Josh Fechter

The Growth Mindset

SaaS B2C Marketing – Everything You Need to Know

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design-and-publish

B2C marketing in SaaS is just as much about the product as it is about the actual marketing. If you can build a product worth marketing or even a product that has marketing built-in, then you’re off to a great start. B2C marketing is easier said than done, though. The goods news? There are patterns you can copy.

The best founders and marketers? That’s exactly what they do.

Know that B2C marketing success isn’t given to those with the most talent. For example, Melanie Perkins was a teacher who focused on educating students on InDesign, Photoshop, and other design software programs.

She told bbc.com that “It could take a whole semester to learn the very basics. Even the simplest tasks, like exporting a high-quality PDF file, could take 22 clicks.”

Rather than keep complaining, she built a solution that almost marketed itself. A solution that’s worth over a billion dollars today. You might’ve heard about it. It’s called Canva.

If you want to build the next Canva or if you’re looking for inspiration, then you need to start with a few examples.

B2C SaaS Company Examples

  • Netflix is worth over a billion dollars today with 140 million paid subscribers. It’s widely considered the leader in B2C marketing. It’s also believed they have the best data scientists in the world working on its personalization engine to give you the right shows, episodes, and previews at the right time.
  • Spotify has over 80 million paid subscribers and over 200 million users today. It’s taking on the music industry by storm with its freemium model.
  • Canva is one of Australia’s unicorns. This design software is used by around 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies across 190 countries, with more than 10 million users.
  • Duolingo has over 300 million users and is valued at over 700 million dollars. However, they’ve yet to nail down down a sustainable monetization source as their mission is to provide free language education to the world.
  • Slack a workplace communication software has over 8 million daily active users. It scaled within the workplace by people benefiting from more of your peers joining. The network effect has led to explosive growth.

B2C Marketing Examples & Parallels

Even though these examples aren’t all SaaS specific, they are B2C marketing specific or work in parallel. In other words, they can all be applied to SaaS models. B2C marketing in SaaS is about being creative enough to pull from other similar marketing strategies even if it’s not a 1:1 with the industry. To inspire you, here are five ways companies are marketing to consumers:

1. The Hustle’s Ambassador Program

The Hustle’s ambassador program is a unique addition to their renowned newsletter where if you refer enough people to join you get swag and other goodies. If you refer six hundred people, you can attend their events free for life.

2. Ample’s Facebook Group to Engage their Core Users

Ample, a popular meal shake for athletes and techies has a Facebook Group to engage their core users. They operate on a subscription model as well. I’m a personal fan as I drink sixty of their bottles every month.

3. Corepower’s Black Tag Membership

Corepower has a unique business model where you can attend in-person for their classes, but they offer an ambassador subscription model. Unlike The Hustle, you need to pay to be an ambassador and part of this “cool yogi club.” By doing so, you get access to free workshops, unlimited yoga, 20% of teacher training, and more.

4. Airtable’s Invite a Coworker

Airtable is the upgraded version of Google Sheets. It’s widely considered to be one of the slickest collaborative SaaS companies next to Slack. Similar to Slack, it relies on a network effect to attract more users.

5. Webflow’s YouTube Channel and Evangelism

The Webflow team creates numerous tutorials around thei product. They’ve hired an evangelist, Nelson Abalos also known by his YouTube username “pixelgeek to help create and distribute their content.

Canva’s B2C SaaS Marketing Case Study in Personalization

To give you a little history of Canva. The software was launched in 2012. By 2014, it had over 150,000 users and opened to the public. Today, they’ve raised $86 million dollars and are continuing to expand exponentially.

Melanie noted in this article that in order for Canva to take off, it’d require a seamless onboarding process personalized to the individual user.

In order for Canva to take off — we had to get every person who came into our product to have a great experience in a couple of minutes.

Melanie further explained that because they were breaking the norm of the idea that design is difficult to learn, it meant she needed to change how people perceived their design abilities.

We needed to change their own self belief about their design abilities, we needed to give them design needs and we needed to make them feel happy and confident clicking around. We needed to get them to explore and play in Canva. No short order! So we spent months perfecting the onboarding experience paying particular attention to users’ emotional journey.

