Contents
Free Image Editors ............................ 21
Big Pictures .............................................. 7
Collect & Send Emails For Free......... 21
Hype Cycles ......................................... 7 Startup Philosophy ................................... 7
Free Social Media + Community Management ...................................... 21
Peter Thiel on Startup Foundations ...... 7
A/B Tests & Growth Hacking ............. 22
Peter Thiel on Contrarian Thinking ....... 7
Free Design Resources ..................... 22
Peter Thiel on Creating Monopolies ..... 8
Color Pickers ..................................... 23
Peter Thiel on Sales ............................. 8
Inspiration .......................................... 24
Peter Thiel on 7 Questions to Ask ........ 9
Free Stock Photography .................... 24
Lean Startup .......................................... 11
Free Typography ............................... 27
Minimum Viable Product .................... 12
Free Icons .......................................... 27
Pivot ................................................... 12
Useful Stuff ........................................ 28
Engines of Growth .............................. 12
Background Sound To Focus ............ 28
Smoke Tests ...................................... 13
Avoid Distraction ................................ 28
Zero to product/market fit ................... 13
Organize & Collaborate ..................... 28
Concept prototype .......................... 13
Digital Nomads & Remote Working ... 29
Paper/Wireframe prototype ............. 14
Discover Tools & Start-ups ................ 29
Code prototype ............................... 14
Build Together ................................... 29
Friends and family alpha testing ..... 14
Newsletters That Don’t Suck.............. 30
Random people beta testing ........... 15
Useful ................................................. 30
User flow optimization..................... 15
Voice-overs ........................................ 30
Ready to scale? .............................. 16
Video-maker ...................................... 30
Crisis, terror, and melancholy ......... 16
Slides Maker ...................................... 30
Tools To Use .......................................... 18
Responsive Embed ............................ 30
Prototyping ......................................... 18
Product Design ...................................... 32
Mobile Apps ........................................ 18
Site Design ........................................ 32
Web Development .............................. 18
Minimal Homepage ............................ 32
Collaboration ...................................... 18
Optimised Contact Forms .................. 33
Business Intelligence & Data Visualisation ....................................... 18
Monetization Framework.................... 33
Gamification ....................................... 18
Shopping Cart Abandonment ............ 34
Name Generators ............................... 18
How to make money online ............... 34
Writing/Blogging ................................. 18 Find Trending Content/Ideas .............. 19
Building Platforms - “Pull, facilitate, and match.” ............................................... 35
Free SEO + Website Analyzers.......... 19
Crowdsourcing Elements ................... 35
Free Image Optimizers ....................... 20
Social Elements ................................. 35
Jay Ng, CMT
Turn Visitors to Users ........................ 34
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27 December, 2015
Community Building ........................... 35
Choice Paradox Hack .................... 44
Product Churn .................................... 35
Image Sharing Hack ....................... 44
Next Feature Fallacy .......................... 36
About Page Hack ........................... 44
Product Death Cycle .......................... 36
Floating Share Bar Hack ................ 44
Assistant-As-App ................................ 37
Infographic Hack ............................ 44
Virality................................................. 38
Invite Only Hack ............................. 44
The Viral Loop ................................ 38
Little Bighorn Hack ......................... 44
Typography ........................................ 39
Headline Hack ................................ 45
Sales and Marketing .............................. 41
Roadblock Hack ............................. 45
Growth Hacking Tactics ..................... 41
Share The Good News Hack ......... 45
Email Signature Hack ..................... 41
Pay With a Tweet Hack .................. 45
We Can’t Go Back Jack Hack ......... 41
Scent Hack ..................................... 46
Hashtag All The Things Hack ......... 41
Landlord Hack ................................ 46
Screencast Hack ............................. 41
Human Pyramid Hack .................... 46
Survey Hack ................................... 41
Queue Jumper Hack ...................... 47
My Name is Company Hack ........... 41
Multi Post Hack .............................. 47
Back To Home Hack ....................... 41
Poke Poke Poke Hack ................... 47
Open Graph Image Hack ................ 41
Timebomb Hack ............................. 48
Power of 9 Hack ............................. 42
Almost There Hack ......................... 48
Guarantee Hack .............................. 42
Winback Hack ................................ 48
Price Hike Hack .............................. 42
Decoy Pricing Hack ........................ 48
Lottery Hack .................................... 42
Webinar Hack ................................. 49
Chat Show Hack ............................. 42
Unboxing Hack ............................... 49
Hidden Pricing Hack ....................... 42
Vanity Hack .................................... 49
The As Seen On TV Hack .............. 42
Intro Video Hack ............................. 49
Fast Form Hack .............................. 42
Aha Moment Hack .......................... 49
No Free Plan For You Hack ............ 42
High Score List Hack ...................... 50
Powered By… Hack ........................ 43
Auto Follow Hack ........................... 50
Case Study Hack ............................ 43
Thundercats Ho Hack .................... 50
Comment Marketing Hack .............. 43
One Time Offer Hack ..................... 50
The Distributor Hack ....................... 43
Annual Upgrade Hack .................... 50
Competition Hack ........................... 43
Horoscope Hack ............................. 50
White Paper Hack ........................... 43
Negative Follow Up Hack ............... 51
You are Mine Now Hack ................. 43
Teaser Hack ................................... 51
Exit Offer Hack!............................... 43
Content Seeding Hack ................... 51
Exit Guilt Trip Hack ......................... 44
Remarketing Tag Hack................... 52
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
Two Way Incentive Hack ................ 52
Twitter ................................................ 70
Email Detective Hack ...................... 52
Formula to drive social media ............ 70
Pre-filled Form Hack ....................... 52
Video Marketing ................................. 77
Thank You Hack ............................. 53
Slideshare .......................................... 79
Welcome Email Hack ...................... 53
Write a Book ...................................... 79
Polyglot Hack .................................. 53
Podcast .............................................. 79
Multi API Hack ................................ 53
Search Engines ................................. 81
Automatic Content Hack ................. 53
Word of mouth ................................... 83
Celebrity Endorsement Hack .......... 54
Networking ......................................... 85
Bundle Hack ................................... 54
Critical Metrics ....................................... 86
Dummy Content Hack ..................... 54
Before Product/Market Fit .................. 86
Free Template Hack ....................... 54
Metric #1: Qualitative Feedback ..... 86
Register to Save Hack .................... 54 Event Hack ..................................... 54
Metric #2: Measuring Product/Market Fit ................................................... 86
Responsive Design Hack ................ 54
More Resources ................................ 86
Widget Hack ................................... 55
Beginning to Scale ............................. 86
Free Tool Hack ............................... 55
Metric #1: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) ............................. 86
Turbo Hack ..................................... 55
Metric #2: Churns ........................... 87
UGC Hack ....................................... 55
Expansion .......................................... 87
Affiliate Program Hack .................... 55
Metric #1: Lifetime Value (LTV) ...... 87
Fun Hack ........................................ 56
Metric #2: Cost Per Acquisition ...... 87
Liberal Interpretation of the Rules Hack................................................ 56
Industry Insights .................................... 90
Integration Partner Hack ................. 56
podsfolio.com Industry Research....... 90
White Label Hack ............................ 56
Micro-learning ................................ 90
Public Presentation ............................ 58
Gamification ................................... 90
Email Marketing.................................. 60
Podsfolio.com Competitors Review 90
Drip Campaign Upsell Hack ............ 60
Fintech (investments) ideas ........... 91
Try this tool: http://proleads.io/ ........ 61
Mobile Retail ...................................... 92
7 Little Known Techniques .............. 61
Finances ................................................ 94
Article Writing ..................................... 64
Banking Account ................................ 94
Blogging ............................................. 64
Raising Money ................................... 94
Facebook............................................ 69
Podsfolio.com 1.0 .................................. 97
Google+ .............................................. 70
Pain Points & Solutions...................... 97
LinkedIn .............................................. 70
Core Competency .............................. 97
Instagram ........................................... 70
Demand ............................................. 97
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
Existing products ............................ 97 Vision:................................................. 97 Core Guiding Questions ................. 97 Strategy: ............................................. 97 Sales model: ................................... 97 Growth engine ................................ 97 Target market: ................................ 97 Monetization: .................................. 98 Product: .............................................. 98 Lean startup hypothesis ..................... 98 Business Management ....................... 98 Corporate Entity .............................. 98 Website ........................................... 98 Finances ......................................... 98 Podsfolio.com 2.0 .................................. 99 Pain Points & Solutions ...................... 99 Core Competency .............................. 99 Demand .............................................. 99 Existing products ............................ 99 Vision:................................................. 99 Core Guiding Questions ................. 99 Strategy: ............................................. 99 Sales model: ................................... 99 Growth engine ................................ 99 Target market: ................................ 99 Monetization: ................................ 100 Product: ............................................ 100 Lean startup hypothesis ................... 100 Business Management ..................... 100 Corporate Entity ............................ 100 Website ......................................... 100 Finances ....................................... 100
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
“Don’t disrupt, avoid competition as much as possible”
•
Big Pictures
Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs?
Hype Cycles 2014 Hype Cycle
Most conflicts in a startup erupt between ownership and control, that is, between founders and investors. In the boardroom, less is more. A board of 3 is ideal. Your board should never exceed 5 people. As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full time. Anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally mis-aligned. Hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues are not together full time, in the same place, every day.
2015 Hype Cycle
A company does better the less it pays the CEO. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.
Startup Philosophy Peter Thiel on Startup Foundations
From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way. On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.
A startup messed up at it’s foundation cannot be fixed. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together; otherwise they are just rolling dice.
Peter Thiel on Contrarian Thinking • • •
To avoid misalignment, distinguish • •
•
Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity? Possession: who actually runs the company on a day to day basis
Jay Ng, CMT
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It is better to risk boldness than triviality A bad plan is better than no plan Competitive markets destroy profits Sales matters just as much as profits
27 December, 2015
What valuable company is nobody building? Creating value is not enough; you also need to capture some of the value you create.
For complex sales, its long term relationships and no need salesman as the CEO must be the salesman. For Sales ($10,000), important to create a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience. Sometimes the product itself is a distribution channel.
Peter Thiel on Creating Monopolies • • • •
Proprietary Technology Network effects Economies of scale Branding
In between personal sales (sales people required) and traditional advertising (no sales people required) there is a dead zone. For e.g. A software costing 1000, advertising is too broad or too inefficient. Needs a personal sales effort but at that price point, don’t have the resources to talk to every customer.
Every startup should start with a very small market. It is easier to dominate a small market than a large one. The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.
Marketing and advertising work for relatively low priced products that have mass appeal but no viral distribution.
Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets.
A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.
Don’t disrupt, avoid competition as much as possible.
One of these methods is likely to be far more powerful than every other for any given business: distribution follows a power law of its own. But the kitchen sink approach – employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of virality to the product as an afterthought – doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you are finished.
We don’t live in a normal world; we live in a power law. Investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible. You should focus relentlessly on something you are good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
Peter Thiel on Sales All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.
You must also sell your company to employees and investors Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
Peter Thiel on 7 Questions to Ask • • • • • • •
Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? Is now the right time to start your particular business? Are you starting with a big share of a small market? Do you have the right team? Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? Will your market product be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
“The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build – the thing customers want and will pay for – as quickly as possible.”
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated.
Lean Startup Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
Validated learning is backed up by empirical data collected from real customers. Our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept.
The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build – the thing customers want and will pay for – as quickly as possible. Emphasizes fast iteration and customer insights.
Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the start-up’s vision. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Instead of making complex plans that are based on a lot of assumptions, you can make constant adjustments with a steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. To achieve the vision, start-ups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. Innovation is a bottom up, decentralised and unpredictable thing. A company’s only sustainable path to long term economic growth is to build an innovation factory that uses lean startup techniques to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis.
Products change constantly through the process of optimization. Less frequently the strategy may have to change (pivot). Overarching vision rarely changes.
Killing things that don’t make sense fast and doubling down on the ones that do.
2 most important hypotheses are: Value hypothesis: whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it.
We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.
Growth hypothesis: how many customers will discover a product or service. Understand reasons behind a start-up’s growth
Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer. Anything else is waste.
Concierge minimum viable product: make sure the first few participants has an experience that was as good as we can make it, completely aligned with our vision.
Learning is the essential unit of progress for start-ups. The effort that is not
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
A good design is one that changes customer behaviour for the better.
Pivot Zoom in pivot What previously was considered a single feature in a product becomes the whole product Zoom out pivot Sometimes a single feature is insufficient to support a whole product. What was considered the whole product becomes a single feature of a much larger product Customer Segment pivot Company realises that the product it is building solves a real problem for real customers but they are not the type of customers it originally planned to serve. Focus our energy on minimizing the total time through this feedback loop.
Customer Need pivot Becomes clear that the problem we are trying to solve for them is not very important. Often discover other related problems.
Craft a customer arch type (humanize a proposed target customer.)
Minimum Viable Product
Platform pivot Change application to a platform.
MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. It’s goal is to test fundamental business hypothesis.
from
an
Business Architecture pivot Company change from high margin low volume by going mass market.
Focus on scaling something that was working rather than trying to invent something that might work in future.
Value capture pivot Ways to capture the value a company creates Engine of growth pivot Viral, sticky and paid growth models
Focus our energies exclusively on producing outcomes that the customer perceives as valuable.
Channel pivot Sales distribution channel
Remove any feature, process or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
channel
or
Engines of Growth Sticky engine of growth
Step 1: Use MVP to establish real data on where the company is right now.
Companies using the sticky engine of growth track their attrition rate or churn rate very carefully. If the rate of new customers’ acquisition exceeds churn rate, the product will grow.
Step 2: Startup must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward the ideal Step 3: Pivot or Persevere
Viral engine of growth
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
Viral engine is powered by a feedback loop that can be quantified. It is called the viral loop. Speed is determined by a single mathematical term called the viral coefficient.
Make sure you run your test properly too (i.e., that the people you’re running the test on actually represent the correct audience). KEEP SCORE
Viral coefficient measures how many new customers will use a product as a consequence of each new customer who signs up. Viral loop with coefficient greater than 1.0 will grow exponentially. Paid engine of growth Each customer pays a certain amount of money for the product over his or her lifetime as a customer. Once variable costs are deducted, this usually is called the customer lifetime value (LTV). This revenue can be invested in growth by buying advertising.
Zero to product/market fit
Smoke Tests
Concept prototype Picking a product and market
Goal is to get to P/M fit in shortest time possible, defer everything else. • • • •
Don’t let your product roadmap hi-jack growth, rather let growth drive your product roadmap.
• • •
Validate an idea before actually dedicating technical resources to building product. •
•
•
What are the bottlenecks in my business and what do I think could solve them? Is it customer acquisition, is it activation, retention, etc.? Figure out the highest impact change you could make then Smoke Test it. Where are resources most strapped? Is your product backlog just a black hole of “ideas?” If so, try to validate more of them before passing them to product team. But, don’t waste time trying to validate anything that isn’t directly correlated to growth. What is a product feature I’ve recently released that didn’t have the impact on Growth I expected? Make a list of iterations and Smoke Test those.
