The hype around growth hacking has not only affected people in the Silicon Valley but every place in the world where an ambitious and determined entrepreneur has ever lived. As of April 2017, LinkedIn has 3,604 people with the term “growth hacker” in their title. A majority of them are startup founders and CEOs.
So why do these founders want to be known as growth hackers rather than entrepreneurs, founders or CEOs? Changing your title on your business profile does not make you a growth hacker.
Growth hackers are people who accelerate growth within a company. They have decisive ideas about growth, virality and the success of a product or company that are needed to bring the company to the front and center of the public, media and potential investors.
Airbnb, Dropbox and Paypal are just a few examples of companies that hacked their growth. Here are some tactics I used to generate HashChing $70 million dollars via a viral video, I also built a 70,000 email list for Las Vegas based company ROCeteer and helped dozens of other companies scale online; Lavishlife, MyOnlineAdvisors, TWIP, Titlexchange and dozens more;
1. Use StumbleUpon to increase your exposure exponentially.
Ask a few people to share on the platform and it will be seen by hundreds (if not thousands). This platform works by the more sharing the more people see it, so if you start the loop with a few friends sharing, you can get seen by over 5,000 new people daily.
2. Use swipe files within the StumbleUpon blogs.
A “swipe file” is a collection of proven ad/marketing copy, such as guaranteed successful article headlines. (Check out the Swiped.co community for more information.) With these, I get 5-12% conversion on each blog post instead of asking for bland ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ that will receive 0-1% conversion, I have tested it hundreds of times.
3. Create a valuable whitepaper or e-book and leverage the power of Slideshare.
The way I’ve traditionally done this is by creating a valuable whitepaper that solves a pain point then post on SlideShare. I generally get about 150 views from sharing on social media and among friends and family. If you get that many very quickly when you launch it, LinkedIn editors will push it to be featured and you’ll get about 20,000 hits within days. On the last slide, make sure you put a call-to-action (CTA) where you direct viewers to your website to convert.
4. Measure everything that is measurable.
Growth hacking is about tweaking every single variation on your website to convert better. In your landing pages, also have data-driven images (i.e. graphs or statistical data). These convert much higher than regular images, by 20% on average.
For example, some things that you should measure are which images/words in an ad give you the best response rate, which demographic segment is engaging with you (it may not be who you initially thought), and where you get your best rate of return.
5. Build a strong referral program.
Your customers love you, right? So let them generate more customers for you with as little as $0 acquisition cost (CAC). This increases the lifetime value of your customer and your product goes viral. Look at Uber: They offer $10 to an existing user to invite their friend to join, while giving away $10 as well. That creates a $0 CAC for them, and very little downside on their end.
Tamir Vigder is one of Australia’s youngest and most successful entrepreneurs. Tamir established growth hacking business, Tukushor, at the age of 15 and has achieved significant results for well known businesses including HashChing and ROCEeteer. Tamir is fast attracting an enviable list of high powered clients and is aiming to establish a presence in New York before the end of the year. He manages his busy schedule while also completing his final year of high school, by rising at 4am every morning to connect with his clients in San Francisco.