As a result, after they perfected the onboarding, many people would take note and even Tweet about it. To that end, the Canva onboarding served as their primary marketing channel.

If you go to Canva’s homepage, you’ll notice that they ask you to define your role whether you’re a small business, student, or even a teacher. From there, they provide you relevant content to what you select.

Depending on what you select, you’ll then see a list of the most common templates for that persona.

If you selected the “Large company” persona, you’ll be prompted to share your designs with your team before you see the templates. This is an example of well-executed personalization to your user persona.

Once you’re in, you’ll see the most common templates used for the persona that you chose. For some personas, it will take you right into the design editor.

They’ll even cater the copy to the chosen persona as well. Often, you’ll see on SaaS pricing pages, it says “Most Popular Choice” when you’re looking to choose between several different prices. In this case, they have the same copy except for in their web app to make you take action. Notice the text below “Popular for small businesses.”

Duolingo’s B2C SaaS Marketing Case Study in Personalization

When Duolingo’s founders realized that there was a huge market interested in learning English based outside of the United States, they took action. The founder noted the problem they were solving:

“The majority of these people [who want to learn another language], like 800 million of them, are learning English, and don’t have very much money…The majority are not learning French because they want to get ready for a trip to Paris over the summer. They’re learning a language to get a job at a call center.” – Luis von Ahn

Today, Duolingo offers over thirty languages, which has resulted in a number of B2C marketing changes for personalization. And, even though they do provide software as a service, they’re still trying to understand their monetization paths.

One of my favorite parts about Duolingo is they have you select attributes to help better personalize your experience with their software. As a result, you’re likelier to stay and finish learning a language.

Not only do they know what language you want to learn, but they know how committed you are to doing so. This way they can send you reminders in parallel to help increase retention. I’m sure the selected daily goal has a correlation to power users as well.

Because Duolingo now has you invested by a couple of steps, you’ll feel more inclined to give them your login info. When people commit to a goal, psychology says they don’t like changing their mind. To stay consistent, they’ll have an additional incentive to log in.

Next, they want to see whether you’re an experienced user. Notice how the commitment hasn’t escalated either. Because this is a softer ask then the previous, people will continue forward in the onboarding journey.

Once you’re through, the app is ready to give you an incredible experience. One worth marketing the product without spending the dollars on marketing to do so.

The real magic comes in word-of-mouth marketing. People are likelier to recommend a product their friends will have a great first experience with, especially if that experience happens in only ten seconds.

To add to that experience, Duolingo uses a number of nifty ways to increase retention through its first few days and beyond.

One of these ideas that moved the needle was the concept of the “streak.” The word was taken from the gaming industry, which happens to be a popular origin for many other marketing strategies and tactics.

How it works is if you come back to use Duolingo the following day, they’ll reward you with experience to access new levels and add another +1 to your streak. The best part: the higher your streak, the harder it is to break. Just like any habit. It works when you work it.

As Jeroen from Salesflare notes, the team also introduced “weekend amulets”, “streak repair”, “streak freeze.” These features helped people believe they can make up for their failures. Introducing the amulet alone was responsible for a 4% increase in 14 day retention.

They continued to find ways to increase retention with the introduction of the in-app coach called “Duo.” Duo is Duolingo’s owl mascot. Not everyone fell in love, but it moved the needle.

To be exact, it improved 14-day retention by 7.2%. Part of this can be attributed to the idea that people perform more consistently with social pressure. “Duo” as the mascot that’s always there provides that pressure.

Squibler’s SaaS B2C Marketing Case Study in Personalization

As the founder of Squibler, a writing software, I went ahead and took note of both the onboarding flows from Duolingo and Canva. As a result, we implemented this flow after they click “Start Outlining” on our homepage.

By the time a user starts writing in our product, we know their level of commitment and what type of book they want to write. As a result, we can provide them personalized content to succeed.

Also, when the user is going through this onboarding experience, it doesn’t change page URLs so there’s no additional loading time. After they select their daily writing goal, we ask them to log in to create their account just like how Duolingo did it. The next step we need to do (still in development) is implement another onboarding question that separates writers by aspirational authors and people who’ve already written a book.