Jay Ng, CMT
•
•
13
defers monetization defers marketing defers scaling (this is all by design)
build for yourself (start with intuition) have a long term vision base it off something that’s already big and already working o big makes it easy to test and collect feedback o already working means you have a good sense for minimum product o also, there’s pre-existing distribution channels as well figure out the options for competitive differentiation – this is the core design intention o talk to a lot of users, do a lot of research, compare a lot of products in the space dimensions for competitive differentiation o competitive dimensions o vertical audience o design intention o cheaper/niche
27 December, 2015
•
•
•
•
•
o targeting rejecters validating that there’s LOTS of preexisting “pull” for the market o search keywords o app leader boards ideal goal: simple product with fundamentally different core design intention for large pre-existing market o bonus points for baked in distribution, monetization, etc. but don’t let this lead the idea!!! o usually one killer feature (not a bunch of features) prototype: Landing page o what’s a good landing page experiment? o headlines, copywriting, hero shot, etc. o unique URLs antipatterns: o “someone’s already done this” (desire for originality) o monetization/strategy driven product ideas o technology in search of a market o “Wall Street” markets o lumping yourself into an aspirational market o comprehensive feature set done poorly
• •
Code prototype Coding the initial product • • • •
Paper/Wireframe prototype Designing the initial product • go for the minimum desirable product o might work :) o the central design intention drives the product design o supports only the core use case, as minimum as possible o core UX should be 23 pages o limited functionality, done well. “Less but better” o Should build bare bone prototype in less than 2 weeks (really!) o Flow based product design o user quotes, then fill in with UI
Jay Ng, CMT
low fidelity prototyping tools o easier and cheaper to make changes o fix defects earlier (Toyota lean manufacturing model) o engineers always want to prototype in code, but then sunk cost fallacy o get feedback from people and iterate prototype: Core user flows, mocked up and ready to build antipatterns: o “databaseup” design o feature creep and low product self-esteem (v1 should look like a feature!) o comprehensive feature set all of it done poorly o lots of pet features that don’t fit into the core design intention
• • • •
build the prototype as fast as possible fill in any blanks left out of the prototype use the product yourself, iterate on it while keeping with the core design intention focus on key flows and prioritize over ancillary ones don’t worry about corner cases get it ready to be used by other people prototype: Live product, usable by other people antipatterns: o taking too long o losing focus of the central design intention o not adjusting based on intuition and usage o over architecting, trying to make it scalable or modular or futureproofing in general
Friends and family alpha testing • private beta goals o clean up core experience
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27 December, 2015
make product usable over multiple visits o validate the core design intention o not scalable recruiting friends and family o focus on retention o are users coming back? recruiting random people o Find people from the existing market, rejecters, and outside the market o Learn from extreme users o Craigslist o User testing user testing o do they get it? o how would you describe this to a friend? o usability – remove the friction o would they switch? (for existing market users) o Net promotor score interpreting user feedback and learning to say “no” o which users fall into the target market? Hear them out o which users don’t? It’s OK (and maybe even good!) to have them reject o try not to add new features unless absolutely necessary o what features can you remove that aren’t part of the core? prototype: Simple product, polished by real use antipatterns o Delusion it’s not working but you think it is o Melancholy from user testing o Adding features without interpreting o Adding features that violate core design intention o Listening to out of market users is it working? o people understand the product o
• •
•
•
• •
•
Jay Ng, CMT
o o
some subset of your users like it and use it you like it :)
Random people beta testing • traffic testing goals o start polishing your on boarding flow o develop options for distribution o build some basic stats infrastructure o not meant to be scalable • User acquisition tactics o ads o PR + launch page + slow stream o partnerships o power through it • Collecting feedback o surveys o help and problems o recruit users to talk to • prototype: Spreadsheet for signup flow, more polished signup flow • is it working? o signups are happening o people are going through the core flow o retention/recurring usage from target users o product still works for you, and your friends/family User flow optimization • model your usage and figure out your core drivers o this is completely product specific o two examples daily deal versus a chat site o what’s your “metric of love?” • prototype your funnel – explore! o flow chart o excel o SQL o formalize/finalize with dashboards • identify major bottlenecks for why the product’s not working o start at the beginning of the flow o fix bottlenecks with A/B tests
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27 December, 2015
•
•
is it working? o how do the metrics compare to the usage model? o 10% signup o +1 day retention and +1 week retention o DAU/MAU antipatterns: o trying to fix problems in core UX when signup is the problem o over architecting stats infrastructure o trying to use a generic analytics product to answer situational questions
Ready to scale? • Hopefully the major checkboxes are checked – at this point you’d have: o Huge market o Differentiated product o Product makes sense to normal people o Product is working for IRL people o Product is working for nonIRL people o Well understood and optimized user flows o Ready to scale up • Non scalable marketing, tech, and otherwise that’s fine • Now scale everything else :) Crisis, terror, and melancholy • Is it good enough? • Nobody likes my product! • My product is a mess! • It’s taking too long! • Investors hate my product! • I’m iterating in circles! • When to work on a completely new idea? • Iterations are getting diminishing returns and people still don’t love the product
Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
What’s your tool? Jay Ng, CMT
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27 December, 2015
Invoice to me [http://invoiceto.me/] : Free Invoice Generator.
Tools To Use Prototyping
Free Invoice Generator [https://www.freeinvoice-generator.com/] : Alternative free invoice generator.
http://www.invisionapp.com https://balsamiq.com
Slimvoice: [http://slimvoice.co/] Insanely simple invoices.
http://canvasflip.com/index.php
Mobile Apps Collaboration
https://www.heroku.com
https://slack.com http://seed.happyfuncorp.com
Business Intelligence & Data Visualisation
https://parse.com
http://www.qlik.com
Web Development
Gamification
http://getbootstrap.com
https://gametize.com/index
HTML5 UP: [http://html5up.net/] Responsive HTML5 and CSS3 site templates.
Name Generators The Name App: [http://thenameapp.com] Find an available name for your brilliant idea.
Bootswatch: [http://bootswatch.com/] Free themes for Bootstrap.
Naminum: [http://www.naminum.com] Discover a perfect company name.
Templated: [http://templated.co/] A collection of 845 free CSS & HTML5 site templates.
Wordoid: [http://wordoid.com] Pick a short and catchy name for your business.
WordPress.org [https://wordpress.org/] | WordPress.com [https://wordpress.com/] :
Short Domain Search: [http://shortdomainsearch.com/] Find short, available single word domain names.
Strikingly.com Domain: [https://www.strikingly.com/] One free website for strikingly.com domains. Withoomph [https://withoomph.com/] Beautiful logos designed instantly.
Hipster Business Name: [http://www.hipsterbusiness.name/] Hipster business name generator.
:
Impossibility [http://impossibility.org/] : The best domain name generator ever.
Hipster Logo Generator: [http://www.hipsterlogogenerator.com/] It’s Hip, It’s Current, It’s Stylish, It’s Hipster.
Lean Domain Search [http://x/] : Find a domain name for your website in seconds.
Squarespace Free Logo: [http://www.squarespace.com/logo/] You can download free low-res version for free.
Domainr: [https://domainr.com/] Fast, free, domain name search, short URLs.
Writing/Blogging Hive: [https://www.hive.im/] First unlimited cloud service in the world.
Jay Ng, CMT
free
Hemingway: [http://www.hemingwayapp.com/]
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27 December, 2015
Buzzsumo: [http://buzzsumo.com/] Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear. Grammarly: [https://free.grammarly.com/] Finds & corrects mistakes of your writing.
Hubspot Blog Topic Generator: [http://www.hubspot.com/blog-topicgenerator] Custom blog ideas.
Medium: [https://medium.com/] Everyone’s stories and ideas. ZenPen: [http://www.zenpen.io/] minimal writing tool of web.
Swayy: [http://www.swayy.co/] Discover the most engaging content. Free for 1 dashboard user.
The
Liberio: [http://liber.io/] Simple eBook creation and publishing right from Google Drive.
Others: Google+ What’s [https://plus.google.com/explore/_] Twitter Trendin
Editorial Calendar: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/editorialcalendar/] See all your posts, drag & drop to manage your blog.
[https://twitter.com/] g | Quora [http://www.quora.com/Content-Strategy] | Reddit
Hot |
[http://www.reddit.com/]
Story Wars: [https://www.storywars.net/] Writing stories together.
Free SEO + Website Analyzers Open Site Explorer: [https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/] A comprehensive tool for link analysis.
Headline Analyzer: [http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/] Emotional marketing value headline analyzer.
Ahrefs: [https://ahrefs.com/] Site explorer & backlink checker.
WP Hide Post: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-hidepost/] Control the visibility of items on your blog.
Quick [http://www.quicksprout.com/] analysis of your website.
Sprout: Complete
Social Locker: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/sociallocker/] Ask visitors “to pay” for your content with a tweet, etc.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpressseo/] Have a fully optimized WordPress site.
Egg Timer: [http://e.ggtimer.com/] Set a time and bookmark it for repeated use.
SEO Site Checkup: [http://seositecheckup.com/] Check your website’s SEO problems for free.
Find Trending Content/Ideas
Hubspot Marketing Grader: [https://marketing.grader.com/] Grade your marketing.
Portent: [http://www.portent.com/tools/titlemaker] Content idea generator. Google Trends: [http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/vi sualize?pn=p1] A new way of displaying trending searches.
Jay Ng, CMT
SimilarWeb: [http://www.similarweb.com/] Analyze website statistics for any domain.
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27 December, 2015
Alexa Ranking: [http://www.alexa.com/] Analytical insights to analyze any site’s rank.
Pingdom Website Speed Test: [http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/] Test & the load time of a site.
SERPs Rank Checker: [https://serps.com/tools/rank_checker] Free keyword rank & SERP checker.
GTMetrics: [http://gtmetrix.com/] Analyze your page’s speed performance. Moz Local: [https://moz.com/local/search] Check your local listings on Google, Bing, and others.
OpenLinkProfiler: [http://openlinkprofiler.org/] The freshest backlinks, for free. Keywordtool.io: Free alternative Planner.
XML Sitemaps: [https://www.xmlsitemaps.com/] Sitemap generator that creates XML &
[http://keywordtool.io/] to Google Keyword
HTML variants.
Google: Analytics [http://www.google.com/analytics/] | Keyword Planner
W3C validator [http://validator.w3.org/] : Easy-to-use markup validation service.
[http://adwords.google.com/keywordplann er] | Webmaster Tools
Shopify E-commerce Report: [https://ecommerce.shopify.com/grader] Get your freeEcommerce report.
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tool s/home?hl=en] | Trends
Free Image Optimizers
[http://www.google.com/trends/]
TinyJPG [https://tinyjpg.com/] | TinyPNG [https://tinypng.com/] Compress images.
Nibbler: [http://nibbler.silktide.com/] Test any website.
Compressor.io: [https://compressor.io/] Optimize and compress your images online.
Browseo: [http://www.browseo.net/] How search engines see your website.
Kraken: [https://kraken.io/web-interface] Optimize your images & accelerate your websites.
Broken Links: [http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/s eo-tools/google-sitemapgenerator/]
ImageOptimizer: [http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Ho me.aspx] Resize, compress and optimize your image files.
Find broken links, redirects & more. Copyscape: [http://www.copyscape.com/] Search for copies of your page on the web.
ImageOptim: [https://imageoptim.com/] Makes images take up less disk space & load faster.
Woorank: [http://www.woorank.com/] Website review and SEO tool.
Smush.it: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/] Image optimizer WordPress plugin.
Google Pagespeed Insights: [https://developers.google.com/speed/pag espeed/insights/] Check the performance of your site.
Jay Ng, CMT
20
27 December, 2015
Collect email addresses with light box popover.
Free Image Editors Canva: Amazingly bloggers.
[https://www.canva.com/] simple graphic design for
Scroll Triggered Box: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/dreamgrowscroll-triggeredbox/]
Pixlr: [http://apps.pixlr.com/editor/] Pixlr Editor is a robust browser photo editor.
Boost your conversion rates — Wordpress only.
Skitch: [https://evernote.com/skitch/] Get your point across with fewer words.
Sumome Scroll Box: [http://sumome.com/app/scroll-box] Capture more email addresses, politely.
Easel.ly: [http://www.easel.ly/] Empowers anyone to create & share powerful visuals.
Free Social Media + Community Management
Social Image Resizer Tool: [http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/s eotools/
WriteRack: [http://writerack.com/] The easiest way to blog/tweetstorm on twitter.
favicon-generator-crop-images/] Create optimized images for social media.
Spruce: [http://www.tryspruce.com/] Make Twitter ready images in seconds.
Placeit: [https://placeit.net/] Free product mockups & templates.
Click To Tweet: [http://coschedule.com/click-to-tweet] Get more shares on your content.
Recite: [http://www.recitethis.com/] Turn a quote into a visual masterpiece.
MyTweetLinks: [http://mytweetlinks.com/] Increases Twitter traffic.
Meme Generator: [http://memegenerator.net/] The first online meme generator.
Latergram [http://www.latergram.me/] : Easily plan & schedule your Instagram posts.
Collect & Send Emails For Free Contact form 7: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/contactform-7/] Famous WordPress plugin to collect email addresses.
WordPress Pin it Button for Images: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/pinterestpin-itbutton-for-images/] Add a “Pin It” button.
Mailchimp: [http://mailchimp.com/] Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free.
SharedCount: [http://www.sharedcount.com/] Track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more.
ManyContactsBar: [https://www.manycontacts.com/] Free contact form sits on top of your website.
Justunfollow: [http://www.justunfollow.com/] unfollow people on Twitter &
Hello Bar: [http://hellobar.com/] Get more email subscribers.
/
Instagram. SocialRank: [https://www.socialrank.com/] Identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter.
Sumome List Builder: [https://sumome.com/app/list-builder]
Jay Ng, CMT
Follow
21
27 December, 2015
Klout: [http://blog.klout.com/2014/06/kloutbrowser-extensions/] Social media influence score on browser extension.
A/B Tests & Growth Hacking Petit Hacks: [http://petithacks.com/] Acquisition, retention, & revenue hacks used by companies.
Ritetag: [https://ritetag.com/hashtagacademy/ritetag-browser-extensionsschedulingproductivity]
Optimizely: [https://www.optimizely.com/] One optimization platform for websites and mobile apps.
Instant hashtag analysis.
Hello Bar:
Social Analytics: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai l/socialanalytics/
[http://write%20better%20content%20and %20have%20a%20fully%20optimized%20 wordpress%Tool for A/B testing different CTAs & power words.
pgckigmaefoaemjpijdepakcghjkggmg/relat ed] Interactions for a URL on most social platforms Riffle: [http://crowdriff.com/riffle/] profile and info on any Twitter user.
GrowthHackers: [https://growthhackers.com/] growth. Together.
Full
Free Design Resources
Buffer Free Plan: [https://bufferapp.com/] Schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+.
Freebbble [http://freebbble.com/] : Highquality design freebies from Dribbble. Dribbble: [https://dribbble.com/search?q=freebie] Dribbble search results for “freebie�. An absolute freebie treasure.
Bitly: [https://bitly.com/] Create, share, and track shortened links. Flament: [http://filament.io/flare] A free beautiful and customizable sharing bar.
Graphic Burger: [http://graphicburger.com/] Tasty design resources made with care for each pixel.
Addthis: [http://www.addthis.com/] Get more shares, follows and conversions.
Pixel Buddha: [http://pixelbuddha.net/] Free and premium resources for professional community.
Sumome Share: [https://sumome.com/app/share] Autooptimizes your share buttons for max traffic.
Premium [http://www.premiumpixels.com/] Stuff for Creative Folk.
Digg Digg: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/diggdigg/installation/] Your all in one share buttons plugin. Disqus: [https://disqus.com/] Build community of active readers commenters.
Pixels: Free
Fribbble: [http://fribbble.com/] Free PSD resources by Dribbblers curated by Gilbert Pellegrom.
a &
Freebiesbug: [http://freebiesbug.com/] Latest free PSDs & other resources for designers.
Typeform: [http://www.typeform.com/] Free beautiful online survey & form builder.
365 Psd: [http://365psd.com/] Download a free psd every day.
Tally: [http://tally.tl/] Create polls in no time.
Jay Ng, CMT
Unlocking
22
27 December, 2015
&
Brand Colors: [http://brandcolors.net] Colors used by famous brands.
Marvel: [https://marvelapp.com/resources/] Free resources from designers we love.
Bootflat: [http://bootflat.github.io/colorpicker.html] Perfect colors for flat designs.
UI Space: [http://uispace.net/] High quality hand-crafted Freebies for awesome people.
Hex Colorrrs: [http://hex.colorrrs.com] Hex to RGB converter.
Dbf: [http://dbfreebies.co/] Dribbble Behance best design freebies.
Get UI Colors: [http://getuicolors.com] Get awesome UI colors.
Free Section of Pixeden: [http://www.pixeden.com/free-design-webresources] Free design resources.
Coleure: [https://www.coleure.com/] Smart color picker.
Free Section of Creative Market: [https://creativemarket.com/free-goods] Freebies coming out every monday.
Colllor: [http://colllor.com/] Color palette generator. Flat UI Colors: [http://flatuicolors.com/] Beautiful flat colors.
Teehan+Lax: [http://www.teehanlax.com/tools/iphone/] DiOS 8 GUI PSD (iPhone 6).
Skala Color: [http://bjango.com/mac/skalacolor/] An extraordinary color picker for designers and developers.
