Best 100 Content Marketing Hacks for 2021
Best Content Marketing Hacks That Will Help You Attract More Clients. Attract more clients. Increase your email list size. Generate more valuable comments. Encourage repeat visitors to your blog.
| Hack | Description | Companies Who Use It | Step-by-Step Guide / Example |
| CONTENT MARKETING HACKS (FREE) | |||
| The High Ticket Client Hack | Follow these four steps (to win high-ticket clients): 1- Make a list of your Dream 100 clients and the one key decision maker in a spreadsheet. 2- Pick the top 10 to like/comment/share on their posts. 3- After engaging on a handful of their posts, share one piece of content you know will help them. 4- Lookup which college the decision maker went to and send them a baseball cap from their college with a personal note about how your company can help them. | Box | https://contentmavericks.com/how-i-made-100000-from-one-blog-post/ |
| The Social Media Traffic Hack | Follow these three steps (to get massive social engagement on every post you make): 1- Post on your social media account. 2- If a post isn’t getting AT LEAST one like a minute within the first 5 mins, delete it and try again with a new intro to your post. 3- Once a week add your posts (link and topic) to a spreadsheet. Add in the number of likes, shares, and comments (revenue or leads generated too if you have that info) to track which topics and types of posts are ?or ?. | AdSkills | https://www.facebook.com/jus.brooke/posts/909453962719444 |
| The Amazon Mechanical Turk Headline Hack | Follow these ten steps (to a/b test headlines using Amazon Mechanical Turk): 1- Write out 5-10 headlines for your next piece of content. 2- Pick 2 you think are the best. 3- Create an Amazon Mechanical Turk account 4- Create a new project 5- Select the “Website Classification” template 6- Give your project the title “Answer a question about what blog post headline you would click” 7- Use the keywords “website, survey” so workers on mturk find your task 8- Make the reward $0.01 with 1,000 assignments 9- Modify the design layout to be an A/B multiple choice question. Your headline A versus your headline B. 10- Publish the task | Content Mavericks | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157406577404452 |
| The SEMRush Competitor Traffic Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Go to SEMRush > Organic Research > Pages > Plug in your competitor’s URL. 2- See the monthly traffic and percentage of traffic individual pieces of content contribute to the site. 3- Take your competitor’s winning content and make it your own. | Content Mavericks | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks |
| The Partnership Promotion Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Identify 5 companies that have the same audience you want to attract. 2- Send a 100% personal email telling the partner about one piece of content of theirs you love, want to promote to your audience, and an estimate of the number of leads you think you can send them. 3- Mention one piece of content of yours you think their audience would benefit from, then ask if they’d be interested in having you share their content. 4- Set up a call to discuss the details (what piece of content each of you want to promote, where you will promote it, and what date you will promote it). | Content Mavericks, Growth Tools | https://cl.ly/406dacd43ca8 |
| The $1,000 Cash Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Find a “how to” article. 2- Go to Buzzsumo, enter the URL of the article, then click the “View Shares” button to get a list of everyone who has shared the article. 3- Offer that article as a service be emailing people who shared the article and have a sizeable audience (i.e. enough money to pay you for a service) | Content Mavericks | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157594690914452 |
| The 80/20 SEO Hack | Follow these eleven steps (to double your organic traffic): 1- Go to your Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report. 2- Add a segment for “Organic Traffic”, remove the “All Users” segment, and toggle the date range to cover the last year. 3- Filter the results down to the blog only (i.e. in the search bar enter /blog if you use that for your site structure). 4- Go to Export > Google Sheets and remove every column except for Page and Unique Pageviews. 5- Now you’re looking at all your content ranked by the most unique pageviews over the last year, add a SUM function to add up the total unique pageviews for all your content. 6- Add a column for “Percentage.” Then use the formula: Unique Pageviews divided by Total Pageviews for every page. This will show you the percentage of organic traffic each page is contributing to your site. 7- Add a column for “Cumulative Percentage.” The first row will equal the percentage of the first row. The second row will be the percentage of the first row + the percentage of the second row. The third row will be the percentage of the second row + the percentage of the third row, and so on. You’ll now be able to see the 20% of content on your site contributing 80% of the traffic. 8- Identify what broad topic every piece of content in your top 20% falls under. You’re looking for a pattern to see what your site has topical authority for, so you can create more content like this. 9- Once you find “the topic” you win for, brainstorm as many ideas as you can related to that topic. Look on conference sites, podcasts, youtube, fb groups, etc. 10- Grab the top ranked URL on Google for every related topic you find and smash it into SEMRush. Jot down the “traffic potential” for it on Desktop and Mobile. 11- Find 10 pieces of content you can create with similar traffic potential to your top trafficked post. | Sumo | http://www.evolvingseo.com/2013/01/22/what-80-20-rule-really-is-applying-it-to-seo/ |
| The CDS Intro Formula Hack | Follow the CDS formula to write killer intros for your content: C: Call out your reader in the first sentence. D: Describe your readers problem back to them, better than they can describe it themself. S: Show proof you have the solution. | Content Mavericks | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks |
