When connecting with people on LinkedIn (for B2B outreach), test not including a message with your outreach request.

We’ve found that no message appears ambiguous and, as a result, less like a sales pitch. People accept the request more often.

In contrast, a templated message definitely looks like outreach automation, and it triggers people’s reflex to ignore you.

Most video content is poor. Here's MrBeast's technique for creating videos that get engagement and shares:

1. Describe the video's value in the first five seconds. Don't make users guess what they'll get by watching.
2. Ask a question you don't resolve until the last five seconds. This is the hook that gets users to watch until the end of the video—and satisfies them when the question is answered.
3. Create fewer quality videos over many lesser-quality videos. The YouTube algorithm favors high-quality content. One amazing video will grow your channel more than ten good videos.
4. Integrate quick cuts. Don't give people time to ask if they're bored.

Watch the first 30 seconds of Ali Abdaal's video here to see a job well done.

If you're building an audience on Twitter, consider this:

Growth on Twitter comes from retweets. Retweets get your content in front of completely new audiences, instantly.

We ran a poll to figure out why people retweet. Here were the top 3 responses:

1. To give kudos.
2. To signal which side of a debate they're on.
3. Save and bookmark for later.

So use this to build your audience on Twitter:

• Be concise and novel. People retweet to give kudos to novel, elegantly articulated ideas.
• State contrarian findings. People retweet to signal that they're on your side of the discussion.
• If you really know your subject, tweet step-by-step threads. People retweet to save longer-form content to reference again later.

Links from mainstream news outlets carry a ton of weight:

• They have high domain authority and improve your startup's keyword ranking in Google.
• They have some of the largest audiences on the internet and provide valuable brand awareness and referral traffic.

But most startups only focus on PR for things like fundraising and product launches. That'll only get you so far. To see a real growth lift from earned media strategies, consider intentionally creating content that’s optimized for pickup by news outlets.

Here's how you can do it. Make your content:

1. Relevant: Focus on your publisher's audience first. Re-frame your briefs and think about how to make your content broadly appealing so that your stories get picked up.
2. Objective: Publishers won't link to a story that’s obviously stuffed with keywords or product links. Create content that’s objective and authoritative—not salesly.
3. Timely: Weave in current events and cultural trends. Why would a journalist be motivated to link or reference the article today? Find a hook and use it when pitching.
4. Unique: What makes your story different? Use localization, first-party data, and engaging visualizations. The best way to stand out is to provide a unique, fresh angle that a journalist couldn’t access without referencing your story.

News publications are resource-constrained and looking for unique storytelling that will appeal to their readers. Make it easy for them by being a source of great, compelling content.

Most content marketers aren't thinking enough about distribution before writing. They often create too many single point-of-view and opinion pieces—neither of which have built-in distribution benefits.

Instead, consider interviewing subject matter experts, practitioners, and internal team members. Then create content written through their lens of expertise.

It's likely you'll get a bump in distribution:

• The experts you feature in your piece will be inclined to share it for you. (This works even better if you can work with practitioners who have engaged, online audiences.)
• Ask the people you interview to link to your post from their website. Backlinks to your new post send a positive SEO signal to Google.
• Insights from experts are more likely to be referenced by others than standalone brand opinions are. After the initial distribution boost, it's likely that other writers will reference your piece in their work.

A simple technique for more search traffic:

• Find a subreddit related to your business.
• Pop the subreddit link into Ahrefs (our go-to keyword generation tool) and look for the keywords that the page ranks for.
• Take the list of keywords and use them to optimize your content.
  

Keywords that Reddit ranks for are low-competition.

Reddit has a high domain authority and frequently ranks on page one. But Reddit pages don't tend to outperform great blog posts in search results.

Now that you have a list of low-competition keywords, build superior content that actually answers the searcher’s questions.

You can eventually outrank the original Reddit thread.

Google has an acronym for content they tend to rank higher in search. It's E-A-T:

• Expertise: The content’s author is knowledgeable in their field.
• Authority: The content, site, and author are authoritative.
• Trustworthiness: The content, site, and author are reliable.

Google uses E-A-T to rate page quality, along with factors like website reputation and page purpose. According to Google, all high-quality content takes a “significant” amount of one or more of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill.

To improve your E-A-T score:

• Commission content from knowledgeable creators.
• Make sure claims are substantiated and sources reputable.
• Showcase your brand’s credentials and awards.
• Create an informative “about us” page.
• Respond to all reviews (not just the good ones).

If your content strategy is fast and furious, rethink your approach. A churned-out article won’t just hurt your brand reputation and thought leadership. It will make Google bury your content.

Podcast downloads are highly concentrated within the top 1% of shows.

So how do you get traction for your own?

Well-known guests are the easiest solution to attracting listeners. They have fans who consume everything they create.