Teehan+Lax: [http://www.teehanlax.com/tools/ipad/] iPad GUI PSD. Freepik: [http://www.freepik.com/] graphic resources for everyone.
Couleurs: [http://couleursapp.com/] Simple app for grabbing & tweaking colors you see on screen.
iFree
Tech&All: [http://www.techandall.com/] PSD, Tech News, and other resources for free.
Colorful Gradients: [http://colorfulgradients.tumblr.com/] Gradients automatically created by a computer.
Tethr: [http://www.invisionapp.com/tethr] The most beautiful IOS design KIT ever.
Adaptive Backgrounds: [http://briangonzalez.github.io/jquery.adapt ivebackgrounds.js/] Extract dominant colours from images.
Color Pickers Material Palette: [http://www.materialpalette.com] Generate & export your Material Design color palette.
Paletton: [http://paletton.com/] The color scheme designer.
New Flat UI Color Picker: [http://www.flatuicolorpicker.com] Best flat colors for UI design.
0 to 255: [http://www.0to255.com/] A simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.
Coolors: [http://coolors.co] Super fast color schemes generator for cool designers.
Colour Lovers: [http://www.colourlovers.com/] Create & share colors, palettes, and patterns.
Material UI Colors: [http://www.materialui.co/colors] Material ui color palette for Android, Web & iOS.
Jay Ng, CMT
23
27 December, 2015
UI Parade: [http://www.uiparade.com/] User interface design tools and design inspiration.
Adobe Color CC: [https://color.adobe.com/create/colorwheel/] Color combinations from the Kuler community.
The Best Designs: [https://www.thebestdesigns.com/] The best of web design.
Palette for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai l/palette-forchrome/
Agile Designers [http://agiledesigners.com/] : Best resources for designers & developers.
oolpphfmdmjbojolagcbgdemojhcnlod] Creates a color palette from any image.
Niice: [https://niice.co/] A search engine with taste.
Inspiration MaterialUp: [http://www.materialup.com/] Daily material design inspiration.
UI Cloud: [http://ui-cloud.com/] The largest user interface design database in the world.
FLTDSGN [http://fltdsgn.com/] : Daily showcase of the best flat UI design websites and apps. Site Inspire: [http://www.siteinspire.com/] Web design inspiration.
Crayon: [http://www.crayon.co/] The most comprehensive collection of marketing designs.
Moodboard: [http://www.gomoodboard.com/] Build a beautiful moodboard and share the result.
The Starter Kit: [http://www.thestarterkit.info/] Curated resources for developers and designers.
Land-Book: [http://land-book.com/] Product landing pages gallery.
Free Stock Photography
Dribbble: [https://dribbble.com/] Show and tell for designers.
Stock Up: [http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/stock-up] Best free stock photo websites in one place.
Behance: [https://www.behance.net/] Showcase & discover creative work.
Pexels: [http://www.pexels.com/] Best free photos in one place.
Pttrns: [http://www.pttrns.com/] user interface patterns.
Mobile
Unsplash: [http://unsplash.com/] Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.
Flat UI Design: [https://www.pinterest.com/warmarc/flat-uidesign/] Useful board I discovered thanks to Erik
Splashbase: [http://www.splashbase.co/] Search & discover free, hi res photos & videos. Travel Coffee [http://travelcoffeebook.com/] beautiful travel moments.
Awwwards: [http://www.awwwards.com/] The awards for design, creativity and innovation.
Designers Pics: [http://www.designerspics.com/] Free photographs for your personal & commercial use.
One Page Love: [http://onepagelove.com/] Resource for one page website inspiration.
Jay Ng, CMT
Book: Sharing
24
27 December, 2015
www.flickr.com
Death to the Stock Photo: [http://deathtothestockphoto.com/] Free photos sent to you every month.
All The Free Stock: [http://allthefreestock.com/] Free stock images, icons, and videos.
Mazwai: [http://mazwai.com/] Free creative commons HD video clips & footages.
Startup Stock Photos: [http://startupstockphotos.com/] Go. Make something.
Picography [http://picography.co/] : Free hi-resolution photos.
Jay Mantri: [http://jaymantri.com/] Free pics. do anything (CC0). Make magic.
Pixabay: [http://pixabay.com/] Free high quality images.
Moveast: [http://moveast.me/] This is a journey of a Portuguese guy moving east.
Magdeleine: [http://magdeleine.co/] A free high-resolution photo every day.
Foodie’s Feed: [http://foodiesfeed.com/] Free food pictures in hi-res.
Splitshire: [http://splitshire.com/] Delicious free stock photos.
Jéshoots [http://jeshoots.com/] modern free photos.
Life of Pix: [http://www.lifeofpix.com/] Free high-resolution photos.
:
New
Super Famous: [http://superfamous.com/] Photos by Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter.
Gratisography: [http://www.gratisography.com/] Free highresolution photos.
Little Visuals: [http://littlevisuals.co/] 7 hires images in your inbox every 7 days.
Getrefe: [http://getrefe.com/downloads/category/fre e/] Free photos.
New Old Stock: [http://nos.twnsnd.co/] Vintage photos from the public archives.
IM Free: [http://www.imcreator.com/free] A curated collection of free resources.
Picjumbo: [http://picjumbo.com/] free photos.
Totally
Public Domain Archive: [http://publicdomainarchive.com/] New 100% free stock photos.
Cupcake: [http://cupcake.nilssonlee.se/] A photographer’s treat by Jonas Nilsson Lee.
ISO Republic: [http://isorepublic.com/] High-quality, free photos for creatives.
The Pattern [http://thepatternlibrary.com/] patterns for your projects.
Kaboompics: [http://kaboompics.com/] The best way to get free photos.
Library: Free
Stokpic: [http://stokpic.com/] Totally free photos.
Raumrot: [http://www.raumrot.com/10/] Free high-resolution picture.
Function [http://wefunction.com/category/freephotos/] : Free photo packs.
Range Stock [http://freerangestock.com/] | Free Photos Bank
MMT: [http://mmt.li/] Free stock photos by Jeffrey Betts.
http://negativespace.co https://stocksnap.io/
Jay Ng, CMT
25
27 December, 2015
Paul Jarvis: [http://pjrvs.com/a/photos] Free high-resolution photos.
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/12-freenature-photos-v-3/] | here
Lock & Stock [http://lockandstockphotos.com/] stock photos for you.
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/13-freegeometric-backgroundsshapes/] |here
Photos: Free
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/10-freegeometric-backgrounds/] | and here
Bucketlistly: [http://photos.bucketlistly.com/] A free creative common collection of travel photos.
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/free-heroheader-presentation-images/] .), → from Deal Jumbo: [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/theultimate-photo-pack-freeversion/]
Some more websites: Free Digital Photos [http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/] |Morguefile [http://morguefile.com/] Public Domain Pictures
|
[http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/] Stockvault [http://www.stockvault.net/] |
|
(here
| here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/peopleplaces-and-things-photobundle/] | here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/24free-photos-vintage-workshop/] |
ImageFree [http://www.imagefree.com/] | Rgbstock
here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/30free-photos-from-kaboompics/] | here
[http://www.dreamstime.com/freeimages_pg1] |Dreamstime
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/12-freenature-photos/] | here
[http://www.rgbstock.com/] | Free Images [http://www.freeimages.com/] | Free
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/12-freenature-photos-v-2/] | here
[http://freephotosbank.com/] . → from Free Goodies for Designers: (here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/theultimatephoto-
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/12-freenature-photos-v-3/] | here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/13-freegeometric-backgroundsshapes/] |here
pack-free-version/] | here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/peopleplaces-andthings-
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/10-freegeometric-backgrounds/] | and here
photo-bundle/] | here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/24-freephotos-vintageworkshop/]
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/free-heroheader-presentation-images/] .),
| here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/30free-photos-from-kaboompics/] |
→ from Dribbble: (here [https://dribbble.com/shots/1659014-FreeDownload-Nature-
here [http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/12free-nature-photos/] | here
Photo-Pack] | here [https://dribbble.com/shots/1584133-2014workspace-free-photos]
[http://dealjumbo.com/freebies/12-freenature-photos-v-2/] | here
Jay Ng, CMT
26
27 December, 2015
| here [https://dribbble.com/shots/1561280-FreeVintage-Photos] | here
FontFaceNinja: [http://www.fontface.ninja/] Browser extension to find the web fonts a site uses.
[https://dribbble.com/shots/1093355-FreeBlurred-Backgrounds] | here
Google Fonts: [http://www.google.com/fonts] Free, opensource fonts optimized for the web.
[https://dribbble.com/shots/609751-8Backgrounds-Free-download] | here [https://dribbble.com/shots/1671186-HipBundle-mockups-collection] | here
Beautiful Web Type: [http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/] Best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.
[https://dribbble.com/shots/1789659Freebie-Friday] |here
DaFont: [http://www.dafont.com/] Archive of freely downloadable fonts.
[https://dribbble.com/shots/1669946Freebie-Hero-Image] |and here
1001 Free Fonts: [http://www.1001freefonts.com/] A huge selection of free fonts.
[https://dribbble.com/shots/1619059-HisMercies-Background-2x] .),
FontPark: [http://www.fontpark.net/en/] The web’s largest archive of free fonts.
→ from Graphic Burger: (here [http://graphicburger.com/wood-forestfree-photos/] |
Font-to-width: [http://font-to-width.com/] Fit pieces of text snugly within their containers.
here [http://graphicburger.com/icelandfree-photos-vol-1/] | here
Free Icons
[http://graphicburger.com/iceland-freephotos-vol-2/] | here
Fontello: [http://fontello.com/] Icon fonts generator.
[http://graphicburger.com/5-bokehbackgrounds-vol-1/] | here
Flat Icon: [http://www.flaticon.com/] A search engine for 16000+ glyph vector icons.
[http://graphicburger.com/3-infinitewooden-floors/] | here
Material Design Icons: [https://github.com/google/materialdesignicons/ releases/tag/1.0.0] 750 Free open-source glyphs by Google.
[http://graphicburger.com/5-blurredbackgrounds-vol-1/] | andhere [http://graphicburger.com/3-curvedwooden-backdrops-vol-1/] .)
Font Awesome: [http://fortawesome.github.io/FontAwesome/] The iconic font and CSS toolkit.
Free Typography TypeGenius: [http://www.typegenius.com/] Find the perfect font combo for your next project.
Glyphsearch: [http://glyphsearch.com/] Search for icons from other icon databases.
Font Squirrel: [http://www.fontsquirrel.com/] 100% free commercial fonts.
MakeAppIcon: [http://makeappicon.com/] Generate App Icons of all sizes with a click.
Jay Ng, CMT
27
27 December, 2015
Endless Icons: [http://www.endlessicons.com/] Free flat icons and creative stuff.
Window Resizer: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai l/windowresizer/
Ico Moon: [https://icomoon.io/] 4000+ free vector icons, icon generator.
kkelicaakdanhinjdeammmilcgefonfh/detail s?hl=en] See how it looks on various screen resolutions.
The Noun Project: [http://thenounproject.com/] Thousands of glyph icons from different artists.
Background Sound To Focus Noisli [http://www.noisli.com/] Background noise & color generator.
Perfect Icons: [http://perfecticons.com/] A social icon creation tool.
Noizio: [http://noiz.io/] Ambient equalizer for relax or productivity.
Material Design Icons: [https://github.com/google/materialdesignicons/releases/tag/1.0.0] 750 Free open-source glyphs by Google.
:
sound
Defonic: [http://defonic.com/] Combine the sounds of the world into a melody. Designers.mx: [https://designers.mx/] Curated playlists by designers, for designers.
Icon Finder: [https://www.iconfinder.com/free_icons] Free icon section of the website.
Coffitivity: [https://coffitivity.com/] Stream the sounds of a coffee shop at work.
Free Round Icons: Doodle Set [http://roundicons.com/doodle-icons-freeset/] | Flat Set
Avoid Distraction Self-Control [http://selfcontrolapp.com/] : Mac: free application to help you avoid distracting websites.
[http://roundicons.com/free-icons/] | Vector Line Set [http://roundicons.com/freevectorline-icons-set/] Icon Sweets: [http://iconsweets.com/] 60 free vector Photoshop icons.
Cold Turkey: [http://getcoldturkey.com/] Windows: temporarily block yourself off of distracting websites.
Useful Stuff
Organize & Collaborate
UI Names: [http://uinames.com/] Generate random names for use in designs and mockups.
Trello: [https://trello.com/] Keeps track of everything. Evernote: [https://evernote.com/] workspace for your life’s work.
UI Faces: [http://uifaces.com/] Find and generate sample avatars for user interfaces.
Dropbox: [https://www.dropbox.com/] Free space up to 2GB.
UI Blurbs: [http://uiblurbs.com/] Quick user bios for your mockups.
Yanado: [http://yanado.com/] management inside Gmail.
Copy Paste Character: [http://copypastecharacter.com/] Click to copy.
Jay Ng, CMT
The
Tasks
Wetransfer: [https://www.wetransfer.com/] Free transfer up to 2GB.
28
27 December, 2015
Drp.io: [http://drp.io/] Free, fast, private and easy image and file hosting.
Erli Bird: [http://erlibird.com/] Where great new products are born.
Pocket: [http://getpocket.com/] View later, put it in Pocket.
Build Together Assembly: [https://assembly.com/discover] Co-create new ideas no matter where they are.
Mailtoself: [http://www.mailtoself.com/] An iOS extension to mail notes to yourself from any app.
CoFoundersLab: [https://www.cofounderslab.com/] Find a co-founder in any city, any industry.
List.ly: [http://list.ly/] Discover and create great lists.
Founder2be: [http://www.founder2be.com/] Find a co-founder for your startup.
Markticle [https://markticle.com/] : Mark your reading progress in articles for later.
Skillshare: [http://www.skillshare.com/] Unlock your creativity with free online classes & projects.
Digital Nomads & Remote Working Nomadlist: [http://nomadli.st/] The best cities to live and work remotely
Khan Academy: [https://www.khanacademy.org/] Free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
Where Nomads at: [http://where-mynomads.at/] Find digital nomads & travelers all around the world. Nomad Jobs: [http://nomadjobs.com/] The best remote jobs at the best start-ups.
Coursera: [https://www.coursera.org/] Free online classes from 80+ top universities & organizations.
What’s It [http://www.whatsitlikeapp.com/] travelers figure out WHEN to go.
Codecademy: [http://www.codecademy.com/] Learn to code interactively, for free.
Like: Helping
Discover Tools & Start-ups
How to start a startup: As an Audio Podcast
Product Hunt: [http://www.producthunt.com/] Curation of the best new products, every day.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/howto-start-a-startup/id922398209?mt=2] or
Angellist: [https://angel.co/] Where the world meets start-ups.
As Online Course [https://startupclass.co/]
Beta List: [http://betalist.com/] Discover and get early access to tomorrow’s startups.
Startup Notes: [http://startupnotes.org/] Startup School invites amazing founders to tell their story.
StartupLi.st: [http://startupli.st/] Follow. Recommend start-ups.
Find.
The How: [http://how.co/] Learn from entrepreneurs.
Start-ups List: [http://www.startupslist.com/] Collections of the best start-ups in different places.
Launch This Year: [http://launchthisyear.com/] Guide to help you launch your online business.
Jay Ng, CMT
29
27 December, 2015
Closed Club: [http://closedclub.co/] Browse shut-down start-ups & learn why they closed down.
Useful
Startup Talks: [http://startuptalks.tv/] A curated collection of startup related videos.
Ad Spend Calculator: [http://ad-spendcalculator.qwilr.com/] Should my startup pay to advertise?
Foundrs: [http://foundrs.com/] Co-founder equity calculator.
Rocketship.fm: [http://rocketship.fm/] Learn from successful entrepreneurs each week. reSRC.io: [http://resrc.io/] All programming learning resources.
HowMuchToMakeAnApp: [http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com/] Calculate the cost of a mobile application.
free
App vs. Website: [http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com/build-awebsite-vs-app/] Should you build an app or website?
Newsletters That Don’t Suck Email1K: [http://email1k.com/] A free 30 day course to double your email list.
Pitcherific: [http://pitcherific.com/] Pitcherific helps you create, train, and improve your pitch.
