Lincoln Murphy Presents... Traffic Hacking 43 Growth Hacking Tacitcs to Get Quality Prospects to Your B2B Saas Site

Lincoln Murphy presents... Traffic Hacking 43 Growth Hacking tacitcs to get quality prospects to your B2B SaaS site

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved Five Rules Before We Get Started 1. Know what your audience is looking for, what problems they have or what opportunities they want to take advantage 2. Talk to your audience, not about your product... at least at first... WIIFT! 3. Know how your audience ‘consumes marketing’ and where they are on the awareness ladder 4. Know where your audience hangs out online, what publications/blogs they read, who they listen to and trust, etc. 5. Know the goal for the traffic you're getting! Traffic doesn't matter - customers matter. So get 'em to take action when they get to your site.

Buy Now! 5. Convinced!

4. Beneﬁts of Your Solution Free Trial 3. Your Solution

2. Solutions Exist

Indoctrination 1. Problem

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http://sixteenventures.com/traffic-hacking

Do the Thing

Do the Thing Do the Thing Do the Thing Do the Do the Thing Thing *if you do things right and the stars align in your favor

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #1 - SEO If they don't search for info, all the SEO in the world won't matter SEO = Hope... Hope is a bad strategy! Know your audience and what they're looking for/the terms they use (use Google AdWords Keyword Tool... at least) and build your marketing site around that If you have an audience that is low on the awareness ladder, they aren't going to search you out... you need to go out to where they are and get them to come back to your site Oh, yeah... and putting all of your eggs in the Google basket might be a bad idea... you never know how Google will change it's algorithms next and cause your site to be ranked lower... even if you aren't doing anything "black hat"...

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #2 - Content Marketing Create compelling content that search engines like, but that your market likes (and shares) even more Contrary to popular belief, you don't create content just to attract people to your site (see #1 above)... you create it to engage with people, to get them to stick around, to know, like, and trust you and eventually use it to convince them to sign-up for your stuff. The higher-up on the awareness ladder people are, the less you have to do to convince them and the more actively they'll seek you out. Buy Content here: http://www.textbroker.com/ https://www.elance.com/ https://www.odesk.com/

Here are 41 other ways to generate traffic in no particular order... and this list is far from exhaustive!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #3 - Email List You should be building an email list before you launch and maintain lists of future/past and current customers; and market to them appropriately. If you aren't doing this, you're missing out. Period. This is a traffic source that you build organically and from swaps, customers, etc. Think about your mailing list like a bank account that you can reach into and pull traffic - and money - from on demand

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #4 - Alternative Products iPhone / Android Apps Kindle e-Books Installed Apps Stand-alone MVP Web Apps If it resonates with your audience and gets your name/link into their hands and doesn't cannibalize revenue streams... do it! Not necessarily FREE... apply a price, discount it 100%, drive up ratings, take off discount for public, offer discounts to select groups

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #5 - Video Marketing Google ❤ Youtube (also #3 search engine itself) Don’t have video ideas? Do a video overview for every blog post you write Put your URL as the first part of the description Use the keywords you want to rank for You can use other video platforms for hosting quality video - like VSLs - Wistia is who I use - on marketing pages, but also put those on Youtube for SEM

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #6 - Webinars Has that "live event" feel that people will work their schedule around to attend People know that they have to register and are OK with that You can even do automated ones - http://www.stealthseminar.com/, http://webinaragogo.com/ Market these independent of your product and use to convert to buyers/trials

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #7 - Swaps You do something for someone, they do something for you... in this case you each send each other traffic Get an industry pro to do a Webinar with you. They market the webinar to their list (another validation of their expertise) and you market to your list (you’re educating/indoctrinating/piggybacking on their trust) and you each get a list of participants who you can send to your site. Unbounce and KISSMetrics did a great swap in late 2012 Get someone to email out to their list about you; you do the same for them... share sign-up/opt-in lists with each other On your Post-Signup/Thank You page send traffic to them; they do the same... Get an extra month FREE when you sign- up for XYZ product!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #8 - Write Guest Blog Posts/Articles Write articles in the publications or on the blogs that your audience reads Think about adjacent products that your customers already use and write for them Including offline industry rags Get a byline (with a CTA) and/or include links in your post and you’ll get traffic from their readers