The reason we follow Duolingo’s flow closer than Canva’s is that the effort in learning a new language is more similar to writing a book.

Running Ads to Acquire New Customers

Many B2C companies spend thousands of dollars on ads to scale their customer acquisition. The reason is B2C markets can often be huge. For example, think about Canva. Imagine how many designers and social media marketers you can target with ads. For subscription SaaS, there’s often a payback period, though, which makes the ad buying process a bit more complicated.

What is a payback period?

The payback period is the period required to recoup the cost of an investment. Often, the longer the payback periods are, the harder it is to scale your SaaS product without funding.

To understand how long it will take you to recoup your cost, you must know how much each user and customer is worth to you on average. That means having a deep understanding of your product’s retention. If you don’t have strong retention on your SaaS product, it will be hard to achieve a positive ROI ad campaign. In fact, if you have poor retention, then you need better product marketing before you spend ad dollars.

One major hurdle with paid acquisition campaigns is understanding them to their full effect. If you run a lot of ads, people may be more likely to convert through other channels whether Google or email because they saw your ad earlier. For example, even though your cost per customer from Facebook ads is $30, the influence on other channels actually brings that number down to $24. You often can’t see this number because it’d require you to know the exact influence your ads have on other channels.

That’s why there’s a separation between blended CAC (cost of acquiring a customer) which is the CAC combining all your channels vs channel CAC, which is the CAC of one channel like Facebook ads. You want to keep the two in mind as you look to scale your marketing ad spend. For example, when I worked as the head of growth for UpOut, an event subscription platform, we noticed, at least, a 10 percent lift in organic visitors when we spent $50,000/month on Facebook ads.

To keep track of each of your channels, I recommend tagging every campaign you create in your Facebook ad account using the Google Campaign URL Builder and creating Custom Conversions. This will help you measure each marketing channel independently.

Using Mixpanel to Personalize Your User’s Experience

Mixpanel provides a strong analytics understanding of your users from a retention standpoint and helps identify hurdles they go through by giving you the data underlining your funnel. Moreover, it has the ability to provide your users and customers a more personalized experience so they continue to refer your product.

You can segment users for messaging whether that’s email, SMS, or in-app notifications. You can even use a Webhook, which will allow you to connect to Zapier to enable voicemails, automated Tweets to new users, and much more. You can A/B test these messages in Mixpanel as well to understand their effectiveness.

For example, if you want to send a certain segment of users who are struggling with a product feature a how-to tutorial on using it, then you can do that. There’s unlimited creativity when it comes to what you can do with Mixpanel.

How to Rank Content Faster

Did you know that B2C products can rank their content faster by tying their support to their content? For example, in Canva, they have a section where you can access their “Design School,” which is a fancy name referring to a blog that’s highly personalized. By sending people to their blog from in their app, they can rank all their blog post content faster because Google now has more visitor data points to analyze.

Canva doesn’t just do this with their Design School, but with their support chat. If you have an issue, you may find your problem solved on a blog post. If the user reads it, then Google will once again have more data points to rank that content.

insert tutorial here

B2C Marketing Starts with the Product Marketer

Because B2C marketing relies on the product quality, it’s important to not go all-in on hiring for SEO, paid marketing, and content marketing before you hire a product marketer.

What is product marketing?

Product marketing involves finding the best product-market fit with not only the entire product but each feature for each user and customer persona. To do this effectively, it means surveying your customer base, researching the industry as a whole, understanding onboarding flows, personalization, and seeing a pathway of least resistance to getting customers their first win.

By a natural extension, product marketing also includes positioning. A top-notch product marketer should have a strong growth background, ideally, in copywriting, data (“Mixpaneling” and using Google Analytics), and knowing what triggers increase retention. 

Product marketers are the fundamental piece to ensure you hit an MVP point without overbuilding. That you get the product to the perfect balance of users believing they can get their first win and achieving it without feeling that some features were added simply because the founders wanted them.

Research, Research, Research

A key to building out a successful B2C product that markets itself is focusing on product research and validation before building out the product.