Design for Hackers: [http://designforhackers.com/] 12 weeks of design learning, right in your inbox.
Voice-overs
Startup Digest: [https://www.startupdigest.com/] Personalized newsletter for all things startup in your area.
Voice bunny
Video-maker Free video makers like Picovico or Kizoa
Mattermark Daily: [http://mattermark.com/app/Newsletter] Curated newsletter from investors & founders.
Slides Maker https://www.slideshare.net/create
Responsive Embed http://embedresponsively.com
ChargeWhatYou’reWorth: [http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/freepricing-course/] Free course on charging what you’re worth. Product Psychology: [http://www.productpsychology.com/] Lessons on User Behavior. UX Newsletter: [http://www.theuxnewsletter.com/] Tales of researching, designing, and building. UX Design Weekly: [http://uxdesignweekly.com/] Best user experience design links every week.
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“Build something customers want” Jay Ng, CMT
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Product Design • •
Virality Engagement engagement)
•
(motivated
Site Design
• •
The F-pattern is the go-to layout for textheavy websites like news sites, blogs, or in-depth landing pages. The F refers to the reader first scanning a horizontal line across the top of the screen, as is understandable for cultures that read left-to-right. Next, the user scans a vertical line down the left side of the screen, looking for keywords or points of interest in the paragraph’s initial sentences or subsection titles. When the reader finds something they like, they begin reading normally, forming horizontal lines
Assess each page for clarity – is it perfectly clear and understandable what’s being offered and how it works? This is not just about the value proposition – it applies to all pages (pricing, featured, product pages etc).
Minimal Homepage If the goal is to increase signups, keep homepage simple and ask for signups upfront: •
•
•
Understand context and evaluate page relevancy for visitors: does web page relate to what the visitor thought they were going to see? Do pre-click and post-click messages and visuals align?
No access without signup. Contrary to popular belief, the more things a visitor can interact with on your site before they’re prompted to sign up, the lower your signup rate will be. Navigation and hyperlinks are almost always absent. “Squeeze Page” with minimal content and a single clear call to action because they discovered that additional information could distract a visitor or cause them to click away to a different website. Focus on a single, clear value proposition. The product’s value
Jay Ng, CMT
proposition is boiled down to one clear statement. Your product is not about sharing. Lots of start-ups start out thinking that people will use their product because it helps them “share” things more easily. Let me be clear here: most people do not share. And even those people who share things aren’t sharing things 90% of the time. Most of the time on the web is spent consuming, not producing. Big images. Big images increase conversion rates. Just do it. Embedded signup forms. Start your signup process on the homepage so people don’t have to click through to a new page for no reason. Generally speaking, the more clicks you have in your signup process, the more people will drop off along the way. Note that these signup forms are almost always on the right hand side, above the fold. They also rarely ask for more than a name, email and password.
Assess incentives to take action: Is it clear what people are getting for their money? Is there some sort of believable urgency? What kind of motivators are used? Is there enough product information? Is the sales copy persuasive? Evaluate all the sources of friction on the key pages. This includes difficult and long processes, insufficient information, poor
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readability and UX, bad error validation, fears about privacy & security, any uncertainties and doubts, unanswered questions.
Notification driven
Notify you
Advertising
Pay attention to distracting elements on every high priority pages. Are there any blinking banners or automatic sliders stealing attention? Too much information unrelated to the main call to action? Any elements that are not directly contributing to visitors taking desired action? Understand buying phases and see if visitors are rushed into too big of a commitment too soon. Are there paths in place for visitors in different stages (research, evaluation etc)? (See Appendix 1 for examples)
Optimised Contact Forms 3 fields. 5 field max. Email, name, lead source Build trust by including • •
Contact info (Phone, address) Customer proof (endorsement, testimonials) • Just be cool (freebies, privacy policy) Call to action copy
Quadrant I include apps that are used intensively and to which consumers are loyal over time. On average, because these apps tend to have stable, growing audiences, they are best positioned to generate advertising revenue or charge a subscription.
•
From second person to first person (start my free trial) Click through rate •
Click here (best)
Monetization Framework Categories Time waster
Core utilities
Episodic utilities
Jay Ng, CMT
Examples Angry bird (provide entertainment value) Camera, Calendar (basic) Opentable, Uber (useful in certain situations)
Quadrant II is comprised of apps that are used intensively, but for finite periods of time. An implication could be that to maintain a growing audience, apps in this category require heavy, constant acquisition to find consumers who are “in the market” for dating.
Monetization Monetise content /advertise Subscription based Advertising
Quadrant III contains apps that are used infrequently and have high churn. Since the app’s value is diminished almost
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immediately, applications with this kind of usage pattern are best served with premium pricing models; That is, charging the consumer before providing access to the content.
Shopping Cart Abandonment 1. Insecure checkout 2. Not allowing for guest checkouts 3. Displaying website navigation during checkout process 4. Losing customer input when a submission causes error 5. Layout page design that conflicts with eye flow 6. Multiple calls to action buttons with same design and in close proximity 7. Not displaying visitor progress in the checkout process 8. Displaying discount code late in the checkout process 9. Requiring unnecessary information 10. Using cross sells and up sells during the checkout process
Quadrant IV is made up of apps that are used infrequently but deliver very high value when used. Even though they’re used only occasionally, these apps can remain on a consumer’s handset almost indefinitely.
Turn Visitors to Users Pulling the trigger • •
First step in bringing users in. Successful trigger – the message must be consistent. People need to talk about the product in the same way, each and every time. • To be effective, the articulation for what the product is for should connect to when the product should be used. • The best triggers are those that attach to frequent behaviours. Prompting the action
How to make money online 1. Get rich slow 2. Focus on the scare resource online: attention. If you try to invent a way to take cheap attention and turn it into cash, you will fail. The attention you want isn’t cheap, it’s difficult to get via SEO and it rarely scales. Instead figure out how to earn expensive attention. 3. In addition to attention, focus on trust. Trust is even more scarce than attention. 4. Don’t worry so much about the online part. Instead figure out how to create value. The online part will take care of itself. 5. Build a public reputation. A good one and be sure that you deserve it and that it will hold up to scrutiny. 6. Obsessively specialise. No niche is too small if it’s yours. 7. Connect the disconnected. 8. Lead 9. Build an online legacy that increases in value daily. 10. Make money offline. If you can figure out how to create value face to face, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to do the same digitally. The web isn't magic. It’s just efficient. 11. Become the best in the world at something that people value. Easier said than done, worth more than you might think.
•
Getting users to take the intended actions. • Reducing the effect involved in completing an action increases the likelihood of that behaviour. • Simplifying the experience is key. Gimme the record •
Providing the rewards on a variable ratio increases the probability of behaviour. Investing for the future •
Exerting effort makes people value outcomes more highly. • Strategically ask the user to do some work. • Earn commitment with every bit of effort the user invests in the product. On boarding and beyond
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room listing. On Youtube, it’s a video. On Kickstarter, it’s a project. “Without this core unit of value, the platform has no value at all,”
12. Hang out with people who aren't looking for shortcuts. Learn from them. 13. Make money in the small and then relentlessly scale. 14. Don’t chase yesterday’s online fad. 15. Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find under used resources and to spot patterns.
Carry on by designing how this interaction will happen on your platform. The important things to determine: who is creating value? Who is consuming it? Then comes the time to think about technology. The only part technology plays is it scales the interaction at a global level.
Building Platforms - “Pull, facilitate, and match.” Platforms allow people to create and consume value or, in other words, “share” value. “In this model, the business acts as an infrastructure where external parties create value and external parties consume value. The business manages the interactions between these two sides. How platforms are traditional industries
disrupting
1. “They remove gatekeepers”
inefficient
–
Governing through rules Once you’ve pulled together the two sides and enabled interaction between them, the challenge then becomes how to facilitate this interaction. “What kinds of people are allowed on the platform? How do we know what’s allowed and what’s not?
Crowdsourcing Elements Social Elements Financial products are similar to health products. They require some privacy. The product is inherently not “social”
Platforms solve inefficiency by providing solutions that allow businesses to scale fast.
Community Building Product Churn
2. “They unlock new sources of value” –
Every churned customer is a new customer you’ll have to acquire just to get back to even. When you look at a successful subscription service like Netflix or Hulu, you might find a churn rate of 2-5% per month, and you can calculate the annual churn through the following:
some industries have privileged access to supply.
3. “They aggregate fragmented and inefficient markets” Enabling interaction
Annual Churn = (1+monthly_churn)^12 –1
Never start with the technology. He says some businesses think technology is the end-product. “It’s the easiest way to fail. What is important is to focus on interaction that you’re going to enable between users.”
2% monthly churn = (1+0.02)^12 = 26% annual churn 5% monthly churn = (1+0.05)^12 = 79% annual churn
Start by thinking of a core unit of value they want exchanged. On Airbnb, it’s a
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Successful public SaaS companies try to keep their monthly churn under 2%. With most subscription products, the more you improve your product, the lower your churn.
Product Death Cycle
Next Feature Fallacy
1) No one uses our product The natural state of any new product is that no one’s using it :) So that’s not a problem in itself. However, the way you react to this problem is what causes the Product Death Cycle.
For people who love to build product, when something’s not working, it’s tempting to simply build more product. It leads to the launch-fail-relaunch-cycle. The Next Feature Fallacy strikes because it’s easy to build new features that don’t target the important parts. Two mistakes are often made when designing features meant to bend this engagement curve:
2) Ask customers what features are missing Users who love your product now may not represent the much larger market of nonusers who’ve never experienced it. So the feedback you get might be skewed towards a niche group, and the features they suggest may not be mainstream
1. Too few people will use the feature. In particular, that the features target engaged/retained users rather than nonusers and new users. 2. Too little impact is made when they do engage. Especially the case when important/key functions are displayed like optional actions outside of the on boarding process.
User research is great for coming up with design problems, but you can’t expect users to come up with their own design solutions. That’s your job! They may be stuck in a certain paradigm and won’t have the tools/skills to come up with their own solutions. Faster horses and all that “What features are missing?” assumes that just adding more features will somehow fix the problem. But there are many, many other reasons why your product may not be working- maybe the pricing is wrong. Or it’s not being marketed well, the activation is broken, or the positioning sucks, etc.
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The interface used by assistant-as-app services is an effective way to help people get more out of the Internet. Since it looks like a chat, interactions feel familiar. As I mentioned in a previous post, people don’t want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently (see the California Roll Rule).
Instead of asking for what’s missing, instead the solution is to ask- what is the root cause of users not using the product? Where’s the fundamental bottleneck? 3) Build the missing features The second jump in the Product Death Cycle is to take features that customers have suggested, and just build the missing features. However, this quickly falls into the Next Feature Fallacy
The power of the conversational interface is that it shields the end user from having to learn anything new. We already know how to chat, so making requests is easy. An assistant-as-app leverages well-trained human assistants to use complex technology behind the scenes. The assistant can process requests that would otherwise require several steps, complex analysis, or pro tools the layperson is unlikely to have the knowledge or patience to use
If the new features are meant to target the core experience, it’s important that they really improve the majority workflows within the UI, otherwise people won’t use them enough to change their engagement levels. To break out of this part of the Product Death Cycle, ask yourself- is this enough of a change to influence the experience? Is it far enough “up the funnel” to impact the leakiest parts of the product experience? Is this just another cool feature that only a small % of users will experience?
•
App makers are returning to the roots of what our phones are for. They are after all communications devices. • “assistant-as-app” to help users accomplish complex tasks conversational interface • One of the biggest things that need to be established by assistant as an app services is trust and confidence before they can be helpful. What is it Good for?
Ask “why?” over and over, to understand the root cause for lack of growth. The response to these root causes should consist of a large toolkit of responsesmaybe marketing: Pricing, positioning, distribution, PR, content marketing, etc. Maybe it has to do with the strategy: Going high-end instead of low-end. Building a utilitarian product instead of a network-based one, or vice versa. The point is, the solution should be tailored to the root cause, rather than to be explicitly driven by the desire of every product team to build more products.
•
•
Assistant-As-App “assistant-as-app” to mean: an interface designed to enable users to accomplish complex tasks through a natural dialogue with an assistant.
Jay Ng, CMT
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When There’s One Goal and Too Many Options. It should be noted that an assistant-as-app is not ideal for situations when the user enjoys browsing or where the best option is subjective. When Data Collection is Easy but Analysis is Hard. An assistant-asapp is particularly good at offloading the burden of analysis. In addition to complex interfaces, assistant-as-app services are particularly well-suited for small screens. When it Feels Like a Friend. Working with an assistant through 27 December, 2015
a conversational interface should feel like interacting with a friend. These apps work best when the user trusts the assistant’s unbiased recommendations. However, if a friend was chatting you up to make a buck, you’d quickly see through the scheme. Similarly, an assistant-as-app is best suited for subscription models where the value lies in being an objective filter. Another friend-like characteristic of an assistant-asapp has to do with the pace of the interaction. When sending a friend a text, you’d expect to wait a while before they respond. Likewise, conversational apps are for when you need something soon but not immediately. Since culling the right options, running test, or analysing data takes time, assistants are not well suited to provide instant feedback.
The steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users. What’s your viral media? The first (and last) choice you have to make is where people are going to receive an entryway into your viral loop. That might be email, Facebook newsfeed, or blogs. The main factors to evaluate here are how difficult it is to integrate your entryway into their surface, and the response rate. The first factor, integration, is obviously important because a difficult integration means that perhaps fewer people will see your messages, or your messages will be filtered out altogether. The second factor, response rate, depends on how in your face your messages are (think Facebook invites versus email spam), and how competitive the medium is. Obviously, viral marketing is about a compounding viral growth rate, and if your response rates are low, that will mean a huge difference in outcomes.
Virality • • • • • • • •
Did you sufficiently cover the topic? Is it long enough? Does the content inspire a highenergy emotion like awe, anger, or anxiety? Did your tone convey emotion? Is it practically useful? Is it interesting? Is it surprising? Does the author have fame/credibility Is it actually funny?
What’s your funnel design? First off, you want it to be as accessible as possible, since each page is a barrier you’re asking your users to leap over. So if you can make it very short – 23 pages at most – with progressive commitment of personal information, you’ll get further along in your design. And obviously, you’d ideally want to test for drop-off at each point, and optimize each step as if it were a landing page.
The Viral Loop What’s a “viral loop?” “The viral loop of people inviting each other to most social networks revolves around a user posting a widget to their page and having friends see their page.
What’s the viral hook in your product? Another important choice is product, of course. At the end of the day, a bad product can adversely affect your viral experience, because a poor slideshow (or a widget that no one wants) will lead to very few embeds. So picking something that is either a deep personal expression (music, avatars, slideshows, celebrity posters, etc.) or a communication
The viral loops for Facebook (there are multiple) revolve around the news feed, the minifeed and the invite request. Not around people coming to your page and interacting with it” Jay Ng, CMT
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mechanism (voice messages, text, etc.) are all great for getting people to WANT to put the apps on their homepages.
At 12-point size, Arial was preferred and Times New Roman was the least preferred.
What are the onramps to your viral loops? Once you’re done with a very tight viral loop, then it’s time to create the on ramps. In this case, you are looking at places like your website homepage, paid advertising, traditional marketing campaigns, SEO, etc., to create places where users can discover your viral loop and begin the process.
The preferred font overall was Verdana, and Times New Roman was the least preferred. For easiest online reading, use Arial 12point size and larger. If you're going smaller than 12 points, Verdana at 10 points is your best choice. If you're after a formal look, use the font "Georgia." And for older readers, use at least a 14-point font.
Tagged.com has a fascinating one to analyze, since they won’t even let you use the website without entering in your email address book information. Definitely check out that one. They definitely short circuit the entire viral process by turning it from: Register > Use Product > Evaluate Product > Tell friends to: Register > Tell friends > Use Product > Evaluate Product
Typography Serifs Serifs are easy to understand and typically used in print media. Popular serif fonts are Times New Roman, Palatino, Georgia, Courier, Bookman and Garamond. San-serifs are typically for online media. Some popular San Serif fonts are Helvetica, Arial, Calibri, Century Gothic and Verdana. The most legible fonts were Arial, Courier, and Verdana. At 10-point size, participants preferred Verdana. Times New Roman was the least preferred.