| The Blog Post Audience Building Hack | Make a content upgrade for your post, then follow these four steps: 1- Add a bonus material link below the headline. 2- Add a call-to-action in the top 10% of the post. 3- Add a 1-3 contextual calls-to-action in body of the post. 4- Add a call-to-action in the bottom 10% of the post. | Content Mavericks | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks |
| The Truncated Teaser Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Writing a teaser for your blog post in the meta description field. 2- End it with an “…” ellipsis to trigger curiosity so you get more clicks than competitors on Google. | Content Mavericks | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks |
| The Lazy Content Writers Hack | Follow these six steps: 1- Identify a topic your audience is dying to learn about. 2- Interview an expert who’s at the tippity top of their game on the topic. 3- Create an outline from the interview recording. 4- Write it. 5- Embed highlights from the interview throughout the post. 6- Cut the video up into 1 minute teasers to promote on social. | Sumo | https://sumo.com/stories/appsumo-marketing |
| The Google Natural Language Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Copy/paste the content from the top ranked listing on Google for your target keyword into Google’s Natural Language tool and click the “Analyze” button. 2- Make sure you’ve included the entities with the most Salience in your content in-depth. 3- Make sure the “Sentiment” of your piece of content is similar to the top ranked piece of content. | Content Mavericks | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks |
| The Beautiful Looking Images Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Go to https://www.screely.com 2- Upload your image. 3- It’ll turn your screenshot into a beautiful ‘dribbble’ ready design. | Content Mavericks | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks |
| The TL;DR Preheader Text Hack | Follow these two steps (on emails you send to promote content): 1- Use a subject line that is short and filled with curiosity. 2- Use TL;DR preheader text that clearly and concisely sums up what’s inside the email. | AppSumo | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157380814089452 |
| The Push Notification Hack | Follow these three steps (to grow your push notification list): 1- Put a push notification offer on your most visited pages (remind to download lead magnet), thank you pages (remind of new products), webinar post-registration page (remind of webinar start), and blog posts (remind to download content upgrade) 2- Expect a 6% to 10% opt-in rate for generic pages and 20-50% opt-in on strategic placements. 3- Send push notifications to your list that have 100% deliverability, work on all device types, and have 50-60% open rate on every push. | Aramis Interactive | https://www.facebook.com/jus.brooke/posts/619757771689066 |
| The Big Contest Hack | Follow these four steps to run a contest that collects thousands of ready-to-buy leads: 1- Identify who your target audience is (e.g. homeowners who need to upgrade their kitchen). 2- Run a contest to attract the target audience (e.g. give a brand new kitchen (to a certain dollar amount) to the winner of a contest titled “Have you got the ugliest kitchen in America?”) 3- Promote the contest (e.g. invite email subscribers, social followers, etc to post a photo of their ugly kitchen online at a contest landing page) 4- Send a direct-response offer to the valuable database of people with old kitchens you collected from the contest (e.g. $10k offer to replace their current kitchen + personal chef for a month) | Classic Kitchens | http://www.classic-kitchens.com/ugly-kitchen-contest/ |
| The WOW Marketing Offer Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Identify your target audience (e.g. Bank targeting working class people like truck drivers, mechanics, teachers, etc.) 2- Calculate how much 10% off your product price would be (e.g. $10,000 for a $100,000 product). 3- Instead of discounting, come up with a WOW marketing offer equivalent to that 10% value. (e.g. Get A Home Loan, Get A Free Holiday.) 4- Promote the offer to your target audience (e.g. television advertising and other ads to your target audience.) | Greater Building Society | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb8h5rZlKOg |
| The Quora Traffic Hack | Follow these three steps (to use SEMrush + Quora to rank on page #1 of Google): 1- In SEMrush > Domain Analytics > Organic Research > search for quora.com 2- Click on Advanced Filters and filter for keywords containing your target keyword, positions <10, and volume >100. 3- Write the best answer to the question on Quora. | Geckoboard | https://youtu.be/DTbK6bjNk0g |
| The LinkedIn Traffic Hack | Follow these three steps (to get thousands of views on your LinkedIn posts): 1- Get a VA to use LinkedIn Advanced Search to connect with 2nd degree connections in your target industry with the job title you sell to (do not connect with more than 150 people in a 24 hour period or you risk your account getting banned) 2- Publish a LinkedIn Post with a teaser for your piece of content and tell people if you get 10 comments you’ll share the post to build up engagement. 3- Once you get 10 comments, edit the last line of your LinkedIn post to include a link to your content. | Chris Von Wilpert | https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6311652139131293696/ |
| The LinkedIn Follower Hack | Follow these four steps (to massively grow your LinkedIn following): 1- Write a short LinkedIn post about something amazing you have done in your life. 2- Offer a cheatsheet so people can skip the learning curve and learn what you have learnt quickly. 3- Ask people to LIKE + COMMENT “I want the cheatsheet!” if they’re connected with you. 4- Ask people to send you an invite, then LIKE + COMMENT if they’re not connected with you. | OkDork | https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6331501925569220608/ |