Good news: There are famous people who are willing to appear on just about any podcast—no matter how small—while promoting their book launches. They make it a goal to be hyper prolific.

1. Build a system around identifying famous people who do this.

• Browse Amazon's "coming soon" book list and make a list of authors.
• Search podcast guests on big shows to see if they recently launched a book.
• Use YouTube to find famous people who appear on smaller podcasts. Search "their name + podcasts" and see who shows up on tiny podcasts with small numbers of listeners.

2. Reach out to them to entice them to come onto your show:

• Highlight how their subject matter expertise overlaps your audience's interests.
• Always offer them the last cut in editing so they can appear as they'd like.

Now use their appearance to hook other huge guests: Your first big-time guest acts as social proof that your show is worthwhile.

If you're using your podcast as an acquisition tool, you face a real problem: It's notoriously hard to get conversions.

But you can use scarcity and urgency to convert listeners to your email list and nurture them down funnel. How?

Tease limited-time downloads they can only get that week.

Here's loosely how “Growth Marketing Today” does this at the beginning of their podcast:

1. Tease the episode highlights/benefits: “In this episode, you’ll learn x,y,z.” This hooks the listener.
2. Then, explain how you can save them time: “And before we begin, we’ve put all the actionable takeaways into a free PDF. Why take notes when you can just get them from me?”
3. Create Urgency: “Why get it now? Because once I publish next week’s episode, this goes back to costing $100.”
4. CTA: Grab it in the link in the show-notes or on our website.

The scarcity (you can only get the PDF this week) combined with the low maintenance ask (all you have to do is download it from our site) gets people to act quickly.

And to save time turning podcast episodes into notes, you can use a tool like Descript to quickly transcribe the audio, then edit it down to the highlights.

And what about all the listeners who listen months or years later? Offer them something else when they hit your landing page. Something related and still useful.

Marketers tend to create blog posts solely for top-of-funnel awareness, failing to take advantage of an opportunity to convert existing users.

Here are two ways to optimize your blog posts for the people further down your funnel:

• Offer a basic solution, and then pitch your product as a more effective one. Increase conversions by presenting your product as a better alternative.

• Example: Zapier could write an informational blog post showing customers how to manually manage their social media mentions. For the second half of their post, they could highlight how users could use Zapier to send social mentions to Slack, automating the entire process.

• Improve your CTAs. Over 20% of B2B blogs don't include CTAs in their posts. CTAs should offer a solution to the problem that your readers face after each article. You can drive people to:

• Related articles: Use for complex products that require multiple content touch-points.
• Newsletter sign ups: Use when you've just solved a problem for your readers and they're in a mindset to give you their email address for more content. E.g. "Sign up and we'll send you actionable growth tactics each week."

Give interested buyers a way to move further down funnel after reading your posts.

When writing for SEO, avoid chasing trophy keywords—words that have high traffic potential but drive little value for your startup.

Example: If your business sells software to accountants, a trophy keyword would be “accounting software,” which carries 28,000 monthly searches.

Though this term drives plenty of traffic, here’s the reality: High-intent, professional accountants will rarely ever search for such a generic term.

When you decide to attempt to rank for a keyword, avoid asking the most obvious question: What would drive the most traffic to my site? Instead, ask yourself:

• What terms would my target audience search for?
• What terms have the highest purchase intent?
• What terms would educate my audience and lead them to convert?

Then, act on your answers:

• Use Ahrefs to create a keyword list using the questions above.
• Measure them by competition and potential traffic.
• Then seed your target words in your page titles, headers, and content to rank quickly.

People use Google for three objectives:

1. To be inspired
2. To be educated
3. To execute

Using a standing desk as an example, we can use variations of the keyword “standing desk” to create a stream of relevant content for all buyers:

• “Minimalist standing desk home office"
• “Benefits of a standing desk”—Once a buyer has identified a product, they’re likely to start looking for practical reasons to buy. Benefit-focused content answers their biggest questions, solves their pain points, and moves them toward a purchase.
• “How to attach monitor to standing desk”—Once they’ve made a purchase, continue to educate with content about setup and product maintenance. Consumers who engage with your content and customer service are likely to buy from you again.

New content can take months to surface on search engine results pages.

But you can repurpose your old content to accelerate the ranking of your new content. Here's how:

• Figure out if you have any existing content that ranks for the keywords you're targeting. You can Google search using this format [site:yoursitename dot com keyword] to find ranked pages.
• Then redirect (for outdated pieces of content) or interlink (for pieces that are still relevant) these URLs to your new piece. This will give it an authority boost—a sign that Google uses to increase your content’s ranking.
• If you don't have any relevant content for interlinking, use an SEO tool (like Ahrefs) to determine high-authority pages on your site. Link these pages to your new content where it fits.

Your new piece of content now has an internal linking profile with authority, which will help it to rank quicker, and better, on Google.