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[Title: Chief Growth Hacker]
Jay Ng, CMT
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business name. For example instead of commenting as John Smith, you should comment as John Smith @ MyCompany.com which then appears for all other viewers of the content to see.
Sales and Marketing Growth Hacking Tactics Email Signature Hack Include information at the bottom of all outgoing employee emails about your company such as company name, url and value proposition. Most email clients allow for an email signature of some kind.
Simply get into the habit of writing Name @ Company when entering your username on different social platforms. Back To Home Hack Add a clear link either at the top or bottom of your company blog, linking to the main product homepage.
Go to your email client’s settings page and tweak the signature. Make sure to include a call-to-action which could be simply your company’s url or a link that says “Click for more information”.
Edit the HTML of your blog template to include a link to your main product homepage either at the top or bottom of the page, or both.
We Can’t Go Back Jack Hack On the signup page for your product, disable or remove all navigational elements that would enable a user to go back to the previous page. Includes disabling your site logo, which is often linked to the homepage.
An alternative tactic is to try to capture a user’s email address in order to add them to a drip campaign Open Graph Image Hack When a user shares content on Facebook, special meta tags
Use CSS to hide navigational elements and use Javascript to disable links to other pages on the signup page.
are used to determine how the content is displayed in a user’s feed. These tags determine the specific image for the content that appears on Facebook, the title that gets used, the summary text etc. Use these meta tags to specify a sizeoptimized photo for Facebook.
Hashtag All The Things Hack Use relevant hashtags in all social media activity Screencast Hack For new users, show a video tutorial of how to use your product. Keep the video short and concise. If you are not comfortable using your own voice there are products like VoiceBunny where you can hire professional voice actors in a marketplace-style platform
Facebook has documentation on how to use these special tags, called Open Graph meta tags. Using them is simply a case of including the right tags in the head of your page. To preview how your content will look when posted to Facebook you can use Facebook’s open graph content debugging tool, also known as the Facebook Linter.
Survey Hack Conducting a survey is simple with tools like Surveymonkey. My Name is Company Hack Whenever you create content anywhere on the web such as writing comments, participating in forums etc., add your
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Hidden Pricing Hack Do not show your product pricing up front, until it is clear what the value proposition is. Instead encourage users to try your product for free, before making it clear there is a price for more functionality or to continue using. Hiding pricing as an effective growth strategy is not as simple as just removing pricing from the public facing marketing material. The key is introducing pricing at the right point in the user lifecycle, when they understand the value of your product. For example:
Power of 9 Hack When setting prices, use numbers that end in 9, such as 19, 29, 59 etc. Guarantee Hack Offer a “money back guarantee” on your product and display it prominently. Price Hike Hack Increase the prices of your product A useful barometer is to use the 10x pricing methodology. This states that whatever price you are charging you should aim to provide at least 10 times more value to the customer - thus making your solution an attractive alternative to performing the task manually. For example, if your software costs $50 per month, it should ideally help customers to save $500 worth of their time per month.
• Just after the user has received a benefit and wants to receive again • Just before the user is about to receive an expected benefit The As Seen On TV Hack Add to your homepage logos of media outlets that have mentioned or written about you. Arguably, any mention by a media outlet gives you enough of a pretext to use the term “as seen on”. Create some great, trending content that gets referenced by a popular media outlet.
Lottery Hack When you have a promotion or a new product, get your twitter followers to tweet about it by incentivizing the tweet with a prize. The prize is then awarded to one retweeter chosen at random after the campaign ends. The lottery system is perhaps the least engaging way to use social media for promotion. Only one person reaps the benefit, which can discourage people from participating unless the prize is highly valuable.
• Create some controversy that is covered by a popular media outlet • Guest post on a popular media outlet Fast Form Hack Remove unnecessary form elements on a signup form. Remove unnecessary fields in the HTML and at the database / model level remove the validation requirements for these fields to be filled. After the user’s email has been captured, your product can request the other fields to be filled in order to fully activate the account.
Chat Show Hack Conduct Skype interviews with influential people in your industry and write it up as marketing content for your blog. Identifying the right influencers is the challenge. Super famous people will likely be too busy to be interviewed, but moderately famous people might have the free time and also the motivation to market themselves more and thus agree to an interview.
Jay Ng, CMT
No Free Plan For You Hack If your product has a free version or free tier, remove it. Where freemium does not work as well is when it is feature-limited i.e. users can freely use your product forever
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and try to get influential people in your industry to retweet or post the links on their blogs.
with some feature limitations, until they decide to upgrade to the full version Powered By… Hack Include a small logo graphic or a “powered by…” link on any piece of publicly-facing content your user creates. Edit the HTML template for your user generated content to include a logo or “powered by…” link at the bottom of the page. Instead of simply a logo or “powered by…” link try a call to action that states your value proposition too. For example, if you are an ecommerce marketplace you might try something like “Sell your products easily on FooBar.com”.
Competition Hack Offer a prize in exchange for participation of some kind. For example tweeting about you, creating some sort of content, or simply a lottery-style lucky draw. The challenge with competitions is getting people to participate. Participation will rely not only on your incentive (i.e. the prize offered) but also how high the barrier to entry is and whether there is any benefit for just participating. The best competitions will provide participants with some kind of reward simply for participating, for example:
Case Study Hack Include case studies on your site describing how real people or real businesses use your product and what benefits they receive.
• Making the participant appear socially responsible • Making the participant appear creative
There are always chicken-egg problems to overcome with this tactic. In other words, you need customers to get case studies, but you need case studies to get customers. Many start-ups overcome this by getting the support of their other startup / business-owning friends to base case studies on.
• Making the participant appear exclusive White Paper Hack Create a white paper on your industry and give it away for free. For content, you can try focusing on two types:
Comment Marketing Hack Write authoritative blog comments on popular blog posts.
1. How to-style guides for your industry 2. Industry statistics
The Distributor Hack For every piece of original content you create, have a list of relevant places on the web where you share the content.
You are Mine Now Hack For a first-time user, capture the close window action and make an offer to the user. Possible to capture the beforeunload event in jQuery, which allows you to fire an action when the user closes the window or tab, but before the window itself actually closes.
Subreddits and forums related to your industry are one place to start. Be warned though that most communities will frown on blatant spamming of your links mitigate this by using your content as an opener for a discussion (which you then participate in) rather than just posting the link and leaving. You can also reach out
Jay Ng, CMT
Exit Offer Hack! Convince users who are cancelling their account to stay by offering them a price reduction.
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Infographic Hack Create an informative and well-designed infographic related to your industry.
Exit Guilt Trip Hack Convince users who cancelled their account to reactivate it with a guilt trip or some creativity.
Infographic outsourcing companies exist, who will assemble data into infographics for a few hundred dollars. Alternatively you can produce infographics in house, which may take more time and money. Success is not guaranteed with either approach like content marketing in general, the success of infographics relies not only on the quality of content itself, but on your ability to find an audience for it.
Choice Paradox Hack When offering a choice to users, try to give as few choices as possible. Pricing plans can often be eliminated based on data. After some initial customer acquisition you will know which of your plans is the most popular, which bring in the most revenue - removing the worstperforming plans is then a fairly straightforward exercise.
Invite Only Hack Instead of allowing anyone to sign up for your product, make your product “by invite only”. This means a user would have to be invited by another user to gain entry.
Image Sharing Hack Put a sharing link not only on your blog posts, but on the visuals embedded in your blog content
The invite-only tactic works best when there is a justifiable purpose behind it.
This can be implemented by adding a plugin to your blog. If you use jQuery, a plugin called Slingpic can help you achieve this.
Invite-only for the sake of exclusivity alone will not convince users it is worth trying to get an invite.
About Page Hack Find pages on your site that you typically do not focus on optimizing, which get a large amount of traffic, and optimize
Justifications can include: • Exclusive discount deals that by nature cannot be extended to the public
Try adding a relevant call to action on these pages. For example on an “About” page you might say something like:
• Complex software architecture that cannot deal with unpredictable influxes of users
“Now you have met the team, try out our product! Sign Up Now”
• A revolutionary new product that needs to be tested with a small initial group
Floating Share Bar Hack Put social sharing tools on your blog posts that “follow” the user as they scroll down the page
Little Bighorn Hack Instead of going directly after a difficult-to reach primary target market, aim for an adjacent target market that is easier to access.
This can be implemented by adding a plugin to your blog. If you use jQuery, a plugin called floatShare can help you achieve this.
Jay Ng, CMT
Network effects then cause the primary target market to become accessible through the adjacent market.
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Look for smaller adjacent markets to your primary target market that may be easier to reach.
This is achieved via Javascript and most mature frameworks such as jQuery have plugins to support this behaviour.
Headline Hack At the top of your homepage you probably have some kind of headline that describes your product in big text. This is used to give visitors an immediate idea of what your product does. This headline should be tested to find the version of text that works the best at getting users to sign up.
Notes Overlays can be a polarizing tool to use. On the one hand they can be effective for capturing user emails or introducing users to an offer that they may have otherwise not seen. On the other hand they can be disruptive to users whose primary intent was to view your content, not to sign up for your newsletter or register for your site. Like some other tactics this is one where you must consider the business benefit along with degradation in general user experience.
Use an A/B testing tool to show visitors different versions of your headline (try testing 3 variations at first) and see which version results in an increased signup rate. There are many copywriting articles on the web with suggestions on how to capture interest with a homepage headline. You can find ideas on copywriting blogs or by googling headline formulas. One common tactic is to use the
Share The Good News Hack At a point in the user lifecycle where a user has enjoyed utility or value from your product, prompt them to share your product with friends either via email or social media. encouraging a user to share is best executed when a user has received value, rather than for example encouraging a user to share immediately after signup.
format: [Do something desirable] in [surprisingly small amount of time or effort] For example:
Try encouraging a user to share on social after they have created their first piece of content or after they are actively using your product.
• Become a certified SEO consultant in just 7 days • Learn to play the piano in just minutes per day
Notes FarmVille and other social games frequently use various mechanics and psychological tricks in order to access a user’s friend list or network. For example, sharing an (sometimes rather contrived) achievement, offering more virtual currency, or the rather clever “send a gift to a friend”.
• Send a press release in just one click Roadblock Hack Often on blogs or online media you will experience an overlay pop-up encouraging you to add your email to a mailing list, or register for the site to receive some other benefit. The overlay appears over the content, forcing you to either read the overlay or close it.
Jay Ng, CMT
Pay With a Tweet Hack Give away a freebie (extra functionality, free shipping, and extension of trial) but instead of asking for an email address,
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according to a query string parameter. The latter is easier to manage than the former, when rolling out many alternative landing pages.
ask users to pay by tweeting a link to your site. Services exist to help you execute these types of campaigns. The straightforwardlynamed site Pay With a Tweet is a product that helps clients manages this.
Landlord Hack On a user-generated content product that reviews people, companies or products often a placeholder page will be created for each entity. For example on a site that reviews local businesses, a placeholder page would be automatically created for each local business in a given area, before that local business actually creates it themselves.
Notes As with The Queue Jumper technique, this mechanic has a weakness - if users simply delete the tweet after receiving the benefit (perhaps to avoid being seen as a conduit for advertising), the impact of the campaign is lost. To avoid this situation, a campaign manager must think creatively. The golden rule is to make the user look good in some way such as:
Seeding content is technically a simple process. One example of implementation would be to create an excel file of data (for example local business data) which can be outsourced or created by interns / part time staff. Once the excel file is ready, it can be imported to your production database via a custom script.
• Try to make the user appear attractive. • Try to make the user appear funny or creative. • Try to make the user appear exclusive or important.
Notes Although not illegal this tactic can be frowned upon. In extreme cases it is viewed as a form of extortion, for example where a popular product refuses to display positive reviews of a local business unless that business claims the page by paying for a premium account.
Social content of the above nature is more likely to be kept in the user’s social stream rather than deleted out of embarrassment. Scent Hack When a user clicks on a specific ad or call to action, preserve the message of the ad in the landing page the user arrives at. For example if a user clicks on an ad that says “Get 60% off Women's Running Shoes” they should be taken to a landing page that says “Get 60% off Women's Running Shoes”, rather than say, a generic landing page that says “Get up to 70% off your favourite brands now”.
Human Pyramid Hack When you have a promotion or a new product, get your twitter following to tweet about it by incentivizing them with a countdown or a countup of some kind – for every retweet the campaign page gets, the counter increments by 1. If it reaches a certain goal, you unlock an additional special promotion for all. For example, an ecommerce store might use The Human
The simplest way is to have multiple landing pages and be mindful of which landing page you are pointing users to when building your ads or links. Beyond this, you can build dynamic pages – single pages that swap out visuals or text
Jay Ng, CMT
Pyramid hack to run a campaign whereby if 1000 people tweet about your summer sale, everyone gets free shipping. Group
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Official APIs exist for most mature social platforms to allow this sort of functionality. In the case of AirBnB however, Craigslist had no official API that allowed posting. The team essentially reverse-engineered their own API allowing automated posting. Another word for this would be an exploit.
participation towards a common goal that benefits everyone is a better use of group psychology than The Lottery, which simply plays on an individual’s desire to win something for themselves Queue Jumper Hack Membership waiting list can be skipped via social sharing. Users are freely able to sign up but upon signing up a user enter a waiting list (sometimes their waiting list number is show, sometimes it is not) and the user is encouraged to “bump” their place up in the queue by inviting their friends or sharing the page via social media.
Notes There are two main risks involved in doing what AirBnB did. • Legal risk. Often this type of action goes against the terms of service of the 3rd party. • Time investment risk. Platforms are not static, they are always changing. The 3rd party could either change something on their platform therefore unknowingly breaking your exploit, or they could deliberately change something on their platform in order to disable the exploit.
The waiting list functionality itself could be achieved with a cron job that simply runs every hour or day and updates a small batch of users to an upgraded status. As with The Human Pyramid, the social sharing component will need Twitter / Facebook API integration to function properly. A user would click a button which would post to their social accounts and they would be moved up the queue in your database.
Poke Poke Poke Hack When signed up to a social networking platform, a user tags or adds a label to another user or a piece of content related to another user.
Notes
This in turn sends a notification which prompts the other user to verify the content.
One caveat with any kind of social sharing mechanic is that the user can simply delete any content posted from your system, after they receive the benefit (such as jumping the queue). This negates the point of asking them to share. While it is technically possible to check for this behaviour via social APIs and penalize users who do this, it is an added layer of complexity for what may for you just be a minor edge case.
Attaching a sendout of an email when an action happens on a platform is a fairly common pattern. Most modern frameworks have hooks or callbacks for this. Note Notifications can quickly become overwhelming for users. Although a basic system might send one notification per action, an evolved and perhaps more elegant system would either send a summary or allow the user granular
Multi Post Hack When a user creates content on your platform, you give them the option to post the same content to other social networks with just one click.
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control over which notifications receive and which they do not.
they
Winback Hack Send an automated email to inactive users and incentivize them to return to your site.
Timebomb Hack At any stage where a user must make some kind of critical decision such as a purchase, set a time limit for them and display it visually in a countdown.
Your customer database will need to keep a record of the last time a user logged in. If you are using a mature authentication system such as Devise for Ruby on Rails, this should already be taken care of for you. Once that data is being recorded, a simple winback campaign can be implemented by automatically sending a promotional email to those users who have not logged in for 30 days. You can test this threshold, earlier or later may work better for you. The contents of the email itself could be a discount coupon, a seasonal promotion or simply telling the user about activity that’s been happening on their account since they last logged in.
The visual counter can be achieved with Javascript, for which there are various countdown plugins available for frameworks such as jQuery. Integrating the counter with a backend callback when the counter reaches zero are the harder part of implementing this, but you may find this level of integration is unnecessary in the beginning. The point of the counter is more a pressure tactic to finish an action, not to penalize users if the time does actually run out.
Notes
Notes
The best types of winback campaigns are highly personalized to the user you are trying to win back. Although this can be difficult to implement, by nature a winback campaign is often your last chance at communicating with a user before they unsubscribe from your emails, so it is prudent to put in as much effort as possible in bringing them back to your site.
Pressure can backfire. Give your users too little time and you may frustrate some of them into closing the window or going elsewhere. On the other hand give them too much time and the motivational effect of this tactic is lessened. Almost There Hack Often you will want a user to complete a few actions after signing up such as upload a profile picture, fill out their profile, follow some other users etc. Indicate to users how many actions they have completed and how many are left, with a progress bar or checklist.