| The Niche Blog Post Sponsorship Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Find out who the guy or gal is that “calls the shots” on a site where you want to promote your content. This will often be the marketing manager at the company. 2- Hit them up using a money message: “Hey Amy, love the SaaStr blog! Wanted to contact you guys about giving you money.” 3- Once you get a reply make your pitch: “Your blog post on XYZ topic was killa! I’ve got a great case study/worksheet/calculator based on your post that I think people reading it would lovvvve: [link] Can I offer you sponsorship for offering the case study/worksheet/calculator on that one blog post?” | NachoAnalytics | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157335237409452 |
| The Email Promotion Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Write your copy inside Facebook first. Writing like you’re creating a Facebook post for friends makes your writing 10x more conversational and personal. 2- Move it to a Google doc for editing/approval. 3- Move it into your email service provider to send. | Content Mavericks | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157182873284452 |
| The Book Offer Traffic Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Install the free version of Sumo.com 2- Create a new form. 3- At the bottom of the “Design” section select the “Include a Tab” option. 4- In the “Visibility” section set it to show on the main page of your blog. Cause people going to that page are already looking for educational content you’ve written. | Sumo | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157412415324452 |
| The Reddit Traffic Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Find a subreddit directly related to the topic of your content. 2- Write a conversational headline, like what you’d send to a friend. 3- Write out the key takeaways in a way so readers want to click on the article and learn more. 4- Make it easy for readers to navigate through the points with clean formatting. | Dejan Gajšek | https://www.reddit.com/r/longboarding/comments/9lasqq/just_analyzed_and_published_a_case_study_about/ |
| The Facebook Traffic Hack | Follow these two steps (to create high-engagement Facebook posts): 1- Post a short, list-style native video on your Facebook page <1 minute. 2- Ask people in the description “How many of these do you do? Tell us in the comments!” | HubSpot | https://www.facebook.com/hubspot/videos/10155565170029394/ |
| The 9 Word Email Hack | Follow these two steps (to reengage email subscribers you haven’t been in contact with for months/years): 1- Use the name of the person in the subject line. 2- Send a question based on what the person inquired about when they first engaged with you in the body of the email (e.g. Ecommerce Store: Are you still looking for a vacuum cleaner? Agency: Are you still looking to invest in Facebook ads this year? SaaS: Are you still looking for software to grow your email list?). 3- Engage in a conversation to recommend your product. | Amazon | http://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/podcast/014 |
| The $500,000 Blog Post Hack | Follow the B.A.B. formula (to write a case study style blog post that can make you $500k+): Before: Talk about the pain, everything the person had to go through to get where they are now. After: Talk about the dream, everything the person has achieved now they found a solution. Bridge: Talk about the solution, your solution/product that took the person from before to after. | Social Triggers | https://socialtriggers.com/laura-fuentes-momables/ |
| The Viral Content Upgrade Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Offer a content upgrade on your blog post. 2- After someone opts in for the content upgrade, offer another bonus upgrade if they share the blog post. | Rocketship Agency | http://rocketshipagency.com/success |
| The Viral Giveaway Hack | Follow these six steps (to run a viral giveaway that makes money): 1- Identify who your target audience is (e.g. content marketers). 2- Run a giveaway using KingSumo to attract the target audience (e.g. content marketer for a day). 3- Only give people points for sharing (don’t give points for liking or following your profile) so you increase your chances of going viral (e.g. share on FB, TW, LI, Messenger, email, etc). 4- Setup a Facebook ad to promote the giveaway and give entrants bonus points for commenting on it. 5- Promote the giveaway (e.g. email list, social media, ads, partners). 6- Send a direct-response offer to the thousands of leads you collect from the giveaway (e.g. content marketing consulting). | Content Mavericks | https://kingsumo.com/g/uobaww/content-marketer-for-a-day-giveaway |
| The Influencer Marketing Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Search keywords and dig through social profiles to find good influencers that have the same audience as your target market. 2- Check they get a lot of comments/reviews so their followers aren’t fake. 3- Send them a DM “Hey do you accept money? I want to pay you to post something.” OR if you don’t want to pay $500-$20k for a single shoutout that goes out, and a few days later is forgotten about, then send this DM: “Hey, do you accept money? I’d love to pay you for a day to make some content. What’s your day rate?”. Now you own the content and can use it in your ad campaigns forever. This can be done on Instagram, YouTube, iTunes Podcasts, etc. | EHPlabs | https://sumo.com/stories/ecommerce-influencer-marketing |
| The LinkedIn Hashtag Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Hashtag your LinkedIn post. 2- Get a handful of comments in the first ~12 hours to get your post to start “trending.” 3- Your post will become “trending” in the primary category you tagged and a notification will get sent to your 1st degree connections on LinkedIn to check out the post. | Chris Von Wilpert | https://www.facebook.com/vonwilpert/posts/10157451891964452 |
| The Outbound Tech Stack Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Use a lead list tool like BuiltWith or Clearbit to build a list of decision makers that use a software product that have the same audience as you (or a combination of tech tools you know that would make them an ideal prospect for your business). 2- Build an outbound email campaign to get them on a demo call with your sales team (you can adapt Sumo’s exact sequence for your own use: https://sumo.com/stories/follow-up-email-no-response) | GetResponse, Yesware, ConvertKit | https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-sales/automated-outbound-sales |