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #9 - Host Guest Blogs/Articles Get people to guest blog for you Everyone wants exposure If they have an audience, you just tapped into it! KISSMetrics has built a significant revenue stream using their blog - with tons of guest posts - to drive traffic into the top of the funnel http://blog.kissmetrics.com/the-neil-patel-method/ SEOMoz touts “1,634 Community Written Blog Posts” in their latest funding deck... they tap their community for content (and those posts are super-deep and ultra- informative)... and those people go on Twitter, Facebook, their blogs, etc. and promote their work... and their community friends do, too! HUGE!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #10 - Industry Expert Interviews Do interviews with industry experts and post on your blog/ site industry experts bring credibility and a built-in audience (an “expert” will waste no time in promoting their interview to their audience!) make someone from your team (CEO/leader ideally) available to be interviewed AS an industry expert leverage the idea in the second point above to promote your own expertise

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #11 - Interviews Outside your Industry Get Andrew Warner of Mixergy to interview you He'll write copy about you and give you a link to go along with the interview Or maybe you look to “tech” industry outlets Software CEO, Sandhill.com, Softletter, Think Strategies, etc. Extra-industry publicity can sometimes add to credibility But don't spend too much time outside your industry... do a few of these

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #12 - Infiltrate Online Communities Forums, LinkedIn Groups, etc. that are specific to your industry Get to know the moderator/owner so they'll help promote what you have to offer (but be prepared to play politics with some of the biggest egos online!) Find people in your industry on LinkedIn, see what groups they belong to, and join those http://www.postloop.com/ <== forum owners pay you to post content (either use that service or use as a guide) http://rankings.big-boards.com/ <== huge list of top forums

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #13 - Create Online Communities Create a forum Start a discussion list (put your URL in the sig) Create a LinkedIn Group SNT: Find people in your industry on LinkedIn, see what groups they belong to, join those, then create yours, and promote it to the other members of the group you’re in! Facebook Group

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #14 - Get Quality Backlinks Not just to boost SE rank - which may or may not work at any given time - this is to get TRAFFIC Go where your customers are and give them something to link to... don’t just ask random bloggers to link to your main page Give them a blog post or whitepaper (reverse squeeze!) to link to For SEM purposes, get some high-quality, contextual links by joining organizations - even locally - like the Chamber of Commerce Google’s always changing, but context will always rule(?)

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #15 - Conferences Speaking gives you credibility, a link (usually), and a built-in audience that you should leverage to send traffic to your site SNT: As you wrap up your speech, mention you had 3 other points you wanted to cover, but didn’t have time... go to mysite.com/confname to download those slides! (reverse squeeze) Sponsoring conferences/events - you will often get emails of participants; use cold-outreach tactics to drive traffic. SNT: Don’t expect too much traffic from a logo... so use a CTA instead if allowed! Attend conferences/events - treat it like the marketing opportunity it is... no reason you couldn't boost traffic from being around 400 like-minded, industry folks (SNT: little informal meetups)

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #16 - Pinterest If you have a visual component to your product, integrating with Pinterest could drive massive traffic to your site Know your audience and know where they hang out This is the #3 social network - behind Facebook and Twitter - in the world right now and the demographics are very specific... but if it works, it works This might make total sense for slidemotion.com either to use solely for marketing or - even better - to integrate with Pinterest and “pin” every photo (frame) in a video sequence... pull pics in from Facebook, pin them, then create a video from that and send all traffic from those pins to that video... MASSIVE TRAFFIC

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #17 - Be The Bonus Give your main or alternative product to adjacent product companies to use as a bonus Sort of like a swap, but you get a customer and not a trial or just an email address

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #18 - PPC Ads Google AdWords, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn Contextual and Congruent Not just text... some are graphical SNT: buy an action-oriented domain name to use in the ads... getyourapp.com Use Trada (http://www.trada.com/) or http://boostctr.com/ and tap into their massive network of micro-copywriters to create ads for you... Google just updated Adwords rotation, taking away great testing and replacing it with more revenue for them (one basket + all eggs = fail)

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #19 - Display Ads Pay Per Impression (generally; not always...) Google AdSense / Ad Networks / http://buysellads.com/ http://www.yabuka.com Disruptive and Incongruent (and Contextual... hopefully) SNT: take a picture of a text ad that is killing it for you and use that as your display ad

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #20 - Retargeting Serve ads to those that have already interacted with you http://retargeter.com <== tell ’em I sent you and they’ll give you 50% off of banner ad creation

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #21 - Newsletter Ads Classified Ad: Get a mention in someone else's newsletter Sponsor: The content is brought to them by you Solo: The entire email is all about you <== best one Use this to build your list, not to sell/try to get ’em to try your product Find them on your own, DirectoryOfEzines.com, Smart Brief, FierceMarkets, if you use Mailchimp you can try Wavelength to find adjacent newsletters, NewsletterDirectory.Co, etc. LaunchBit offers ads in 3rd party newsletters