Landing page copy is difficult to optimize. You need a sufficient level of traffic to run accurate A/B tests, but driving traffic to your landing page is costly (you're paying per click just to get people to the landing page you're testing).

Consider running ads to test and refine your landing page copy.

Since your ads will get significantly more impressions than your landing pages, you'll be able to get statistically significant results on your copy, quickly.

Try this:

• Create multiple copy variations to test in Facebook's ad manager. Instead of conversions, focus on click-through rate. The goal is to determine which copy incites the most engagement.
• Test until a clear winner emerges. Use the winning ad copy as your landing page's headline, sub-headline, and body copy.

People checking out your pricing page are likely high intent prospects.

Here's a quick copy fix to turn more of them into customers: Try reframing your pricing copy to include highly valued features for free.

• Before: "$100 per month for up to 10 hours of transcription"

          What your buyer thinks → "10 hours for $100 is $10 per hour. That's pretty pricey..."

• Optimized: "$100 per month. Your first 1000 subscribers are free!"

           What your buyer thinks → "$100 is pretty cheap for what I'm getting..."

Consider getting feedback from your users to understand what they value most about your product. Repackage your product to offer that value "for free" with the purchase of your product at full price.

While most marketers know they should be tapping influencers to sell their products, few know how to find the right influencers for the long-haul.

Here's what to look for:

1. Seek long-term relationships over one-off campaigns: Brands and products that are reinforced over time to an influencer's loyal following lead to deeper affinity. Consider working with influencers who have an interest in becoming a true representative of your brand.

2. Consider prioritizing influencers with high engagement across multiple platforms: This is a sign that their audience is engaged and excited about their content—and that they didn't just fall into meme-based fame on one channel.

3. Most startups should start with micro-influencers over macro-influencers: Influencers with smaller followings are more accessible than their celebrity counterparts. But, more importantly, relatively small followings lead to more trust. Pick creators with smaller follower counts (5,000-25,000), and tailor your message to what that audience trusts the creator to know about.

Keep in mind that influencers can outlast mediums. Ask yourself: If Instagram was to become irrelevant tomorrow, would the creators you're working with still have influence?

Influencer marketing on TikTok requires a different approach than Instagram and YouTube.

TikTok has a high variance algorithm—the impressions that a creator’s average post gets isn’t constant. If a video is good, you get boosted. It’s that simple.

Smaller influencers have more power than they do on other platforms. So it's worth taking a chance on smaller creators if they’re very talented and you believe in their ability to break out.

Here's a suggested strategy:

• Use an app like Swipehouse to find creators that fit your brand. Use data. Avoid trying to manually wing it with seemingly "on brand" influencers.
• Consider splitting your budget: Work with a few bigger creators (20%), but take bets on a large number of small creators (80%).
• Pay with gifts: For the smaller creators (less than 50k followers), you can send products in exchange for content and exposure. They’re likely running their TikTok account on the side, rather than relying on sponsorship income to pay the bills.
• Give them creative control: Give creators even more creative freedom than you would on other platforms. Due to the algorithm, they really need to hit an authentic nerve for videos to go viral.

Giving influencers coupon codes and special links to share helps account for some conversion.

But they won’t tell the whole story—people often hear about your product from an influencer, but think about it later and come back to your site in a way that’s not tracked to that particular influencer.

The workaround? Combine analytics data with an attribution survey.

• Add a post-purchase attribution survey and ask customers where they heard about you first. (There are tools like Enquire for Shopify that get 80%+ completion rates for post-purchase surveys.)
• List influencers as the option.
• Even better if you break it down by channel (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.)

While your link data may show a low ROAS, you’ll likely find that your influencers are actually bringing in a high ROAS once the survey data is accounted for—justifying influencer marketing as a profitable channel for your brand.

It's not just your customers who can refer—your best influencers can refer other influencers to your brand.

Once you find a great long-term influencer partner and you’re ready to scale up, it’s worth incentivizing your partner to activate other great influencers.

Here’s how to do it:

• Create a referral system for your long-term influencer to sign up other influencers.
• Give them a percentage of sales generated by the influencers they refer and activate.

They’ll be motivated to sign up other great influencers because they’re paid based on the performance of those influencers.

Now your long-term influencer partner isn’t just your advertiser—they’re incentivized to help you scale influencer marketing as an acquisition channel.

If you run a subscription business, here's a tactic that can increase your LTV and ROAS (return on ad spend):

Offer discounts for groups.

Think of group discounts like Spotify family plans—users get a discount (say, 10% off) for joining your subscription together.

There are two key benefits:

1. Acquisition: Users are incentivized to bring in friends, since the initial users benefit from the discount. So the group discount becomes an acquisition mechanism.
2. Retention: Individuals within discount groups tend to cancel less frequently, since doing so would make their friends pay more. As a result, retention increases.

Bonus: If your store is built on Shopify, you can use an app like Skio to test this.