Decoy Pricing Hack When presenting a set of price packages to a user, include one price that is there as a decoy in order to encourage users to purchase one of the other packages. For example given three prices A, B and C you might make C disproportionately more expensive than A and B, to give the appearance that A and B are cheap by comparison. This is also known as Price Anchoring.
You will need to decide in advance what user actions you want to include as part of the user’s progress bar. After that it is simply a case of doing some conditional checks and displaying the progress bar accordingly with an inline style to alter the length depending on what a user has completed.
Jay Ng, CMT
A good example of price anchoring in practice was tested by Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational. He tested the
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following price packages for The Economist with 100 students from MIT.
Unboxing Hack For companies shipping physical goods, make your unboxing experience unique or personal.
Test Group A • Web subscription $59
Customers are more likely share unboxing videos when there is something unique or personalized about your packaging or product. Make sure that users know up front to expect a surprise. You can try to incentivize unboxing by offering prizes or simply telling users a special hashtag to use when unboxing.
• Print subscription $59 • Print & Web subscription $125 Test Group B • Web subscription $59 • Print & Web subscription $125
Vanity Hack At any point a user accomplishes a goal or reaches a milestone in your app, give them the opportunity to share (or brag) about it on their social networks.
The package that resulted in the most revenue was the 3rd choice in Test Group A. Nobody chose the 2nd choice in Test Group A. That was simply there as a price anchor, to psychologically reinforce what a better deal the 3rd choice was.
Think about the milestones a user could pass while using your product and productize them into a sharing event. This does not need to be complicated, a javascript overlay and some default social media sharing buttons will suffice with a strong call to action.
Optimizing your pricing is something you should A/B test as opposed to making blind changes. You can use an A/B testing tool to create multiple versions of your pricing page in order to test the best combination of prices and whether or not price anchoring works for you.
Intro Video Hack Create a short introduction video of your product in action and put it at the top of your homepage.
Webinar Hack Hold an online streaming web conference in which you teach something useful to an audience, as well as introduce your product.
In general a video of this type will need to introduce the viewer to the problem and then introduce the solution. Short videos with simple narration / text overlays work best. If yours is a web app these often do not transfer well to video, so you may choose to express your solution in a more visual way, for example with animation / VFX, rather than showing the product itself.
Choose an interesting topic that will teach your prospective customers something. Prepare in advance and make sure your dialogue is entertaining and educational. Do not simply read off slides. The webinar itself can be streamed via a free service. You will also need to promote your webinar in advance in order to sign up interested viewers - these can be captured via your website, a partner, ads etc.
Jay Ng, CMT
Aha Moment Hack Finding the moment in your user’s early lifecycle where they finally understand the benefit, and then optimize towards this moment.
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One Time Offer Hack For first time visitors to your site, make them an exclusive offer that expires soon.
Finding the Aha Moment is an exercise in looking at data and also making qualitative observations. Face to face user testing can be helpful here but data will help make final decisions. Essentially you will need to look at the data for unengaged users and compare it to that of engaged users. You will need to look for differences, perhaps a step that was or was not completed, early activity levels, how long it took them to perform an action, to name just a few.
Users should not see this offer if they come back to the site at a later time (since this defeats the purpose of the offer urgency) so your site will need to store a cookie when the user arrives on the site. Your site will then know that anyone without the cookie is therefore a first-time user and the offer should be shown. Subsequently, users with the cookie should not be shown the offer.
High Score List Hack Display some kind of leaderboard of top users in your product.
Annual Upgrade Hack Offer engaged users an annual upgrade in a discounted one time- only offer.
The most basic form of score is “number of times a user has performed X action”. This kind of data is simple to turn into
A simple way to implement this tactic is to simply send the customer an email upon their 3rd payment (we assume a customer who has used the app for 3 months is engaged) with the annual upgrade offer. Alternatively if you want to keep the offer more exclusive, a filter can be applied where you do not send the email to all customers at the 3 month mark, but instead send to a subset - for example customers at the 3 month mark who have fulfilled certain amounts of activity criteria.
a leaderboard. Other examples might be rankings (e.g. how highly-voted a user or object is) or some kind of arbitrary scoring like the Klout score. Auto Follow Hack Automatically follow popular accounts on behalf of new users. Before you have critical mass, you can try simply auto-following popular users (but giving an easy opt-out). Once more mass is achieved, you can switch to an opt-in method where you give users recommendations and allow them to follow the ones they like.
Horoscope Hack Ask a user a series of questions and define their personality based on the answers. Picking the subject is a challenge, but a good base template is the aforementioned “Which ____ are you?”. From there you will need to decide what has the right combination of relevance to your target audience plus quirkiness / humor potential to maximize the resultant social sharing. Creating the horoscope-style quiz itself is a fairly simple exercise – a number of plugins for jQuery exist for this purpose, such as SlickQuiz.
Thundercats Ho Hack At a specific point in the user’s early lifecycle, encourage them to invite other users if there is some collaborative benefit. Hold off from asking users to invite collaborators until after the value proposition is clear to the user. The user must know that inviting collaborators is something that benefits them, not something that benefits your product with an expanded user base.
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network, not all of the content is viewable until a user registers.
Negative Follow Up Hack Send an automatic email to users who did not buy your product and ask them why.
Most mature CMS platforms such as Wordpress have a “paywall” plugin. These plugins disable posts that are of a certain age or over, allowing them to only be seen by users who have registered or paid. A variation of this is allowing users to freely browse all content until a certain milestone is reached, for example after viewing 5 articles freely a user must register to view a 6th.
You can simply use any email marketing software to send a drip campaign a few days after a user’s free trial ends. A good format is a personal-looking email from a real person (e.g. a founder) asking why the user did not upgrade and that you value their feedback. The desired outcome is that the user simply replies to the email, giving the founder qualitative feedback and the opportunity to open a dialogue if necessary.
Notes Google penalizes products that use CSS / Javascript to hide content or products that are open to search engines but dynamically require signup before a human can view all the content. Some products get around this by showing a (subjectively) useful amount of content before hiding the rest. In Q&A site Quora’s case, the product shows the first and most highly-voted answer of the question thread.
Notes This is one of my first recommendations to all start-ups. Talking to customers who did not purchase can reveal so much, for example (all real-life examples): • Product did not have X critical feature • Did not understand how to use product • Did not even get past the on boarding
• Did not want to pay with PayPal
Content Seeding Hack For a user-generated content site, add content yourself that looks as though it was created by other users.
• Was waiting until start of month to begin subscription
There are a few different levels of content seeding.
• Waiting for purchase approval from higher up
• Founders or employees operate fake accounts in order to create content.
And many others. Some of these are an opportunity to think about how to improve your product. Others are indicators that the user is still in the sales funnel and that you probably should remind them at a later point. It is all incredibly useful information that you would never have gathered without a follow-up email.
• Friends and family members are asked to create accounts in order to create content.
• Could not find the buy button
• Widespread outsourced content creation - many outsourcing companies offer this kind of product for a fee. Automated content creation automatically importing content from somewhere else and making it appear as your own, but with a link to the source.
Teaser Hack When a new user comes across your product via a search engine or a social
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2. Find a person within the company who you want to contact. You will need their first and last name.
Remarketing Tag Hack Add a remarketing tag to the header of your site before you even start remarketing.
3. Send an email to the company contact form with a general inquiry
There are a number of remarketing platforms but in the case of Google Adwords, to implement the remarketing tag it is simply a case of copy pasting a tag into the header of your site. After this point you will begin to build a remarketing audience automatically, as people visit your site.
4. Receive the response and note the format of the sender’s email address 5. Use the format of the email address to directly email your desired contact. For example for a person called Joe Brown, the format could be joebrown@company.com, jbrown@company.com,
Two Way Incentive Hack Offer a user an incentive for inviting a friend, and offer the friend an incentive for signing up.
joe@company.com, joe.brown@company.com etc.
Although not technically difficult to implement at a basic level, if money (or discounts etc.) are involved you will need measures in place to mitigate abuse. For example:
Pre-filled Form Hack Wherever possible, pre-fill form fields with information if you have it at hand. Prefilling a users email address. For example, a user has subscribed to your marketing emails (perhaps an online course, or news updates) but has not yet signed up for your product itself. When they decide to sign up, they click a link in the email that brings them to a form where their email is already pre-filled. This can be achieved since you already know their email, which can be appended to the signup link via a url parameter and then added to the form.
• Tokens that expire so invitees cannot sign up over and over again to receive the reward multiple times. • Verifications to check that emails are valid and not being faked. • IP checking to make sure the inviter and the invitee are from different • IPs and not simply the same person creating multiple accounts in order to receive the rewards.
Prefilling a location / country, based on the detected geolocation of the user. There are 3rd party APIs available to get a users country and city based on IP. However you do not have to use a 3rd party, you can install IP tables (these can be found for free) into your database and do the lookup yourself, which can be faster. Or if you are using a framework such as Ruby on Rails you can install something like GeoKit which will provide you with an internal API to use for geolocation.
Email Detective Hack If you are in business development, do not be dissuaded by not knowing an email address of a prospect. There are quick ways to find out or guess. Follow these steps to guess the email of a specific person within a company. 1. Find a company you want to contact
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• Answer the user’s key questions (e.g. does this product do X?)
Thank You Hack Send amazing thank you letters to special customers
• Encourage users to get through the on boarding process
You can automate this kind of interaction, for example if you are an ecommerce store, sending an automatic email a week after a customer has received their first order. Alternatively while you cannot send personal messages to everyone, you can segment your database and send personal thank yous to customers who fit certain criteria for example:
Polyglot Hack Translate your site into other languages. Roughly speaking you have three options when it comes to top-down translation: • Translation by a professional agency • Crowdsourced translation. This can be via a paid service such as Gengo or a free implementation such as the Facebook example.
• Customers who spent over a certain amount • Customers who live within a certain distance (to keep postal costs down)
• Machine translation.
• Customers who have a presence on social media
Implementing multiple languages in your product is most likely a solved problem if you are using a mature web framework. Language/locale support is an out of the box feature for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.
Notes This type of interaction works best when it is personalized and not automated. While an automated strategy could produce positive ROI, it is also easily detected by users. The purpose here is not simply to say thank you, but to establish a personal relationship with the customer which does not translate well to automation. Although clunky and analogue, a handwritten note is an order of magnitude more personal than an automatic email.
Multi API Hack Integrate with multi-API platforms such as Zapier or IFTTT. Getting on these platforms generally requires a manual approval process and your product will need to have an API for the platform to use before you begin. At a bare minimum your product will need to output some kind of RSS or JSON feed for the platform to query.
Welcome Email Hack Send a welcome email to users after they sign up, in order to orient them with your product.
Automatic Content Hack Use your data to automatically create many pages of content
Sending a user an email after an event like signup is a feature provided by most web frameworks. The key to the success of your welcome email will be the content. At the very least you should seek to:
Think about how your data can be grouped into subsets to create more search engine landing pages, for example categories, locales, prices etc.
• Provide support contact channels to the user
Jay Ng, CMT
Notes
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Simply creating hundreds of automatically generated pages is most likely a recipe for getting penalized by Google.
can be packaged into a template. Then put this on your site as a free PDF (or excel etc.) download.
Celebrity Endorsement Hack Engage a celebrity or blogger to endorse your product e.g. talk about it on their blog, make a youtube video for it or be seen with the product on Instagram etc.
Register to Save Hack Instead of getting users to sign up in order to use a product, only ask users for their email after they have gone through some steps to create a piece of content or perform a task.
Talk with a blogger agency operating in the market you want to target.
Try to think of a creative, fun way for users to experience your product, before asking them for their email address. This can apply for products based on:
Notes Although this is a form of paid advertising, it can be unpredictably awesome.
• Searches e.g. property search websites. Allow users to freely search, then require email for saving of multiple search parameters.
Bundle Hack Partner up and distribute your product as a package, with other products.
• Content creation e.g. blog platforms. Allow users to freely create content until the point they want to save or publish, which requires an email.
You can work with a product that specializes in bundling, or you can partner up and create a bundle yourself - although by doing this you take on the responsibility of marketing the bundle.
• Profiling e.g. dating websites. Allow users to take a quiz to find out more about themselves but only offer the results via email.
Dummy Content Hack When a new user signs up for your product, typically they will have not yet created content meaning their profile page or dashboard etc. is empty. Instead of showing new users an empty page, show them a page filled with dummy or example content.
Event Hack Host an offline event with a theme relevant to your customers. The practical advice here is similar to that of the conference talk tactic. Establish sharing mechanisms like hashtags upfront, and optimize your presentations for social sharing by including soundbites or useful data.
A simple way to implement this is with a graphic. In its early days Basecamp used a static graphic to show a user what example content would look like (with an EXAMPLE watermark overlaid on top). Basecamp has since migrated to the test data-style of on boarding.
Responsive Design Hack Design your landing pages in such a way that they scale gracefully down for mobile devices.
Free Template Hack Offer a downloadable tool or template for users to download free and use.
Responsive design uses CSS features like media queries to tell browsers how to display content at different screen sizes.
Think about your potential customer’s workflow or business activities and what Jay Ng, CMT
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address for a simple, free tool you can justify it in a few different ways:
Most responsive designs are achieved through a creative mix of CSS and some javascript.
• In order to create an account to save their progress
Notes
• In order to send them some kind of output (e.g. a report) that takes time to generate
As with all things on the web, there exists an opposing viewpoint. Some designers believe it is best to keep the design consistent on all devices and simply let mobile users zoom in and out, since they are accustomed to do this anyway.
• In order to get additional features Turbo Hack Increase the speed of your site in various ways.
Widget Hack Add an embeddable widget to your product, allowing users to easily add your content to their own websites or blogs.
Site speed is not an easy thing to tune, but there are some quick wins. At a basic level you can combine and minimize your CSS and Javascript, which results in fewer and faster downloads for your users. Then you can offload serving of all your static files (CSS, Javascript, images, media) to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which will free up your own server resources as well as deliver content faster to your users. These two steps are fairly simple but will result in a noticeable speed increase.
Look for areas where you can enhance a user’s blog using your content somehow. YouTube was popular for this because before YouTube, embedding video on a blog was difficult. Social sharing buttons are popular because they help the 3rd party blog get shared, and therefore more page views. Any embeddable widget should primarily enhance the functionality of the 3rd party website it is being embedded on, and secondarily promote your product.
Beyond this, increasing speed gets more technically involved.
Free Tool Hack Build a free tool that offers some related functionality to your main product offering.
UGC Hack Create a feature on your product that allows users to create and share their own content (User Generated Content).
Building another tool is one of the more extreme forms of growth hacking, since it requires creating a whole new product which means brainstorming, designing, engineering and marketing resources. In other words it is like running a mini startup within a startup and perhaps best suited only to teams that can spare the engineering resources.
If you are running a Wordpress blog you already have the capability for multiple authors with an approval workflow. Invite users to sign up as an author for your blog. Or create a forum or other space where a community can foster, allowing you to cherry-pick and feature the best content on your blog.
To maximize your direct returns from the free tool, think about how you can capture a user’s email address. While some users may be reluctant to give their email
Jay Ng, CMT
Affiliate Program Hack Recruit people who will drive new customers to you for a share of revenue.
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distribution, has a prominent 3rd party integrations listing page that they can list you on, and is not too large of a company such that they may have too many integrators to accept new submissions to the listing page.
Software exists to manage affiliate tracking and commission payments. The success of an affiliate program will depend on your ability to attract high quality affiliates, and also by providing them with resources and tools in order to help them sell.
Notes
Fun Hack Add “fun” elements to your UX.
You can also write up the integration (why, how, what you learned, results) as either a case study or a blog post which will add to your social proof and in general makes for effective content marketing.
While it is difficult to come up with entirely new design patterns such as pull-to refresh, optimizing common design patterns can improve the UX in your product. For example:
White Label Hack White label your platform and offer it to other businesses as a product they can sell as their own.
• Speed up animations. Faster animations (e.g. activity spinners) give the impression to the user that the action is happening faster.
There are many ways to white label and the topic is complex. From a maintenance perspective the easiest form of white labeling is hosted white labeling, where customers go to your partners site or app but in fact the product is being run from the same servers that power your own product. This means that updates or bug fixes only need to be deployed to one set of servers as opposed to across all your partner servers individually.
