello.
Growth Hacking Email
The Ultimate Guide To Successful Email Marketing – If your new to email marketing, this guide lays out how to get setup to creating great content and launching/tracking your first email marketing campaign.
How to get your first 100 email subscribers – Don’t make the newbie mistake of not collecting email addresses from your target audience. Here’s a guide on how to get your first 100.
How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week – Learn the strategies Harry’s, a new men’s grooming brand, used to gather nearly 100,000 email addresses in just one week.
Perfect Timing: The Very Best Time to Send Email Newsletters – Good general advice and stats on the best time to send email campaigns.
The Complete Guide to Drip Campaigns, Lifecycle Emails and More – Learn what, when and how to use drip marketing at your startup with this extensive guide.
The 25 Best Email Marketing Apps to Send Drip Campaigns – Now you understand what drip marketing is, it’s time to choose an app to help you get the campaigns setup. Here are reviews on 25 such apps.
Hacking the Email Spreadsheet – Learn how to learn about the people behind email address so you can personalize your email outreach with this Google Spreadsheet.
How Maria Popova Turned A Weekly Email into 5+ Million Visitors – Learn the incredible story of how Maria Popova, the founder of BrainPickings, grew her project and email list to 5 million readers per month.
The Complete Guide to Transactional Email – A study by Experian found that some transactional emails are opened at 8 times the rate of promotional emails. Learn how to apply effective transactional emails within your organisation with this handy guide.
Growth Hacking Social Media
Decoding the Facebook News Feed - Updated on 14th December, buffers shares ways you can increase the chance of getting your news feed items seen by your Facebook followers.
15 Twitter Hacks That Will Turn You Into a Twitter Ninja – From using Twitter lists to using the right hashtags, Neil Patel shares 15 easy to implement hacks that will make you a Twitter power user in no time.
A Social Media Marketing Strategy That Isn’t Focused On “Creating Compelling Content” – A thoughtful look at why connecting with your target audience and generating results is more important than likes and page views.
6 Research-Backed Ways to Get More Followers on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and More – Lot’s of research and data to back up 10 tips for growing your social media following.
50 Entrepreneurs Share Their Top 3 Social Media Marketing Tips – From one of our popular posts here at Founders Grid, in which we asked 50 entrepreneurs to share their social media marketing tips.
Facebook launches 7 call-to-action buttons for Pages – Learn more at VentureBeat re; Facebook just (11th December) announcing the launch of new call-to-action buttons.
Customer Acquisition
How to find and track customer acquisition channels that work for you – A must read guide on breaking down customer acquisition figures so you can focus on the campaigns that are performing the best.
Facebook Ads Bidding 101: Everything You Need to Know (& supported by data) – If you are considering testing out Facebook’s ad platform, you’ll want to read this to make sure you understand how Facebook’s bidding works.
A Beginner’s Guide To User Acquisition – Once you’ve built a great product, follow Nate Desmond’s advice on defining your target markets and measuring the results.
How to Get in Front of your Ideal Customers – Simple yet effective ideas on how to find your perfect customers, and how to attract their attention.
There’s only a few ways to scale user growth, and here’s the list – Andrew Chan offers us a list of popular scaleable and non-scaleable growth hacking strategies you can use to drive growth and customers
Generate High Quality Sales Leads Easily With Twitter – A look at generating sales and leads via Twitter’s lead generation cards.
How to Quickly Turn Trial Users Into Paying Customers Converting trial users to paying users is notoriously difficult, however Neil Patel lists a few different strategies and ideas that are sure to help.
User Acquisition, from the trenches – A look at how the co-founder of sendwithus.com is growing his startup, from SEO to reaching out to people directly.
How I used Quora for User Acquisition – Thoughts on being helpful to drive targeted traffic from Quora.
The B2B Referral Sales System - Referral leads start with trust right off the bat, making it one of the best ways to grow your user base.
The Hacker’s Guide to Twitter User Acquisition – One of the best guides I’ve come across detailing how to use Twitter to drive visitors and sales. A must read.
How to Spend Your First $100 on Retargeting Ads – Retargeting advertising (serving ads to those who have previously visited your website) is huge right now, for good reason. This guide will help you get started.
Onboarding
How To Build And Optimize An Onboarding Funnel – Learn how to identify areas of friction in your onboarding process to optimize your conversion rates.
How we Figured Out What Makes People Love Ghost 1,000% More – A detailed report in how ghost, the alternative blogging platform to WordPress, increased their onboarding by 4 digits!
People don’t buy a product, they buy an emotional experience - Frame your messaging in a way that resonates emotionally with your audience.