| The Lead Form Demo Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Make a landing page or opt-in form for your free lead magnet (whitepaper, case study, video, etc). 2- Include one extra ‘Yes/No’ field at the end of the form that says “Would you like a demo of our software?” so you can book demos with people who are already interested in seeing your software. | KISSmetrics, Bounce Exchange | |
| The Advanced Powered By Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Add a “powered by” link at the bottom of your app/page. A fraction of these visitors will click on it and arrive on your landing apge where some will request a demo. It has been shown to lead to a viral coefficient k > 0.4, meaning that every 10 users acquired will generate 4 extras users. 2- Use dynamic keyword insertion on the landing page you send people to with the name of the company who referred them to your website. | Intercom, Wisita, Qualaroo | https://okdork.com/marketing-ideas-from-intercom/#1 |
| The Co-Webinar Poll Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Contact influencers in your space who have a big audience. 2- Do an educational co-webinar with them. 3- Instead of hard selling on the webinar, do a 100% educational webinar with a poll at the end of the webinar for people to select if they are intereted in a demo of your course/software/product. | Hubspot, Unbounce, Uberflip | https://www.eofire.com/podcast/nathanlatka/ |
| The Minimum Viral Product Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Build something in 1-2 days that’s more viral than your actual product to test sentiment-product fit and build a list of emails to launch your core product. 2- Make sure your viral product is closely aligned to your core product and focus on volume of users so you can maximise conversions from your viral product to your core product. | Calm | https://youtu.be/Ln3SWWM0u-4?t=28m24s |
| The App Marketplace Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Integrate your product with a large software company. 2- Get your app listed on their marketplace (eg: Salesforce App Exchange, G Suite Marketplace, Xero App Marketplace, Shopify App Store). 3- Offer customers a $10 Amazon gift card to review you so you rank highly on the platform. | Pipedrive, Insightly, ProsperWorks | https://auth0.com/blog/how-to-get-from-0-to-10000-customers-with-b2b-app-marketplaces/ |
| The Smart SEO Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Look at your highest converting keywords inside AdWords. 2- Create an SEO strategy to get those keywords to rank organically. 3- If you don’t run AdWords look at your Search Queries Report in Google Search Console to see what keywords are getting clicks to your website, but are on page 2 and need a boost to page 1. | Optimizely, Lever, simPRO | http://searchengineland.com/how-to-leverage-ppc-to-discover-high-converting-keywords-for-seo-131862 |
| The Integration Page SEO Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Create a page that talks about your integration with another app/software. 2- When someone searches for a specific use case of your integration with the other app/software, your website will come up. | Zapier, Xero, Klipfolio | https://zapier.com/zapbook/slack/trello/ |
| The Blog Traffic Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Take a content format that is proven (eg: “this vs that” or “top 10”) and mix it with a keyword format that has lots of searches (eg: “most profitable” or “best way to”). 2- Build a whole blog/YouTube channel/podcast around just that. By focusing on one keyword or type of keyword you have a higher chance of beating the competition. (e.g. Crypto niche: “how to buy bitcoin/litecoin/ripple/steem/etc”, Paleo diet niche: “10 paleo recipes/creamers/dinners/snacks/etc”, Finance niche: “top stocks under $100/$50/$25/$20/$10/$5/etc”) | AdSkills | |
| The Survey Response Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Send out a survey to your email list. 2- Offer respondents the chance to win cupcakes. 3- Randomly select 10 participants from the survey to receive a dozen cupcakes. It’s proven that people would rather receive a dozen cupcakes than an iPad. | RJMetrics | https://thinkgrowth.org/the-greatest-marketing-growth-hack-of-all-time-hint-cupcakes-784ccaa3f78 |
| The Highly Qualified Lead Hack | Follow these three steps (after you capture an email lead): 1- Send them to TOFU: top-of-the-funnel piece of content (eg: report, whitepaper, swipe file, etc). 2- Send them to MOFU: middle-of-the-funnel piece of content (webinar, video, etc). 3- Send them to BOFU: bottom-of-the-funnel piece of content (case studies, demo, strategy call, etc). | HubSpot | https://rocketshipgrowth.com/the-most-scalable-channel-for-large-highly-qualified-saas-leads-hint-its-not-facebook-4c6fe110a6e7 |
| The Content Repost Hack | Follow these five steps: 1- Send an email to your list with your new blog post. 2- Share the blog post on social media accounts as soon as the email campaign is sent. 3- Look for channels relevant to your business and submit links there (eg: forums, FB groups, Slack groups). 4- Wait for a few days to get some analytics data (stats, shares and comments). 5- Send emails or tweet editors of big publishers who report on your content topic with a screenshot of proof of traction (eg: “My post has 50% share rate, screenshot attached, repost maybe?”). | Uber, HubSpot, KISSmetrics | https://rocketshipgrowth.com/how-to-promote-b2b-saas-content-eab660ee2407 |
| The PR Backlash Hack | Follow these three steps (after you get bad PR): 1- Build a dedicated website where you unfold the story of your bad PR. 2- Present the facts. 3- Show social proof to prove your version of the story and convert haters into customers. | Freshdesk | http://ripoffornot.org/ |
| The Affiliate Acquisition Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Write a receipt email you send after someone buys your product. 2- Add this to the top of the email: “Want this product for free? Sign up as an affiliate, just 3 referrals and you’ll earn $xxx. Sign up here.” | AdSkills | |
