Growth hacking: it may sound like a buzzword but it’s very simple. It’s all about keeping growth as your central target, to acquire as many users, readers or customers as possible for the lowest cost. (It’s inspired by the start-up mentality of growing as large as possible, as fast as possible, or dying.) Growth hackers have built up a handy playbook of strategies that apply for bloggers, too – to try and build up your readership as quickly as you can by relatively simple and low-cost strategies. Here’s our guide to how you can make growth hacking strategies work for you.
1. How to expand your reach with multiple social media channels
Using social media to boost your growth
Social media is a powerful growth hacking weapon, when wielded correctly. Make sure you familiarize yourself with ways to optimize your social media channels for the maximum reach:
Use hashtags liberally, to make sure that you are part of the #conversation. This is how users can find you when looking for related topics
Mention relevant brands or figures’ handles in your posts where appropriate. This means that they can potentially repost your content, boosting your readership
Don’t stick to just one platform! Although it might sound like more work, diversifying across multiple social media channels will bring in different users. Make sure you learn how to adapt your content for each platform – keep your Instagram posts visually driven and keep your Tweets short and pithy.
Social media automation: the next level
Automation is the future! Once you have developed your specific social media “voice”, it’ll be much easier for you to queue up posts and diffuse them automatically. There are multiple automated social media posting software options, like HootSuite, Sprout Social and Canva. These will also help you to store posts, optimize them for social media, and analyze your post traffic to publish at the time when more of your followers will be online.
Viral competitions to get people talking
Running a viral competition makes sure that your followers are talking to each other about you. It not only generates coverage and awareness but also, long-term backlinks to your blog. To give you an example: A kitchen utensil manufacturer can, for example, ask readers to publish their favourite recipe on a social media platform under a certain hashtag, or even a full blog post of their own, to win a gift pack of new kitchen utensils. People eager to participate will be sharing posts that link back to your website, spreading both the competition (with branded reward) and the brand as far and as fast as possible.
2. Email marketing for growth hackers
Email isn’t dead! Email marketing is actually one of the fastest growing marketing channels, still the secret weapon of many growth hackers. You can diffuse your content to hundreds or thousands of people, straight to their inbox, as well as including backlinks to your blog and boosting its authority for Google. Don’t sleep on email, it is a great way to increase your readership and drive traffic to your site.
3. Skyscraper technique for growth hacking pros
A growth hacking staple, the “skyscraper technique” is a great way to piggyback off already successful content. Look for content that is already popular and receiving a lot of online attention, and develop an even better version of it. You already know that people are looking for this type of content and are then able to provide something to edge out the competition at the same time. This also will gain you far more backlinks as more people see your content while looking for the original.
4. Become an expert
Once you know you’re really an expert in a topic, write an ebook about it. This is a way of increasing your online credentials and proving your expertise, as well as an easy piece of content to spread via social media marketing and SEO. Plus, it’s very cheap. Offer the ebook for free and build regular and broader readership.
5. ABO: Always be optimizing!
If you’re going to be a growth hacker, there is no time to be complacent. You have to always be looking to increase your reach in any way that you can, which means always looking for ways to optimize your blog.
Make sure you are doing the most you can for your click through rate, by optimizing your headline, image and meta descriptions for the most clicks.
Optimize your share rate by creating and posting content that can go viral, be shared and engaged with online, and working on your social media management strategy.
Optimize for search engines by using on-page SEO techniques on your blog, as well as getting backlinks from other sources to push it up the rankings.
This will require a lot of research and time, but a minute spent on further optimizing your blog is never wasted in the growth hacking world.
6. Keep your eyes on the prize!
More than anything, it is important to maintain a growth hacking mindset. You have to stay laser-focused on your goal of achieving the biggest audience possible for your content. Dedicate yourself to this goal, work hard, and consult the other tips in this guide and you will find your audience growing before you know it!
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