Ditch your WELCOME email… and 10x your prospect engagement – Kiss Flow started customizing their welcome emails which increased conversions by 23.39%.
Growth Hacking Free Trials – Thoughts on wowing your customers during free trials whereby you end up users saying to themselves “Wow!” which is the moment where you have converted them into a fan who is likely to buy.
10+ Ways You Can Improve Your User Activation for SaaS – From mapping out your ideal customer flow to optimizing activation threshold, here are 10 tips SaaS companies can use to improve customer activation.
Our User Onboarding Toolbox – A great list of tools Status Page use for their on-boarding.
Reducing Churn
Churn, Retention, And Reengaging Customers – A great guide by Intercom on how to re-engage customers who have stopped using your product.
22 Ways to Reduce Churn with Growth Hacking – Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures looks at the fundamentals of customer retention and 22 ways you can test to reduce churn at your startup.
9 Case Studies That’ll Help You Reduce SaaS Churn – 9 detailed case studies looking at how startups reduce churn, covering the research, execution and most importantly – actionable advice you can use.
How Put.io Reduced Churn By 14% – Learn how the CEO of Put.io used a few simple, thoughtful messages to reduce churn during some engineering mistakes incurred at his startup.
Conversions
The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – An excellent look at conversion rate optimization is, how conversion rates are calculated, the tools you need and more.
Best Practices in Conversion Rate Optimization Debunked – Unbounce ran some tests on popular conversion rate optimization practices and share the results in this excellent post. It’s a must read. The bottom line is; test, don’t use your gut feeling.
How to Write Web Copy that Converts – 8 Simple Techniques Based on 4 Years of Research – From focusing on optimizing decisions to assuming no one wants to do, what you want them to do, Michael Aagaard shares 8 techniques in writing content that converts.
4 Ways Fear is Part of the Conversion Process – And What it Means for You - There are many emotions one must need to consider when writing content or sales copy, this guide, written by Tim Ash, bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization, look’s into fear.
5 Psychological Principles of High Converting Websites – With 20 case studies. This is a must read for anyone looking to increase their on-site conversion rates.
How My Blog Homepage Redesign Increased Email Signups by 300% – Learn how Noah Kagan went about increasing his email subscriber list by 3x by optimizing his homepage.
Unlocking Your Company’s Growth Engine w/ Conversion Rate Optimization - Sean Ellis shares the difference between testing and unlocking growth in this excellent in-depth guide.
10 Psychological Triggers To Boost Revenues – An interesting look at how triggering specific emotions can increase conversions, sales and revenue.
Growth Hacking Video
How to: DIY Startup Explainer Video for Under $300 (That Still Looks Pro) An excellent guide on creating short 1-3 minute videos that help spread your message and teach people what your product and company is all about, for a small fraction of what pro’s in the industry charge.
6 Growth Hacking Tips to Increase Website Traffic Using YouTube – 6 Tips in 16 slides will give you some great ideas on growth hacking YouTube.
Crazy Egg Explainer Video Case Study – Learn how Demo Duck helped Crazy Egg earn an extra $21,000 in monthly income with an explainer video.
Analytics & Tracking
A Guide To Mastering Growth Hacking Analytics – A guide to setup automated tracking and reporting inroder to get your data organized.
Startup Metrics for Pirates – 20 Slides from Dave McClure on the metrics you should be tracking at your startup.
Google Analytics 101: How To Configure Google Analytics To Get Actionable Data – Make sure you properly configure your Google Analytics account from the beginning, in order to leverage the right insights later on.
15 Google Analytics Tricks To Maximize Your Marketing Campaign – From custom alerts to segmenting your audiences, these 15 Google Analytic tips by Jayson DeMers will help you measure the success of your inbound marketing efforts.
How To Take Control Of Your Marketing Channels With Google Analytics – Another worth while read covering Google Analytics and it’s optimization use cases.
The Marketer’s Guide to Google Analytics: How to Extract Numbers That Drive Action -
A great run down on extract numbers the right numbers from Google Analytics to track your marketing goals from the team at Buffer.
10 Optimization Experts Share Their Favorite Google Analytics Reports – If your new to tracking and Google Analytics, here are 10 different reports can copy that’s guaranteed to provide you more insights into your conversions, traffic and audience.
SEO & Research
SEO for Beginners – Everything You Need to Know – An excellent guide to SEO that will help you take action and get more free traffic from search engines like Google.
Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide – As the author writes, “without keywords, there’s no such thing as SEO”. This is the most in-depth guide we’ve across on keyword research.