| The Product Receipt Sales Hack | Follow these four steps (on your product receipt email): 1- Make a special offer, something not available anywhere else. 2- Tell people it’s not available forever, only for new customers. 3- Use a coupon/promo code to track it. 4- Call attention to it with a Johnson Box in the email (if it’s a physical product and you can’t use a link, use a memorable easy to type domain name). | AdSkills | |
| The Messenger Bot Subscriber Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Use a Facebook messenger bot like ManyChat or ChatFuel. 2- Create a Facebook post asking an innocent question (e.g. “If you’ve ever wanted to grow your ecommerce website traffic to 1 million website visitors per month then comment “yes” below, I’ll PM you a case study so your competitors don’t see”) 3- Advertise the post to your target audience. | ||
| The Product Validation Hack | Follow these five steps: 1- Search for a product you want to sell on Amazon “eg: cooking books.” 2- Put links of all the products that have an average star review of >4.5 into a spreadsheet. 3- Look at the 3-star reviews and make a hit list of all the things that are missing. 4- Use that hit list to make your product better than your top competition. 5- Create a 500 word sales page listing how your product is better and ask for pre-payment. | 4-Hour Chef | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v47WEyeSMSA |
| The Long Division Content Conversion Hack | Follow these three steps (via email, video, webinar, audio or any other medium): 1- Explain how you get the results you get (ie: teach long division). 2- Go back and forth from results to how hard you have to work to get those results. 3- Offer an easier way for them to get the same result using your course, software, supplement, service, or product (ie: sell the calculator). | ETF Tipping Point | http://etftippingpoint.com/webinar2/ |
| The Personal Voicemail Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- When someone opts-in for one of your lead magnets, collect their mobile number. 2- Use Slybroadcast to record a personal message that gets sent to their voicemail. | Enduring Marketing | |
| The Magic Moment Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Backtrack through successful customers who are using your product and look what they’ve done in the first 7-14 days. 2- Try and find the first three common things those people did. These are the activities you want new customers to do. 3- Optimize your product consumption email sequence to lead people down the path of doing those three things. | HubSpot | https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/the-data-driven-marketing-playbook-with-hubspot-gocardless-and-idio |
| The Email Open Rate Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Send your content promotion email at 11am, after everyone’s cleared their morning inboxes. 2- Use a short subject line (2-3 words) to increase curiosity. 3- Watch your email open rate skyrocket (40-50% open rates on a 100k+ email list are possible!). | Content Mavericks | |
| The Welcome Email Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Introduce yourself in the first sentence. 2- Tell new subscribers 1-3 things they can expect from your email newsletter. 3- End with one call to action (reply with your #1 struggle, link to most popular blog post, link to latest product, etc) to get your new subscribers in the habit of taking action. | Rocketship Agency | |
| The Email Deliverability Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Create one new email automation in your email marketing software. 2- Set it up to send an email to any subscriber who hasn’t opened or clicked an email in the last 120 days, with a link they need to click to stay active on your list. 3- Set up a rule to delete any subscribers that don’t click the link. | AppSumo | https://sumo.com/stories/email-marketing |
| The Spam Complaint Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Go to the email footer settings inside your email marketing software. 2- Increase the text size of your unsubscribe link to 18px font size so it’s obvious how to unsubscribe and people don’t hit the spam button instead. | Sumo | |
| The Email Segmentation Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Send an email to your full list with a link to a free piece of content focused on one topic. 2- Segment people who click on the link by tagging them with that topic in your email software. 3- Send emails for products related to that topic to that segment of your list to increase conversion rates. | Sumo | |
| The Printable PDF Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- On your blog post right click, then click “Print.” 2- Click on the “Open PDF in Preview” button. 3- Click File > Save, then next to Quartz Filter select “Gray Tone” (You’ll get a sharp, easy-to-read, black and white PDF. People prefer black and white PDFs because they don’t waste color ink). 4- Offer the PDF as a content upgrade at the top of your blog post for people who want to read offline, highlight and take notes in their own time. | ||
| The Content Gap Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Identify what the topic of your blog post is (e.g. content marketing hacks). 2- Study the first page Google results for your topic and look at comments on the posts. 3- See if there are any content gaps (i.e. information people aren’t finding in other posts on the first page of Google that you can add to the content outline for your post). | Content Mavericks | |
| The Sharable Image Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Use a contrasting background color. Colors like yellow, green, orange, purple or pink all stand out on the white and blue backgrounds of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 2- Use diagonal lines. Instead of horizontal oriented text, make it slightly diagonal. In everyday life we’re used to seeing horizontal and vertical objects like windows, roads, tables, etc so diagonal lines cause a pattern interrupt. 3- Use a high contrast color. High-contrast images are more noticeable than low-contrast images. 4- Use recognizable objects. If your topic includes famous people or places includes those in your image. People will be more likely to click. | Content Mavericks | |
| CONTENT MARKETING HACKS (PAID) | |||