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #22 - Twitter Use it to cultivate connections and spread your message w/ links back to your site Very often tweets/RTs are cultivated outside of Twitter... send an email to people asking for a Tweet/RT SNT: @'ing those in your industry = Cold Outreach via Twitter... and it works (if you follow the Cold Outreach rules) You can also buy Promoted Tweets directly from Twitter or use a company like BuySell Ads, IZEA, sponsoredtweets.com or adly.com You can even get Paris Hilton to Tweet for you... $4600 per tweet to her 7M+ followers through BuySellAds

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #23 - Web / App Directories Old School SaaS/App Listings Industry Specific There is simply no excuse for NOT being in every single directory out there Part 1: 100 Places to Promote your SaaS or Web App Part 2: 100 Places to Promote your SaaS or Web App

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #24 - Offline Direct Mail Use Offline to drive them online Snail mail volume is stupid low right now Take advantage of cheap postage and a lack of noise ...but be creative! Use pURLs in the copy, if possible/applicable SNT: send in a DHL envelope Use FedEx if you *really* want to make an impression - costs a lot, though!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #25 - Intermediaries Intermediaries = Channels Distributors /Trusted Advisors /VARs / SIs Xero uses Accounting Firms to promote their product Make your product something the Intermediary can use, too! Something that makes their life/core business easier/better/ faster and they’ll push it for you There are people out there that already have your audience's trust... make one sale - to the Intermediary - and they'll make hundreds or thousands of sales for you!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #26 - Facebook Page Don't just have one to have one Use this to drive traffic to your site and get people to opt-in to your mailing list, sign-up for webinars, download reports, etc. Use it to “engage” with people on-page, of course, but know the goal is to get them to take an off-page action and add them to your list/database/etc.

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #27 - Whitelabeling There might be people out there that could take your product into a whole new market better than you ever could... so let 'em! I know a number of people on both sides of the whitelabel equation that do QUITE well

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #28 - Affiliates Don't over-think this.... find someone that has the audience you want to reach and make a deal Groobix teamed with IM’er for Latin American market Profitably (now ActiveCell) hired a company to find affiliates Loop11 created a program themselves and had people selling for them in other languages/markets and finding new/ creative ways to sell their product. Let Affiliates sell your AltProd for 100% commission Do one-off Affiliate relationships... you might not have 1000's of affiliates, especially at first... have a couple that you trust and then scale it out

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #29 - Marketplaces / App Stores These are just another Distribution / Sales Channel From Traditional App Stores all the way to things like AppSumo Part 1: 100 Places to Promote your SaaS or Web App Part 2: 100 Places to Promote your SaaS or Web App Let’s you reach audiences you might otherwise not reach If you can reach those folks on your own, it might not be worth the cut app stores take... but if you couldn’t reach them, any cut is better than 100% of NOTHING!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #30 - Integrations Many companies do quite well piggybacking off of other companies that have an established audience WORKetc works with Evernote & Google Apps Freshdesk is in Google Apps Marketplace iMeet is integrated with Evernote FreeAgent is part of AppDirect and integrated with Basecamp ClientSpot is a FreshBooks integration partner Bidsketch is integrated with Highrise and Freshbooks

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #31 - Referrals Many people say referrals are the backbone of their business Few of those people actually have a system in place for getting referrals Don't make that mistake Leverage the audience/customer base you already have! Viral Expansion Loop (Oddly, free products do this really well while paid products usually suck at this)

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #32 - Testimonials / Case Studies Do full featured testimonials and case studies with companies known in your industry (SNT: Get them to write the case study for you!) Piggy back off their credibility They’ll often promote it to their audience (especially if it is done in a way that makes sense for them to do that) Oh... and it doesn’t hurt to ask them to promote it, too! You can do PR against it It will likely speak the language of your market so people will find it People searching for those companies will find your site instead/as well! Piggyback on their fame!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #33 - Cold Email Outreach Scraped/bought lists you treat as one-off emails that you use to drive traffic / opt-in SNT: send people to a Wistia video w/ ?wemail or even better the ?wkey (http://files.wistia.com/tools/identity- tagging/index.html) url param so you automagically have know who clicked and who didn't without "tracking" the link and killing trust (awesome for swaps/solo ads/etc.) you can also do this by having a script that tracks URL params... even GA can do this AES used Hubspot and got zero leads... then they started doing CEO and are getting 150 leads/month...