• Animate in and out, instead of having new items appear out of nowhere. • Avoid UI blocking. This is where a button or an entire app becomes disabled while waiting for a remote response. Liberal Interpretation of the Rules Hack In the early stages of the company, startups often interpret the law loosely. For example knowingly hosting copyrighted content or violating the terms of use of larger companies. History has shown us that while you’re small, take advantage of that fact and do not sweat the rules too much. Note, this is merely an observation, not a recommendation! Integration Partner Hack Integrate your app with another app via their API, and get listed on their site as an integration partner. Choose a partner based on the utility your users would receive plus how good their distribution is. The ideal partner has wide
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Public Presentation •
Ideal length of a presentation is 18 minutes Give presentations at conferences related to your industry. To maximize the impact of your presentations on social media: • Establish an @username early on - try to get people to attribute the username if they decide to tweet anything from your presentation. • Establish some hashtags. The event official hashtag and maybe an industry keyword. • Make sure you include several sexy soundbites in your presentation. The best presenters - politicians, CEOs - know that one key to getting good press exposure is being highly quotable. Try to include memorable one-liners that include some sort of insight. Make it obvious to your audience that this is a soundbite by putting these one liners on their own slide.
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[Email]
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them and 2) asking for feedback. Here are a few ideas:
Email Marketing •
Ideal length of an email subject line is 28-39 characters
•
Send abandoned shopping cart emails. According to Baymard, 68.07 percent of all carts are abandoned. Collect email addresses early in the checkout process so you can ping people who abandon • Send "Are you still interested?" emails. Airbnb is great at this. When you a view a listing but don't book, you get an email the next day asking if you're still interested • Send inactivity emails. If someone has signed up for your product or service, most of the really hard work is done. If a user is inactive, send them a little reminder. RunKeeper and Mint.com have this down pat. • Ask for feedback when people are really done. This information will be incredibly valuable for your business development Email is the perfect way to turn expected problems into simple solutions. Timeliness will drive more revenue than a catchy subject line or a beautifully designed email. Be there when you're needed.
Drip Campaign Upsell Hack Capture a user’s email address via the blog and add it to a drip campaign of free content, ending in an upsell to your paid product. A drip campaign is a series of emails (for example 1 per week for 6 weeks) intended to teach a user something or introduce a user to your product. Most mailing list management software has drip campaign functionality such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact. Your conversion rate will depend on the quality of your drip campaign content, ideally a short but useful course that both teaches the user something new and explains the value of your product. When sending out an email newsletter to customers, test different sending times beforehand and choose the best performing time slot Email marketing software will let you conduct A/B tests on your email newsletters, as well as slice your total list into a smaller list for testing. You will want to test day of the week and time slot for sending. As a benchmark to start with you can try Thursday at 9am. In general it is thought to be less effective to send emails at the very start or very end of the working week - but again, this will depend on your target market.
Transactional emails are opened at up to eight times the rate of promotional email. Receipts are a great place to start. If you're sending someone a receipt, it means the customer has already made a purchase. Here are few ways to make them more valuable:
Craft the perfect welcome email. The goal of a welcome email is to guide users to the next step. Ask yourself, :How can I show the value of my product/service/information as quickly as possible?” Figure out which action gets people hooked and build your welcome email around it. people are kicking the tires all the time without converting. Don't let them leave without 1) incentivizing
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Include a referral code Offer a discount on the next purchase Ask customers to follow you on Twitter, Facebook or your blog
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thought this message was so important or so relevant that they felt the need to pass it on.
Try this tool: http://proleads.io/ 7 Little Known Techniques 1. De-Personalization No personalization personalization.
is
the
“Re:” tells me that this is a reminder — perhaps for something we forgot about (oh shit! Was I supposed to respond to something??) — or it implies that I myself was the originator of this thread. Now I want to pay attention.
new
His subject line is short and casual, and doesn’t sell anything or over-describe — common when we’re eager to explain ALL the exciting benefits of our product or service to a defenseless subscriber.
3. Getting Past Promotions Tab
Noah doesn’t use a greeting, and jumps straight into the message, even starting his copy mid-sentence in the preview text (extremely important as it functions as a 2nd subject line).
1. You MUST mobile-optimize all email campaigns. Mobile can be a huge secret weapon for getting past priority inbox, but only if you create campaigns with a MOBILE-FIRST attitude.
The subject line and its preview text both feel imperfect and casual as if from a friend, not overproofed or premeditated like it’s been through the hands of the entire marketing department.
2. Mobile-based followups Another approach is to do mobile based followup to signup, because remember there’s no promotions inbox on most mail apps.
The NO PERSONALIZATION subject line:
You should use your Welcome email to: 1. Instruct recipients about Priority vs. Promotions Inbox 2. Set expectations about what emails to expect next (“In the next few days, I’ll be sending you some useful information about XYZ, so please look for those emails.”)
– disrupts our natural defenses against marketing, – gets us to complete the key 1st action: CLICK TO OPEN – and gives the email copy a chance to work its magic on us.
3. Use your Thank You page to remind people to look for your Welcome Don’t forget to use your email signup Thank You page to REMIND recent subscribers / signups that you’ve just sent them a confirmation and that they should look for it now. 4. THANK YOU PAGE BONUS TRICK On your Thank You page, you can include a link for Gmail users to go straight to a search for your Welcome email to confirm signup, like this: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/S ENDER%SENDERDOMAIN.com+RESPO NSE+(about:blank)
2. Next-Level Personalization COMPANY / AFFILIATION People respond to company- and affiliation-level personalization because it’s their JOB to pay attention to those keywords, or because they are otherwise dutifully invested. FW: / RE: “Fwd:” and “Re:” are un-marketing at its best. “Fwd:” tells me that the message is from someone we know (not a marketer), who Jay Ng, CMT
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single email into two campaigns — one with the psychological hooks that build desire and interest, and the second with the CTA for them to address the desire / tension you built up in the first email.
4. Pre-targeting and Retargeting Email pre-targeting is another great way to warm up your list for a major, conversion oriented email campaign with before you send the campaign. Here’s how pre-targeting works: 1. Identify your recipient list and export them for specific targeting in paid campaigns thru FB Custom Audiences, Twitter Tailored Audiences, and/or Gmail Adwords 2. Focus ads on brand awareness; do not ever make your campaigns about the “hard sell” 3. Send your email campaign.
6. The “Perfect” Time to Send 1. Send time doesn’t matter (that much). 2. Peak vs Off-Peak Look for the holes in noise, and use those moments to send your most important campaigns. 3. Mobile and “on-the-go”
Here are additional campaign retargeting:
ideas
for
post
7. The 1-2 Punch It doesn’t matter if you start with email and then “remarket” with SMS, or if you start with SMS and then remarket with email — the point here is that we live in a multi channel world with lots of access points.
1. to subscribers who never opened 2. to subscribers who opened but didn’t click your CTA 3. to subscribers who opened MULTIPLE times but didn’t click your CTA
The key to the 1-2 Punch is consistency: • • • • •
4. to subscribers who opened, clicked the CTA but didn’t convert 5. NO cta / soft sell / zero sell Your CTA can vary in its commitment level; it doesn’t have to be a hard sell every time.
same offer same headline same language same CTA one core message that is supported by a chorus in the form of multi-channel followups
For example, “Read the rest of this post,” linking to a piece of content you’ve just published, is a low commitment CTA. By contrast, “Join the annual subscription now” is a high-commitment CTA where the action involves both monetary exchange and an extended time commitment. In some cases, however, it works to completely OMIT the call to action. This means you send a content email or even a teaser / “FYI” email that has no click to a destination. It’s just an FYI. You can also think of this sort of like splitting up a
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[Write] Jay Ng, CMT
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and read more. (Example: Why Is the Web Becoming Less Social? )
Article Writing •
Ideal length of a headline is 6 words • Ideal length of a title tag is 55 characters Write a guest post on a popular blog or news site related to your industry. Pitch them an idea for a post, or even better write it up proactively and pitch it to them. Keep the content informative and interesting
Since using Disqus I have found my comments have increased, and this adds to the blog’s numeric credibility as it displays the number of Twitter retweets. It also allows people to post comments with their social channel IDs rather than just an email. This makes it easy for people to post a comment. Get valuable and in-depth information from the top experts in their field. Forged powerful partnerships with other big names in content areas. Tim found the bloggers online whose audiences he believed would benefit from his content, and then met them and hung out in person. He also did guest posts on blogs that he knew would benefit from his writing. Interview thought leaders.
Blogging •
Ideal length of a headline is 6 words • Ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words • Photo-heavy post could bring the average down closer to 1,000 • Longer posts on their blog get linked to more often • Ideal length of a title tag is 55 characters Attention quantification on the social web (where you can display such things as the number of Facebook likes, blog subscribers and Twitter followers) provides numeric credibility that gets notice and attention.
When writing blog content, reference or mention influential bloggers in your industry then reach out to them after publishing. Once you have found influential bloggers or twitter users in your industry, always be on the lookout for content by them that you have a strong opinion on. Writing a genuine, interesting counter argument or supporting argument via your blog is one simple way of executing this tactic.
Readers want to know who you are and what you have done. They want to identify with you and start to connect. Headline that teases is a must in driving readership. Simple formulas to help you write a good headline •
•
•
Find current and influential blog posts on a topic that is relevant to your audience and follow up with a corresponding blog post adding to or enhancing the discussion. Brian Dean outlines the basic strategy as a simple 3-step process to: 1. Find linkworthy content 2. Make something even better 3. Reach out to the right people
How To - [Do Something that Benefits the Reader] (Example: How To Write A Mind Blowing Headline For Twitter So People Will Read Your Blog. ) The List - Top # reasons to [exercise, eat healthy, write articles, etc.] (Example: 90 Tips To Make Your Blog Rock.) The Question - This is where you want to invoke your reader’s curiosity for them to want to go on
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Language is simple. You need to make sure your message is precise and targeted to your audience.
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Online events that create community and tribe. It is essential to build a tribe of fans before you launch any product.
•
A Facebook fan page that is well designed and optimized . He made a note that the keyword to use is JOIN not FOLLOW US.
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Moving from time-dependent content to evergreen content. Write compelling content such as: • • • •
•
• • • • • • • • •
•
Start providing solutions and tips for potential client problems and then sales will naturally follow. You can build that trust by educating rather than selling, and solving problems rather than overtly marketing. Nothing worse than a hard sell, as it turns potential customers away, never to return.
Industry news Look at your competitors’ latest blog posts Video interviews of well known identities and experts in your industry. Find out about your customers’ pain points. Write posts that provide solutions for your customers’ problems. Write about customers’ successes. Write up a case study about a client’s successful project - they will often let you publish their name. Publish content on what not to do, highlighting where something hasn’t worked. Create a video blog post by interviewing a successful client Write articles for the different types of customers that are relevant for each of your vertical markets Subscribe to the top industry blogs in your market, both company and personal, for ideas. Look through your latest news releases for ideas Look through your competitors’ latest news releases Develop a series of How to blog posts Run polls and surveys on your blog. Revisit the comments of your blog and see if there are elements or a theme that you could write around a particular blog. Write an article about the top bloggers in your industry and promote them and tell people why they are successful.
Jay Ng, CMT
Make a list of the top successful people in your industry and put in place a weekly schedule to interview them. Enlist a keen photographer in your company to take photos at events and then set up a company Flickr account
HubSpot doesn’t just use text in its blogs but produces and publishes videos, cartoons, infographics, SlideShare and other rich media that keep the audience educated, engaged and sometimes even entertained. Have more online videos. When attending a conference take your Flip video cam with you and do some short one-on-one video interviews. Cartoons and fun staff videos emerge from time to time to make sure that its audience realises that it is not a faceless corporate and heartless entity. The tips and How To’s demonstrate that HubSpot knows how to assist in making small business a success. Some of the specific questions that you should be asking yourself to provide inspiration to creating content are: • • • • • • •
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Who are you selling to? What are their goals and aspirations? What are their problems? What media do they rely upon for answers to their problems? How can we reach them? What things are important to them? What words and phrases do they use?
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•
•
your services. A prominent email subscription box at the top right-hand corner of the blog that asks for name and an email address. Offer and provide a free eBook or a free how to video to your readers for subscribing to your blog.
What are they really buying from you? What images and multi-media appeal to each persona?
To publish the same core content on a variety of media formats and types such as: • • • • •
•
Permission (or inbound marketing) was more powerful than interruption (or outbound marketing).
eBooks images (Flickr and Instagram) video (YouTube, Vimeo and other online video networks) audio (Podcasts) presentations on PowerPoint – SlideShare. The simplest form of powerpoint would be to convert any list style blog content you have into a powerpoint presentation with a slide for each list item. Summary slide at the beginning and end. The best form of powerpoint would be a bespoke designed presentation by someone skilled at designing powerpoints. Most important factors for powerpoints are the simplicity, ease-of comprehension and the quality of the content. Good design is a bonus. infographics.
The Body Content: So you have written the introduction what are some key tips that will help you structure the main body of your article? Include key words: This is one thing you should not ignore. What are the key words people will be looking for when they turn up? You need to remember you may not be writing for two readers in your audience, but for the 1 million Google computer servers that are crawling and indexing your words, headlines and key words. You should still write naturally but be mindful of Lord Google. Write subtitles: Subtitles are your mini headlines that entice your reader to continue reading. They are teasers that may offer questions promising more intriguing and inspiring content to follow.
Be super responsive. Position yourself and your company as experts and thought leaders. If customers search for you on Google, and find your brand everywhere such as on your website, blog, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter, and referenced on other sites, it creates a feeling of substance and presence that takes trust to a new level. Hanging with other established people and brands creates trust. Awards that are exhibited on your blog and linked to the award site go a long way towards building trust.
Include images Images with screen shots with arrows and circles showing key points can be worth a thousand words and make learning clear and easy. Make the solution a ‘no-brainer’. Consider a video Sometimes a short 1 - 2 minute video can offer the reader a quick way to explain a concept, idea or solution that 500 words cannot convey. This could be embedded half way through the story.
An important element on any business blog is that you need a call to action. Offer subscriptions, seminars or a free trial of
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5. Create context: Lead into the main part of the article by creating the context for the rest of the story. Provide some background to the argument or solution you are about to put forward. It could be the condensed history of the topic or the facts and figures of the problem that need solving.
Remember you are writing for the web and rich interactive media is expected and demanded. The hyperlink This is quite often overlooked and in a digital interconnected age the article that has hyperlinks promises a depth and breadth of information that makes the reader want to explore. Links or additional resources at the end of an article that list associated posts from your blog are also valuable and encourage the reader to read more of your blog content. I also recommend setting up the links so they open up in a new browser window ensuring that the original page is still open and visible and waiting for the reader’s return.
6. Create a mental image: It could be a sentence opening with phrases such as Imagine this or Do you remember when. 7. Analogies and other tricks: It could be a phrase such as A writer without a blog is like a salesman without a telephone that tempts and captures the reader’s attention. A vision statement is an inspirational sentence or two that will keep you focused when uncertainty and temptations to take a different course confront you.
When writing the introduction these are some ideas to keep in mind:
When creating blog content, write longer posts as opposed to shorter posts. Longer form content takes time to put together but for basic ideas on how you can increase the length of a piece of content you can try these tactics:
1. Pose a question: Challenging the reader to think engages their mind and makes them want to find out the answer. 2. Open with a quote: This may inspire the reader to continue to read in the hope of finding out what lies beyond the next paragraph. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” - Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Add citations or ask influencers to comment on the post before it gets published, which you then add to the body of the post.
3. Provide a personally powerful story: The storyteller has captivated people since fire was created, and a personal or powerful story can be the honey, keeping the reader and listener engaged whether that be around the campfire or within an article.
• Add diagrams or visuals which you can then explain or comment on in the body of the post. • Add essay-style formatting e.g. introduction, hypothesis, conclusion etc.
4. Quote an enticing fact or statistic: If you are writing about Facebook it could be the fact that One in every eight minutes spent on the Internet is on Facebook to draw the reader in.