| The Comment Gamification Hack | Follow these three steps to turn your comments into sales: 1- Get Thrive Comments for $67: https://thrivethemes.com/comments/. 2- In the Comment Conversion settings under “Choose what happens after a visitor leaves a comment for the first time”, select “Social Share” and add a custom message with a link to a bonus piece of content. 3- Under “Choose what happens after a visitor returns with another comment” add a custom message with a link inviting people to buy your product. | Content Mavericks | |
| The Facebook Algorithm Content Promotion Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Place a FB conversion tracking pixel on the page that people land on after entering their email on a blog post for a content upgrade. 2- Create a Lookalike audience based on people who have hit the conversion tracking pixel. 3- Create a FB campaign with the “Website Conversions” objective sending your lookalike audience traffic to your blog post. Facebook will use their algorithm to target people who are the most similar to people who have already signed up to your email list and converted on your site. | InVision, Treehouse, Asana | |
| The Case Study Retargeting Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Retarget website visitors to a case study (eg: How Bob, CMO at Apple left his job to be a 7-figure content consultant). 2- Add a call to action at the end of the case study to buy (exclude your list of paid users so you don’t waste ad budget). 3- Group the website visitors who see the case study into a custom audience. 4- Show the custom audience ads to a new case study so your most engaged prospects keep seeing fresh, new case studies in the sequential order you setup. | simPRO | http://www.jonloomer.com/2016/05/10/facebook-website-custom-audience-enhancements/ |
| The Analytics Data Hack | Follow these five steps: 1- Put the analytics tags from major ad networks on your website (e.g. FB, Google, LinkedIn). 2- Setup some custom page rules for the tags to monitor (e.g. sales page, products page, lead gen page, and thank you pages). 3- Connect your cart so it tracks by revenue. 4- Invest in driving 5,000 to 10,000 visitors to your pages to let your tags collect data. 5- Create extremely customized campaigns based on audience insights data from the ad networks that will be ROI GOLDMINES for you (e.g. LinkedIn will tell you specific job titles to target based on your conversions. Google will tell you in-market segments to target… sorted by which make you the most money!) | AdSkills | https://www.facebook.com/jus.brooke/posts/910725455925628 |
| The Facebook Ad Account Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Count the number of products you sell. 2- Create a new Facebook ad account for every product you sell. When you’re advertising multiple products per account (pixel) you are confusing the pixel. It doesn’t know which customer for which product. One product per ad account trains your pixel and Facebook’s algorithm to give you better results. 3- Run ads for that product only using that ad account. | PurpleLeads | |
| The Desktop To Mobile Fishing Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Run your first content promotion ad campaign on mobile. Mobile is cheaper traffic and it’s generally where people discover new things. 2- Retarget people who engage with your ad to your product or sales page on desktop and tablet. More people “convert” on desktop because it’s easier to buy on desktop. For image ads retarget people who like or comment on your post. For video ads, retarget people who watch 50% or more of your video. | Boom! By Cindy Joseph | |
| The Better Trained Pixel Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Export all your chargebacks and refunds. 2- Upload them as a custom audience. 3- Create a lookalike audience from these people and add it to your exclusion list. You’ll end up with a better trained pixel that chases good customers and blocks out refunders. | PurpleLeads | |
| The Ad Network Arbitrage Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Run AdWords paid search ads on Google to high buy intent keywords. 2- Pixel your AdWords traffic. 3- Use that pixeled audience as a Facebook custom audience to seed a high quality lookalike audience for Facebook ads. | ||
| The Local Marketing Hack | Follow these six steps: 1- Build a new 5-page mini-site with a domain that explains what you do and why people want it (eg: LowCostSolar.com). 2- Advertise on Google AdWords within 25 miles of your location on specific service-related keywords (eg: solar installation, solar servicing, etc). 3- Hire 4 star level writers on CrowdContent.com to write articles about your services. 4- Around your content, make an offer to convert your traffic to leads (eg: get free movie tickets when you come in for your appointment using a trackable #800 number). 5- Use Google Tag Manager to pixel anyone who visits your site and stays longer than 30 seconds. 6- Show people the same offer all over the Google Display Network and Facebook. | https://www.adskills.com/014 | |
| The Low Budget Advertising Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Retarget people who have seen the sales page for your product AND did not convert AND who are users of certain fan pages (eg: your biggest competitor). With this layered targeting, your audience will be very small, which allows you to spend less than $10 budget per day. 2- Create an ad promoting a case study that speaks specifically to your target audience so you can increase your click-through rate and skyroclet your conversions, which in turn will drive down the cost of your ad. | SamCart | http://www.digitalmarketer.com/buying-website-traffic/ |
| The Inbound Retargeting Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Add pixels to your site across these 8 ad networks: GDN, Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Taboola, Yahoo Gemini and AOL ONE. 2- Convert your inbound traffic into leads by retargeting them to blog posts with content upgrades across all 8 ad networks. | Optimizely | https://rocketshipgrowth.com/how-the-worlds-biggest-saas-companies-leverage-inbound-to-dominate-a-market-cae780d38bcd |
