27 Growth Hacking Tactics to Use in Your Blog

Oftentimes growth hacking is misunderstood, but it's not a bad thing at all in case if you want to grow your startup, blog, and build a good product with limited resources.

Growth hacking is extremely analytical. It's usually based on data-driven and experiment-based processes.

It involves exploring new growth opportunities and customer experience improvement, ranging from awareness and acquisition to product optimization and referrals.

Quick facts to better understand growth hacking

Everyone wants to grow their audience or customer base fast and acquire millions of users in a short span of time.

An engineer or a designer can be a growth hacker as much as a marketer can.

A coder that thinks about a customer experience and not only the code can build a better product.

Designers, by definition, do a better job if they think about users.

Startups generally don't have enough resources for traditional marketing, and this is where growth hacking becomes handy.

Because the main philosophy of growth hacking is using inexpensive, creative, and innovative methods to grow the audience exponentially.

The way that a product works allows it to market itself in a certain way.

Often times ideas and products spread by word of mouth, and that's one of the goals of growth hacking.

Growth hacking is applicable on all funnel levels like awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.

Growth hacking is tightly involved in product development.

How blogs help in growth hacking

Writing evergreen content in a blog is the common lead generation strategy, among others, but that's not the only way how a blog can help grow a startup or driving products sales.

Sharing stories and use cases improve the transparency of your business. People get familiar with your product, and they're more willing to buy it. You can get more sign-ups than competitors just because you have a knowledge base that's already helping people out.

Email is the most used electronic media, according to stats. The number of people who check email is around 70%. It's significantly greater than social media.

Blogs and email lists work great in pairs. You can find many examples where people make 6 figures and more just from the blog and newsletter.

There are so many ways how a blog can help in growth hacking.

I've created an ultimate list of tactics that I'm going to share with you...

Growth Hacking Tactics

Ask and answer questions

Instead of building a demo and testing how it fits the market, your product development starts by asking your potential customers questions.

Get feedback on your ideas soon if you can.

Product/Market-fit

Validate your idea before investing a lot of time building it.

Focus on improving your existing product to attract the right and enthusiastic audience.

Speed over perfection

Figure out quickly what works rather than building something from scratch and fail on the product-market fit stage.

The right mindset is the key here. A less-talking-more-doing mentality is wrong here.

Make data-driven decisions

Data helps to make the right decisions and where to focus most of your time.

What product improvement would bring the most growth?

Which type of users brings most of the value?

Research and blog using the data you found

Data analytics

• You need to know what's slowing you down.
• What to improve in order to fix it.
• Make decisions execute, and test ideas based on data.

Put out free content if you don't have an idea yet

Create a blog and create content around the niche where you want to build your product.

Build your email list and launch your product when it's ready for your blog audience.

Create an e-book or email newsletter where you communicate an idea and engage with your audience.

Customer profiles

who would get the max benefit from your product?

cater exclusively to those to your ideal customer in the beginning

Invite-only access

Mystery always brings a fraction of skepticism tho. Please make sure you explain your product in an easy-to-understand way, and it's targeted to your ideal audience.

Growth Hacker Funnel

People are unpredictable. Blogs and landing pages are usually being visited chaotically. A funnel helps to direct this energy to achieve a certain percentage of conversion.

A growth hacking funnel in most cases might look like this:

1. Acquisition — getting visitors.
2. Activation — first experience and turning visitors into users.
3. Retention — keeping visitors coming back.
4. Revenue — monetization.
5. Referral — get them to tell other people.

Growth Hacking Acquisition

Viral — make your idea or a product popular and one of the top discussions.

Sticky — people discuss your product for a long time because it's relevant for them.

Paid — invest in your audience to gain profit later on.

Retention Hacking

• Email marketing
• Newsletter
• Chat messages when someone visits your site
• Message specification — show different messages depending on the page or area people are visiting irresistible offers.

Viral Coefficient

The viral coefficient number tells you how many new visitors are brought into your blog or a landing page by your existing users.

If every 100 visitors to your blog bring in 200 new, then your viral coefficient would be 2.

Basically, anything above 0 is good, but I wouldn't recommend focusing on this number if you're just starting out.

Build in public

Share your building process, new features that are a work in progress or launched soon. Share updates and product improvements. 

Create and share content around stories about customers support and how you helped people with your product

Community Hashtags in Twitter

Twitter, in general, has a low engagement, and it’s tough to be seen by your target audience if you don’t have a significant following and/or publish random tweets.

Try to find community hashtags that people use to tweet on topics close to you or your product.