Content Marketing
9 Content Marketing Growth Hacks to Drive Traffic and Conversions – From OpenGraph tags to repurposing old content, these 9 tips are sure ways to increase exposure with your content marketing efforts.
The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing – Not all content marketing plans are effective, and Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame lays down what normally happens when you launch some content you think will spread like wild fire.
17 Advanced Methods for Promoting Your New Piece of Content – A list list of tactics covering some of the more advanced techniques for promoting your content.
How to Create Great Content That Drives Traffic – An excellent guide studying what content is working on successful blogs your niche, and using that data to grow your own content marketing strategies.
Forget About SEO, Here is what to do Instead – A simple yet effective formular not many startups use; find things that are already popular in your industry, and make them even better.
15 Ways to Align Your Content Marketing Strategy With Business Objectives – A general overview of turning free visitors into valuable and long term customers with content marketing, including lists of great resources worth checking out.
7 Techniques To Design Killer Graphics For Your Blog Posts – Nathan Barry shares techniques you can use to improve the design of your content pieces.
Case Studies
Storemapper: Bootstrapped to $50,000/year in 2 years (with live metrics) – A great case study with data, stories and things that did and didn’t work bootstrapping StoreMapper to over $50,000 per year.
The 3 hacks that got SpringSled 138,790 users in less than 40 days – Learn how SpringSled tweaked their landing page, viral loop and follow up emails to grow their user base by 138,790 in less than 40 days.
Growing Sumo Jerky to $10,000 a month in revenue – A great case study on learning about your audience, finding your audience and going out to selling to your audience.
Ten Things I Learned Researching Ten of the World’s Fastest Growing Startups – Sean Ellis from Growth Hackers has researched and interviewed startups like Uber, Snapchat, Yelp, LinkedIn, HubSpot and Evernote to answer the question; “How did they grow so fast?”. In this guide Sean lists 10 findings from his research.
How Pinterest drives sustainable growth – A great in-depth guide from the team at Pinterest looking at gains and losses, tracking new user retention with cohort heat maps and more.
Growth vs Marketing vs Product – A look at how the growth hacking landscape has changed due to the improved access to data, platforms and speed.
Unconventional growth strategies by popular startups – A nice short list of known greyhat, blackhat, growth hacks and unorthodox strategies popular startups have used in the past.
What Unsustainable Growth Looks Like – An interesting perspective on how growth can sometimes hide the fact that a business is on the verge of failure.
How 9 SaaS Companies Hacked Their Growth – Growth hacking techniques have been proven to be successful by other companies.
How Product Hunt + Hacker News fueled 300k views in 30 days – A continuing trend, learn how this startup launched their product on Product Hunt and Hacker News.
How Our Side Project Generated $51,365 In 60 Days – A transparent look at how NeedWant launched a physical goods side project. Includes all the ups and downs of sourcing the products in China to launch, and uncludes revenue numbers.
How 3 Little Changes Increased Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) by 296% – Great insights and lessons can be learned from Mention changing their pricing plans.
Our First $37,800 in Annual Recurring Revenue – A great list of the highs and lows of growing a SaaS business with this very transparent case study.
3 Lessons in Building a Remote Startup to $11,500 in MRR – High level considerations that you can probably learn from as you build your own business.
How a solo entrepreneur slow-launched his SaaS product to $7K+/month – An in-depth guide on how Rob Walling at drip launched his SaaS product to profitability.
How A Real Estate Blog Went From 2,000 To 18,000,000 Visits Per Month In Two Years – A very in-depth guide covering defining goals, pitching, how to make content go viral and so much more.
Tools
14 CRO Gurus Share Favorite Optimization Tools – Learn what Optimization tools Sean Ellis, Hiten Shah, Tim Ash, Noah Kagan and 10 other CEO’s use.
35 Growth Hacking Tools for Marketers Who Don’t Code – Whether you code or not, this is an excellent list of tools can you can consider using in your growth hacking journey.
Google Chrome for Marketers: 10 Setup Tips, 20+ Extensions You Need to Know – This is an excellent list of tips that will turn you into a Google Chrome power user in no time.
15 Web Apps That Built Remarkable Communities – Learn how startups are creating engaging communities, and the benefits of doing so, around their brands and products.
Startup Growth Calculator – Insert key data points in this slick tool to find out how much funding/budget your startup needs.
10 Excel Functions a Growth Hacker Can’t Live Without – These great tips that will help you track and analyze metrics in Excel like a pro.
Growth Hacking Trello Template Turn a Trello board into a growth hacking template tracking Brian Balfour’s processes for creating, running, and analyzing marketing experiments.
The post 101 Must-Read Resources To Become A World Class Growth Hacker appeared first on Founders Grid.