| The AdWords SKAG Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Target feature-specific keywords directly related to your product. 2- Put them into single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) 3- Drive people to feature-specific landing pages with a call to action to buy. | NetSuite, Zoho, Freshdesk | https://rocketshipgrowth.com/how-we-outcompete-ebay-on-google-adwords-without-a-big-ad-budget-885e22d4e619 |
| The PPC Soft Sell Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Run Google ads to a landing page to buy or hop on a demo call. 1-10% will convert. 2- To convert the other 90%+ retarget them with FB lead ads using a softer sell (like a case study). 3- Put leads into a marketing automation campaign (like an email mini course) and nudge them to buy or book a demo with your sales team. | Drip, SurveyMonkey, Pardot | |
| The Pixel Swap Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Find another company who sells to the same target customer as you do (but is non-competitive) and offer to partner by sharing retargeting pixels. 2- Use retargeting ads across Facebook to drive new, cost-efficient leads into the top of your funnel with a blog post and content upgrade. | New Relic, SendGrid, Runscope | http://marketingland.com/perfect-audience-launches-partner-retargeting-network-directly-target-others-sites-visitors-83518 |
| The AdWords Competitor Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Identify your unique point of difference (ie: value for money, features, reputation). 2- Target competitor branded keywords based on your USP (ie: features = [mailchimp features], value for money = [mailchimp pricing], reputation = [mailchimp review]). 3- Create a landing page that shows how you are better than your competitor in that area with a comparison table so your ad is more relevant and gets served. | Intercom, Quickbooks, Wrike | https://www.intercom.com/customer-support/zendesk-alternative |
| The Facebook Lead Ad Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Use FB lead ads to drive people to a lead magnet (eg: case studies for specific verticals, whitepaper, etc). You will increase conversions because when someone clicks on your lead ad, a form will open with the person’s FB contact information automatically populated. 2- Use marketing automation emails to nurture the lead into buying. | Infusionsoft, Salesforce, InsightSquared | |
| The Custom Affinity Audience Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Create an audience from people who have vistied specific websites you define (your competitors, blogs, industry publications, etc). 2- Target them with Google display ads. Someone seeing a display ad isn’t necessarily interested in your product just yet, so offer content that you think will be valuable and helpful to your prospects to build trust and brand awareness (eg: blog post, webinar, whitepaper, etc). | Zendesk, Intuit, Emma | https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497941?hl=en-AU |
| The Gmail Competitor Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- In AdWords create a Custom Affinity Audience from your competitors’ domains. 2- Show Gmail ads with your highest converting content to people who receive your competitors’ emails. | DigitalOcean | |
| The Paid Tech Stack Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Use a lead list tool like BuiltWith to build a list of decision makers that use a software product that have the same audience as you. 2- Upload the email addresses of the decision makers into a Custom Audience that you can run ads to. 3- Create a lookalike audience from that custom audience to target your ads at even more qualified prospects (start at a 1% lookalike audience, then scale up as you see results). | BuiltWith, Datanyze | https://kb.builtwith.com/custom-audiences/reaching-audiences-with-facebook/ |
| The YouTube Ads Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Use YouTube in-stream ads to target your most popular video content to specific YouTube channels relevant to your market. 2- Only pay if someone watches past 30 seconds. | Wishpond, Salesforce | http://www.digitalmarketer.com/youtube-ad-types/ |
| The Paid Content Promotion Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Inside Google Analytics go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages to identify your blog content with the highest email signup conversion rate. 2- Promote your highest converting blog post on one ad network (Facebook, Twitter, Outbrain, etc) for $5/day. | Netflix | https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/native-ads-201 |
| The GDN Content Upgrade Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Look at what sites are winning for your content topic. 2- See if you can buy ads on one of the top three ranked blog posts. 3- Make a “content upgrade” to convert that blog posts traffic into YOUR leads. | https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-hacks | |
| The Irresistible Offer Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- If your product value speaks for itself, add one email into your marketing automation. 2- In the email offer an incentive to buy or demo your product (e.g. See how our software works and get a $25 Amazon gift card). It may seem spammy, but many large B2B SaaS companies use it to generate qualified demos because it can move people from having you at #101 on their priority list to #3. | LeadPages, Bizible | http://www.bizible.com/blog/4-b2b-saas-growth-hacks-that-helped-bizible-raise-8m |
| The Customer Success Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Track people who sign up for your product. 2- When they sign up, retarget them with ads that go to a page for a free webinar or free call with your customer success team to make sure they have everything set up right in their business to prepare for success. | Heyo | https://rocketshipgrowth.com/how-to-increase-free-trials-to-paid-customers-with-onboarding-retargeting-5e8cc05e3756 |
| The Video Testimonial Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- After customers buy redirect them to a page with instructions for how to leave you a video testimonial. 2- Offer customers a $10 gift certificate in return for sending you a 30 second video testimonial you can add to your product page for social proof. | Boom! By Cindy Joseph | https://blog.boombycindyjoseph.com/boom-video-review-page-1/ |