This is a more focused approach, and it’s easier to be seen by like-minded people.

Segmentation

Segmenting your visitors and providing a more specific user experience for each segment drastically improves customer experience.

Referral marketing

Referrals are economically great even tho this tactic might look difficult and expensive in the beginning.

The cost per action of referral customers is usually less, but convert leads relatively faster than using other methods. Also, such customers have a higher lifetime value which I'll explain more further.

Shares and backlinks

Generally, more backlinks equal a higher ranking of your blog or a product page, which means more visits, active users, and so on.

Promoting your content is the key here. Moreover, I've stumbled upon a formula where you spend only 20% on creating content and 80% on actually promoting it. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but it pays out later.

Trends

Use trends as much as possible. People like new things even if it's an interpretation of the old concept, but visually or technically, it's new in some way.

You can always add something so that your blog or a product feels like a breath of fresh air.

Related Topics

Covering the topics that are slightly related to your niche helps to reach a bigger audience. And in some cases, it's a way of finding new markets and opportunities.

Influence marketing

The most straightforward way to get traffic to your blog or a landing page is to reach out to influencers and ask them to link to your page or share it.

Of course, it might be expensive in some cases, and mostly it depends on the following and engagement.

On the other hand, this can be really good traffic and a good return on investment.

Relationship marketing

The best way to build a good relationship with bloggers is to writing guest posts.

Building genuine relationships like this will lead to more shares and backlinks, which is a big difference in the traffic you can get to your blog.

Guest post research is normally a tedious task, but you can find lists and collections of websites in your niche where you can submit your guest posts.

Infographics

Humans are mostly visual learners, and graphic materials have great value because sometimes it's easier to see a visual representation of something instead of reading thousands of words.

Also, infographics can be easily re-purposed for platforms like Pinterest. It creates an additional opportunity to build backlinks and drive some traffic.

Content upgrades

To make your visitors more engaged with your content and blog in general, you can have add-ons like checklists, videos, email courses, templates, or a series of articles that serve as a continuation.

Analytics

Where do the majority of your visitors subscribe?

What's their lifetime value, and how it impacts your business?

You can easily repeat past successes if you find out what works best for you.

Your success can be predictable if you use analytics so you can plan properly and improve over time.

Key Performance Indicator

Basically, it's a number that helps you understand how things are going with your blog or a startup.

You might want to know how many new subscribers you get daily or weekly.

Or what percentage is bouncing from a published piece of content or a landing page.

Another metric would be how many people canceled their subscriptions today.

You can set an experiment such as an a/b test, focus on a single KPI and iterate on it until you get a positive result. And if you don't, then focus on another idea.

Lifetime Value

You can spend a lot of time dealing with one client that's actually on a free plan and missing out on helping those who actually pay you for long periods of time.

Lifetime Value or LTV is a metric that shows the amount of money that one customer spent in total using your product or as a paid member.

Curiosity

Being highly analytical is important but not least important than coming up with new ideas. It might drastically change the success of your business if you dare to implement some of the ideas, at least as a test.

Curiosity Examples:

• Changing user experience in a way that people spend more time on a blog or use a product;
• Implement fluid pricing and allow new customers to set the price, or change the price multiple times until you see which numbers work best in your case;
• Free upgrades in certain use cases;
• Partnership programs that allow others to advertise your blog or product for a percentage from sales;
• New homepage;
• Several landing pages instead of one;
• Changing the vocabulary that's being used in the interface and making it more fun;
• Using funny gifs in customer support.

Growth Hacking Examples

Dropbox is just selling space on a disk, but the way they marketed their product and introduced it to the right community led to success.

Uber — offered discounts and a $5 credit for the next ride if people share the app with others.

Buffer — wrote 150 guest posts in nine months, which helped them to gain 100,000 users.

PayPal — gave out nearly $60 million of incentives using their referral program.

Dollar Shave Club — created a viral video in which they advertised the idea of sending new razor blades for $1 every month. It's been viewed 19 million times in a short period of time.

Airbnb — leveraged Craigslist by emailing the homeowner in new listings and asking them if they'd like to list on their site, then after some success with this tactic, they have written an automated script to scale it up.

Final words

There is an infinite number of growth hacking tactics that you can use to grow your blog or a startup.

After applying 10 or 20 tactics, you might come up with a lot more on your own. And that's the point. It would be best to start somewhere, but the more specific actions you do, the better it's for your business.

The truth is that there is a high probability that you might use a hundred or couple of hundreds of tactics before you see a crazy influx of traffic and money rolling in.