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[Facebook]
[Google+]
[LinkedIn]
[Instagram]
[Twitter]
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10 Tips to Increase your Facebook Likes
Facebook •
Ideal length of Facebook post is less than 40 characters The rule that there is to be a reply to every comment on the Facebook page. Updating the Facebook page
1. Email existing prospects to let them know you have a Facebook page and ask them to drop in and like your page. Provide a link to ease their effort.
There are 4 major types of updates:
2. Invite friends to like your page.
1. Conversation – designed to stimulate conversation with the fan base by asking thought provoking questions that encourage short succinct answers from fans. This could include a Facebook poll using the native Facebook question app.
3. Embed a Facebook social plugin on your blog in the side banner (preferably near the top) that provides the functionality for readers to like your page even when they are not on Facebook. 4. Create a welcome prominent like button.
2. Pictures – upload images you want to share with potential customers. This is especially important for bloggers such as photographers, artists and similar creative disciplines. (A good example is Aqua Bumps blog and Aqua Bumps Facebook page.)
with
a
5. Create a Facebook Reveal page that provides access to exclusive content but only when you like the page. This exclusivity can make your audience feel they are part of the club. 6. Offer them a free gift or PDF in the email to like your page.
3. Link – linked updates that drive traffic away from Facebook to your other online properties such as website, online store, blog or YouTu
7. Link to your Facebook page in your email newsletter banner/s. Digital design dictates that providing several options is much more effective than just one.
4. Product – spotlight a new product to be released. You can test new designs and get feedback on possible new items or even headlines for an upcoming eBook.
8. Join Facebook groups in your categories of interest and post a blog post that will drive traffic to your Fan page and connect with you on Facebook.
Let people know you are there Send out an email to let people know you have a Facebook page, connect with you there and like your page.
9. Capture emails for your email marketing database on your Facebook page. Keep in mind that email may seem old fashioned but it really works, and I don’t see that changing in the near future. So make it easy for people to subscribe for receiving news, updates and your blog posts when they are on Facebook via email.
Call to action Design, develop and implement a Facebook welcome tab that provides a call to action as simple as Click ‘Like’ To Discover How You Can Attract Hundreds Of People To Your Business Each Week! be channel.
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10. Provide a link in Facebook to prospects to subscribe to your blog via RSS.
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deeper engagement with your prospects and customers.
10 Tips to Increase Engagement 1. Run polls using the standard Facebook Question feature (above the Write Something box) to engage your audience with something that makes them actually do something.
Google+ •
2. Implement third party survey tools. One great service is Survey Monkey that provides much more functionality than the basic entry level Facebook Questions feature.
Instagram Twitter •
3. Include Twitter in your menu. This is available as a standard setting on your Facebook fan page and provides another channel for engagement.
Ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters
Share the content of influential Twitter people and let them know by including their Twitter name eg @Jeffbullas.
4. As Facebook is a real time media, you can publish the latest events and news on topics of interest that are happening in your industry or niche. It is a real time sharing tool that will notify people that have liked your page about the latest hottest news.
Automate the tweeting of other trusted bloggers’ content and add value to your followers with other people’s articles and content. Automate the retweeting of your great content
5. Update your Facebook page with your blog posts straight after publishing.
Include # tags Add your business @profile to your personal Twitter profile bio. Also get your employees to do the same. For example your bio might be: I love traveling and spaghetti! I do business development for @company
6. Respond to all comments on your Facebook page in a timely fashion. 7. Run a competition on Facebook. 8. Post your YouTube videos to your Facebook page. This provides another distribution point for your YouTube videos.
Follow potential customers on twitter and / or favorite their tweets. Simply search for terms that are relevant to your company and follow potential customers or favorite their tweets. Or follow your competitors followers.
9. Embed your SlideShare presentations on your Facebook page (SlideShare is a social media website that takes your Powerpoint presentations and converts them into a slideshow on the web). Just paste the link and your SlideShare presentation will embed within Facebook.
Formula to drive social media •
Before - After – Bridge –
10. Photos at events can be uploaded to Facebook which humanize and personalize your brand. People just love photos on Facebook and this will drive a Jay Ng, CMT
Ideal length of a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters
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Before world ...
Here’s
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•
•
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After - Imagine what it’d be like, having Problem A solved ...
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Bridge - Here’s how to get there.
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“creating social media images takes time. Imagine cutting 1 hr into 15mins. Here’s how: “
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The 4 U’s –
Useful - Be useful to the reader
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Urgent - Provide a sense of urgency
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Unique - Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow unique
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Ultra-specific - Be ultraspecific with all of the above
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“webinar Wednesday: answering all your questions on SEO, no matter how long it takes. Only 5 seats left!”
Problem - Agitate – Solve –
Identify a problem
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Agitate the problem
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Solve the problem
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“stuck staring at a blank blogpost? Let writer’s block win again or start fighting back. Find out how:”
Features - Advantages – Benefits –
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birthday. Try the web’s most popular to do list.”
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Features - What you or your product can do Advantages - Why this is helpful
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Benefits - What it means for the person reading
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“Complete social media management to help you schedule updates and get more clicks”
The 4 C’s –
Clear
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Concise
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Compelling
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Credible
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“Remember Even your
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Attention - Interest - Desire – Action –
Attention - Get the reader’s attention
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Interest - Interesting and fresh information that appeals to the reader
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Desire - Benefits of your product/service/idea and proof that it does what you say
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Action - Ask for a response
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“sneak peek! The alpha version of our new project: concierge music service! Want in?”
A FOREST –
A - Alliteration
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F - Facts
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O - Opinions
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R - Repetition
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E - Examples
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S - Statistics
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T – Threes
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“luxurious lakefront. Warm wood floors. King sized kitchen. Details:”
The 5 basic objections –
1. I don’t have enough time.
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2. I don’t have enough money.
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3. It won’t work for me.
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4. I don’t believe you.
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5. I don’t need it.
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“the best way to spend the next 5 minutes: easy grammer fixes for your website”
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Picture - Promise - Prove – Push –
Picture - Paint a picture that gets attention and creates desire
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Promise - Describe how your product/service/idea will deliver
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Prove - Provide support for your promise
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Push - Ask your reader to commit
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“no more late night ice cream runs. Groceries delivered to your door. 24/7”
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psychological pull of Open Loops
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Create a cliffhanger with your content
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“how losing our bigest client led to our biggest month in sales”
Reader’s Digest blueprint –
They are fact-packed
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They are telegraphic
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They are specific
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There are few adjectives
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They arouse curiosity
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“53% of internet users have never shared to social. Learn how they spend their time online”
Sonia Simone’s 5 Pieces Every Great Marketing Story Needs –
1. You need a hero
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2. You need a goal
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3. You need conflict
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4. You need a mentor
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5. You need a moral
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“need to drive engagement on social? Get ready to shine! Buffer’s got your back.”
Write to one person –
Good advertising is written from one person to another.
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“hats off to agencies who manage dozens of social accounts”
3 Reasons Why –
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Why are you the best?
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•
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Why should I believe you?
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Why should I buy right now?
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“trusted by 70% of furtune 500 companies to take the daily headaches out of HR”
your reader to use your solution. –
Action - Call to action
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“how do the world’s best bloggers pull it off? Writing bootcamp. Join their ranks today”
Star - Story – Solution –
Star - The main character of your story
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Story - The story itself
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1. What I’ve got for you
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Solution - An explanation of how the star wins in the end
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2. What it’s going to do for you
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“reach your weekly goals, take off early on Friday. Marketing solutions for overachievers”
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3. Who am I?
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4. What you need to do next
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“need tickets to tonight’s big game? Impress your friends with these front row steals”
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1 – 2 - 3 - 4 Formula for Persuasive Copy
Star - Chain – Hook –
Star product/service/idea
Your
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Chain - A series of facts, sources, benefits, and reasons
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Hook - The call to action
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“zero emails. An empty to do list. Free time. How the business world’s best get things done”
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Awareness - Comprehension Conviction – Action –
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Jay Ng, CMT
Awareness - Present the situation or problem Comprehension - Help your reader understand how it affects them. Explain that you have the solution. Conviction - Create a desire and conviction in 73
So what? –
Every time you state something, ask yourself, “So what?”
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“new blog post “Twitter tips” (our biggest collection yet!)”
AICPBSAWN –
Attention - Biggest benefit, biggest problem you can solve, USP
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Interest - Reason why they should be interested in what you have to say
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Credibility - Reason why they should believe you
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•
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Benefits - List them all (use bullets)
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Scarcity - Create scarcity
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Action - Tell them precisely what to do
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Warn - What will happen if they don’t take action
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Now - Motivate them to take action now
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“Join the buffer blog email list: social media insights we don’t share anywhere else”
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String of Pearls
Bob Stone’s Gem –
Begin with your strongest benefit
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Expand on the important benefit
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Tell exactly and in detail what they are going to get, including all the features and benefits
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Back up your statements with support copy
most
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String together a series of persuasive stories
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Tell them what they’ll lose if they don’t act
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“the 17 best ideas we heard at this year’s SXSW Panels”
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Sum up the most important benefits
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Make your call to action. Tell them to “reply now” and give a good, logical reason why they should.
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“share great content on twitter and facebook when your audience wants to see it – whether you are around or not. Buffer scheduling”
Fan Dancer –
Be specific without actually explaining anything
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“the 2 pizza rule? Meet the four burrito maxim, our favourite new work hack”
The Approach Formula –
Arrive at the problem
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Propose a solution
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Persuade the listener why your solution will work
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“lots of helpful comments on our post about facebook tools! Try some out and leave your thoughts”
Reassure that you and your solution can be trusted
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Orchestrate an opportune opportunity to sell
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Ask for the response)
order
(or
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6+1 model –
1. Context
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2. Attention
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3. Desire
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4. The gap
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5. Solution
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6. Call to action
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+1. Credibility
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“the social media tools that peg fitzpatrick uses to share with 900k people everyday”
UPWORDS Formula –
Universal Picture Words Or Relatable, Descriptive Sentences
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“we are the training wheels for your new social media strategy. Start pedalling today”
OATH Formula
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The four stages of your market’s awareness of your product/service/idea.
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Oblivious
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Apathetic
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Thinking
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Hurting
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“have you heard? You don’t have to tweet in spurts! Schedule your updates to post all day, no matter if you are around!”
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[Video]
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Video Marketing •
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• • •
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Each video kept to a max of 3 minutes o Attention span is short o Users can learn during their small pockets of unused time Social sharing o Video can be shared on Facebook and Twitter Videos are produced in-house. Expert videos must be original and produced by us too
Interview influential people in your topic category on video and post them to YouTube. Instead of writing a text blog, record a short video of yourself speaking about the latest topical news in your industry, or some tips on a common problem that needs to be solved in your niche and category. Include your website/blog link in your profile. Automate sharing after posting. This is available under Account settings then Activity sharing then choose the social accounts, and as a minimum, select Facebook and Twitter (Reader, Orkut and MySpace can also be enabled). Write a headline that is keyword rich for your industry and niche. Write a tempting and teasing headline that makes the potential viewer want to hit the play button. Place a link to your blog at the beginning of each video description and make sure it includes keywords. Include keyword tags for each video.
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[SLideshare.Podcast.Book] Jay Ng, CMT
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Slideshare • • • • • • •
• •
•
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Turn your posts into PowerPoint presentations and post to SlideShare. Write a good headline on the presentation itself and the title area. Include keyword tags that would be used to find the presentation. Promote your presentation on Twitter. Allow viewers to download your presentation making it easy to share. Post it to your Facebook page. In choosing a license, make it CC (Creative Commons) License, so people can use your content and then attribute and link to your blog.
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-And, take the 10-foot test: Open your cover slide. Now, walk 10 feet away and look at it. Does that slide make sense? Or is it covered with little tiny words and images that run together. If the former, you’re good to go. If the latter, stop and re-work to make it legible and something people want to click on. Make your cover slide really great.
Write a Book Podcast
Add a slide (I usually add it at the end) promoting your related presentations. Unless your presentation contains video, upload it as a PDF (Acrobat format). It’s fantastic at maintaining fonts, layout and overlays where PowerPoint and Keynote uploads sometimes fail. Using PDFs also lets you do some nifty linking stuff that doesn’t always work from PowerPoint. Use it to link to those related presentations, too. Once you publish, answer comments. If people praise you, say thanks. If they ask questions, answer. If they make suggestions, get clarification. In my experience, anyone you answer becomes a follower. And of course, you can’t forget the basic “must-do’s” to make your presentation more easily discoverable: -Fill out the keywords field -Write a detailed description -Announce the new presentation on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest (and any other network that makes sense)
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[Search Engines]
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Search Engines The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all clickthrough traffic. The second position receives 11.94%. Third position on the first page obtains 8.47%. Ensuring that your product appears on relevant Q&A threads is a way of indirectly appearing on the SERP of Google for that query. Perform Google searches for terms or questions that you want to rank for. From there, find Q&A sites or forums that appear in the first SERP and contribute to the thread in a genuinely useful manner, with a link to your product homepage. Notice that some content has the face of the author next to it. This display is controllable by the publisher, you just have to enable it for your site/content. 2 things need to happen for author profile pictures to show up on Google search results. First, the author needs to list your site in their “contributor” section on their Google+ profile page. Second, the author’s Google+ profile page needs to be linked from the content they wrote on your site or blog. This can be achieved through using a meta tag. After implementing these two steps, it will take up to a month for the profile pictures to start appearing in Google SERPs. The profile picture that displays will be the Google+ profile picture of the content author. So make sure this photo is appropriate for SERPs to appear alongside your content.
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[Hearsay]
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Word of mouth Mostly from direct experience, when experience deviates from expectations. Consumers tend to talk about functional messages When your mental model collides with the real world, people need to talk about it. However do not stray from brand’s core identity. On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to refer to a friend/colleague? • • •
9-10 (Promoter) 7-8 (Passives) 0-6 (Detractors) Net Promoter Scale = Promoter% Detractor% Average NPS = 10-15%
Jay Ng, CMT
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[Network] Jay Ng, CMT
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Networking • • •
Join entrepreneur groups Network with peers Setup a networking system and routine
Jay Ng, CMT
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Critical Metrics Before Product/Market Fit You’re probably in this stage if: • •
You’ve just started. You don’t know who your ideal customer is. • People are testing your product for the first time. Primary Goals: •
•
Validate core business assumptions by talking to people in your target market. If people ask you for your product before you even try to sell them, you’re going in the right direction. Survey users and have at least 40% say that they‘d be very disappointed if they had to stop using your product.
Metric #1: Qualitative Feedback Usually, you’ll want to follow this format for the interview: 1. Basic demographic questions to get a better sense for who you’re talking to. 2. Deep questions about the current problem. 3. Present your solution for feedback (don’t sell it, just get feedback). You’ll want to do 10-20 of these customer interviews. When you want to start scaling feedback (especially as you move into the later stages of your business), use Qualaroo surveys, SurveyMonkey, feedback forms, and usability tests like UserTesting.com. But when you’re just starting, talk to people in your target market one on one. The insights will always be much better.
Metric #2: Measuring Product/Market Fit How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]? 1. Very disappointed 2. Somewhat disappointed 3. Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful) 4. N/A – I no longer use [product] Send this to people that have used your product at least twice, experienced your core product offering, and used it in the last two weeks. The goal is to get at least 40% of your users to say “very disappointed.”
More Resources Beginning to Scale You’ve got revenue coming in and a growing customer base. Now it’s time to build a business. You’re probably in this stage if: •
You’ve found at least one way to acquire customers consistently. • Many of your customers stay subscribed and want to keep paying you. • Your monthly revenue is starting to grow. Primary Goals: • •
•
Consistently grow MRR while controlling churn. Get monthly churn to 12%. If it’s above 5%, ignore everything else until you lower it.
Metric #1: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) For a SaaS business, monthly recurring revenue is a much more valuable metric to track than
traditional revenue. It’s the total revenue you received during the month that came from recurring subscription.
Primary Goals: •
•
Metric #2: Churns
Expansion
Metric #1: Lifetime Value (LTV)
You’re probably in this stage if: • • •
Metric #2: Cost Per Acquisition
Growth is beginning to slow for the first time. Continuing to improve your main channel is getting a lot harder. You’ve successfully controlled your churn.
Jay Ng, CMT
Keep your cost per acquisition to one third of your lifetime value. Get each customer to profitability within 12 months.
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