| BONUS: CUSTOMER RETENTION HACKS | |||
| The Customer Support Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- After your support rep helps someone over chat, let the customer know you saw an opportunity on their account. 2- Try to get them to upgrade to a 3-year plan paid upfront for a discount. If it’s too much money for the customer, offer downsells to a 2 year, 1 year, 6 month then 3 month plan. | Bluehost | https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WJK8FagxJDlwrpx2Rl7UciqdW_mucYDx |
| The Customer Feedback Hack | Follow these five steps: 1- After a person signs up send them a congratulatory email that offers to send a gift of stickers in the mail. 2- In the email link to a Typeform that collects the user’s mailing address. 3- At the bottom, give people two optional response fields: 1) What brought you to [your product]? What problem were you looking to solve? 2) Anything we could be doing better? Any feature/product we are missing? 4- Use Zapier to send responses from those two fields into productboard. 5- Use productboard to bucket and rank feature requests by priority of user cohorts, and by how a feature fits into the broader vision for your product. | CloudApp | https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-marketing/customer-retention |
| The Product Reactivation Hack | Automatically send this email to users that haven’t used your product for 30 days: “I was wondering if you could spare a second to let me know what you thought of the product and if you have ideas on what we could do to improve? In return, I’ve gone ahead and added one month of the pro plan to your account for free.” | CloudApp | https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-marketing/customer-retention |
| The Sticky Product Hack | For every subscription level in your product, create a three-email series with a CTA to enable/walk them through the most important feature on that pricing tier (eg: Email #1 > Wait 1 Day > Email #2 > Wait 2 Days > Email #3 > End Campaign). Then start a 2nd three-email campaign to enable/walk them through the next most important feature in your product so you can create sticky users who are less likely to churn. | CoSchedule | https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-marketing/customer-retention |
| The Personalized Monthly Report Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Use a customer data tool like Segment to pipe the usage data from your product into a data marketing automation tool like Customer.io. 2- Setup data-triggers using “if/else” logic to give your customers actionable recommendations on where they can improve. 3- Automate the sending of a personalized Monthly Metrics Report that includes a summary of what your customer has achieved with your product during the month + actionable recommendations. | AdRoll | https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-marketing/customer-retention |
| The Product Gamification Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Track when customers hit a specific milestone in your app. 2- Send them a reward for hitting milestones + tips to get to the next level and a call-to-action to upgrade. For example, for a product that helps you grow your email list rewards could be: 1 Email Subscriber = Sumo Sticker (plus tips to get to 100 email subscribers). 100 Email Subscribers = Sumo T-Shirt (plus tips to get to 1000 email subscribers) 1000 Email Subscribers = Sumo Sunglasses (plus tips to get to 10000 email subscribers) 10000 Email Subscribers = Sumo Hat (plus tips to get to 100000 email subscribers) 100000 Email Subscribers = Sumo Taco Lunch | AdRoll | https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-marketing/customer-retention |
| The NPS Churn Reduction Hack | Follow these three steps: 1- Send a two question email to all customers 30 days after a purchase or 1 day after their free trial ends (for software). 2- Use this email template: Hi [First Name], Today marks 30 days since you bought [product name]. I was wondering if you might answer two short questions… 1. On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate [product name] 2. Would you refer [product name] to your friends? Why? Bob Smith Founder of [Biz Name] 3- If the NPS score is <6 thank them for their honesty and offer to jump on a call to help them out. If it is 6-8 offer to extend their free trial (or ask what it would take to get them to a 10). If it is >8 offer them an upgrade promotion. | Mention | http://fr.slideshare.net/mentionapp/mention-nps-process-reduce-churn-increase-customer-hapiness |
| BONUS: COMPANY CULTURE HACKS | |||
| The Anonymous Feedback Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Use an anonymous tool where employees can ask questions on topics that worry them. 2- Every two weeks stand up in front of the whole company and answer those questions. | Freshdesk | https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/building-a-unicorn-saas-company-girish-mathrubootham |
| The Annual Company Feedback Hack | Follow these two steps: 1- Send a “Start/Stop/Keep” Google form to everyone in your company asking three questions: What should we START doing? What should we STOP doing? What should we KEEP doing? 2- Review the feedback with everyone in the company and tell them what you’re going to take action on. | Sumo | https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScvXiT83E7vIuFCGxb2pAC6prSIc79RBEfBaslaIMV-4PqUaA/viewform |
| BONUS: PERSONAL FINANCE HACKS | |||
| The Financial Independence Hack | Follow these four steps: 1- Work out your annual living expenses. 2- Save 25x what your annual living expenses are. 3- Invest the money in an index fund. 4- Retire on the dividends and interest. (this is based on the assumption you can earn 5% investment returns after inflation during your savings years and you’ll live off a 4% withdrawal rate). | Mr. Money Mustache | https://tim.blog/2017/02/13/mr-money-mustache/ |
![[Info-Graphic] The Dark Side of Content Marketing](https://techblogcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dark-side-content-marketing-infographic.png "[Info-Graphic] The Dark Side of Content Marketing 4")