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #34 - Cold LinkedIn Outreach LinkedIn = B2B Gold Use the scraped/bought lists to import into LinkedIn and when they connect with you, they’ve “opted-in” and you can message them to drive traffic Add them in bulk (this will send everyone the “I’d like to add you...” generic message. This can be good if you want to conceal your intentions If you want or use Rapportive to do it one at a time and send a relevant message SNT; use unsubscribes from your mailing list... I’ve had ~30% accept and now I haven't lost touch... they’ll see my updates and I can reach out directly

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #35 - Press Releases Gets you out there, gets your link out there, lets Google know that you're doing something... good or bad, it works... do a press release for everything, even your blog posts! Make sure you include a link... oh, but you might also get picked up by the media People that say press releases are dead just wish they were http://www.prweb.com/ http://www.businesswire.com/ http://www.prlog.org/ (FREE)

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #36 - Win Awards Sign-up for, nominate yourself for, and otherwise try to win awards Many cost money to “be nominated” but it gives you a "credible" reason to do a Press Release and gets your name out there (think Think Strategies’ BoSS awards) in front of the awarders(?) audience Some are legit competitions which you should still enter because they give you links and exposure generally, even if you don’t win!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #37 - Target GMail Users w/ AdWords Use AdWords to target GMail users If your potential customers use GMail, they likely spend A LOT of time in GMail every day if your customers are large enterprises that use Exchange or Lotus Notes... this might be a stupid idea. Use “thought stringing” - put yourself in the middle of their conversation, hit on Book Titles, Names & Competitors, competitor Unsubscribe Info or specific subject lines. If you get too granular or specific you could hit the "low search volume" response from Google and they won't run your ad. Expand out until they do.

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #38 - HARO Help a Reporter Out (http://www.helpareporter.com/) When you see a story that's relevant to your industry/niche/ expertise... reach out and get your company mentioned (don't forget to explicitly ASK for a link to your site!)... Oh, and you can place ads in HARO.... your industry experts waiting for a way to get mentioned by the media and then they see your ad? Use that power wisely! 75% open rate (is what they claim; and I’m sure that is legit) and ads start cheap; like $300.

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #39 - Cold Calling Pick up the phone Make 25 calls per day, 22 days per month (550/month total) Get 25% to go to your site (maybe get a domain that’s easy to say and easy to understand over the phone) You've got 138 new, targeted leads... send 'em to a webinar reg or other reverse squeeze. You might have to do less-than-scalable things at first to figure out what you need to do to scale later

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #40 - Q&A Sites Find questions on Q&A sites like Quora, Focus, or LinkedIn and use that to write blog posts around, create videos about, or otherwise create content... Have a VA or staff member scour the Q&A sites for questions then put them in a spreadsheet and then work off of that or set up something automated like http://ifttt.com/ SNT: Be sure to note how many followers a question has on Quora and answer them in the order of most followers to least... use your time wisely and go for leverage Then "answer" the question with a link to your content

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #41 - Sponsored Content Basically you just pay for an article on a site If the place you do this has reach and you do it right, it can be REALLY worth it; think product reviews, etc. You can buy promoted blog posts through http://izea.com/ or http://www.postsgenius.com/ Many industry magazines will publish an article from you only if you also buy an ad... sleazy on their part, yes... effective? very.

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #42 - Speak to Paid Groups Are there membership sites, private paid communities, etc. where your target audience hangs out? Make yourself available to be a presenter These are powerful because the audience PAID to be there... they are customers of the group and have shown that they are willing to pay money to take action There is also the rule of Commitment and Consistency at play here... they paid to be a part of the group and as a way of defending that decision are more likely to buy something the group is promoting

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com #43 - Offer Deals to Groups In the SaaS/Web App world, if I was selling a product to those folks I’d offer a deal to startup incubators, VC portfolios, Universities, Sponsored programs like Microsoft Bizspark, etc. ... Bonus of offering something to Universities... do it right and get high-trust .edu domains linking to you! You might offer free deals to these groups in exchange for links, buzz and a reason to do PR... plus, they’re young or young companies and they’ll grow up knowing, liking, and trusting you... not a bad way to guarantee some future business!

Copyright© 2012 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com This is from an 85-minute presentation I did in 2012... if you’d like to watch the video of that presentation, you can here:

http://sixteenventures.com/traffic-hacking

If anything, take away the idea that SEO & Inbound Marketing are only 2 ways and that this list of 41 other ways is FAR from comprehensive!

Think outside the box and use your imagination!

Oh yeah, you could also get traffic from... t-shirts, stickers, QR codes, Social Sharing widgets, email signatures, out of office notifications, transactional email,

invoices/receipts, commenting on blog posts, business cards...

Lincoln Murphy Sixteen Ventures [email protected] http://sixteenventures.com @lincolnmurphy