For my writing software, Squibler, to know what features to promote on the homepage, I listened to our competitors. I read blog posts by their founders. For example, the founder of our largest competitor, Scrivener, wrote a Medium post detailing his thoughts on the product.

Here’s a piece of gold I found in the post:

With hundreds of features, this helped us narrow down our initial value proposition on the homepage. From there, I listened to podcasts that writing software founders had been featured on. I found a useful one with the Scrivener founder. It noted that he had surpassed 500,000 customers since founding his business. Even better was that that episode was several years old. This means they’ve probably have over 800,000 customers.

Knowing the size of the market was a huge benefit for us. Moreover, a little research into Scrivener on Amazon and I found what the market was missing – a product with less complexity based online.

I then looked for writing products that understood this advantage. I found Ulysses, but it’s only a desktop and mobile app.

As a result, we took a few of our learnings and made the homepage copy emphasize the ease-of-use of our product. Still, I knew there might be a reason most writing software was on desktop rather than online. So I did some more digging.

Turns out that most of these writing software companies were created pre-Wifi being everywhere. With that said, after many Googles searches, I did find a company called Novlr which is based online with a small customer base. They had put little effort into their B2C marketing strategies and product marketing, which has limited their scale.

Still, it was validation to creating an online web app. While learning more about the industry, I noticed Scrivener users were complaining that they couldn’t sync with tools like Grammarly or Google Docs. That’s when I was convinced on building the web app.

So I spun up a few AdWords campaigns to test landings pages with no product yet built. Instead, we had a few design mock-ups on the homepage and emphasized ease of use and the three features the Scrivener founder had mentioned.

Overall, it cost us $40/conversion.

After optimizing, we drove this number down to $20 by the end of the campaign. At that point, I figured we had something worthwhile because we had customers at – a possibly – profitable margin. Here’s what our ad campaigns looked like:

First, we bid on a number of Ad Groups having to do with book writing software.

Then we went more broad with our bidding on “writing software” phrases.

Now we needed feedback on the designs.

The initial step included automating an Instagram account with a tool called Jarvee that sent traffic to a Facebook Group for authors.

With automation, we averaged a little over 500 engagements a post.

I found most of these images on Pinterest and Google Images. Here’s the resulting Facebook Group we sent people to.

Once we had authors in the group we could ask for feedback on the designs.

After we finalized the initial designs over the next two months, we built-out the product withholding any features we thought weren’t necessary. As a result, the MVP development took around six months to complete.

To understand what to build next for our product, we ran polls in relevant Facebook Groups. We did this until our personal group of authors and email list was large enough to facilitate surveys that would get enough feedback for statistical significance.

Here are a couple of polls I ran in relevant Facebook Groups to understand what features we should add to our roadmap:

For the next steps, we used surveys that focused on ranking features in groups of ten. We hypothesized ten features the audience will want, then we asked them which three they like the best. From there, we sent out another survey asking which one they’d paid for. This way, we’re always implementing the next best feature.

To get a good understanding of the product’s design, we looked at similar guides like this one about B2C marketing and tested different software products in the space.

What I’ve realized –

A lot of people want to start fancy companies.

Innovative companies.

New companies.

The best entrepreneurs realize that it’s better to take a business model that already exists and just do it better. Because doing something better builds companies faster. Just like we did with Scrivener. Just like Canva did with Photoshop. Just like Duolingo did with Rosetta Stone.

The Best SaaS B2C Marketing is Product Marketing

By now, you’ve realized that the best B2C marketing is building a product worthy of marketing. It’s understanding that word-of-mouth marketing is the strongest and most evergreen marketing channel and only scales when you give users the ideal experience the first time they use your product.

All other marketing comes after. If you think you have what it takes to build something that markets itself in the B2C space, then I wish you the best of luck.



What I Learned Ghostwriting for 8-Figure CEOs

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I’ve ghostwritten for ten 8-figure CEOs and have run a 7-figure ghostwriting service where we had close to thirty clients go through it. I’ve learned a lot about the subject matter. Some of our clients included not only the CEOs but consulting with ghostwriters of those CEOs, including the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk from VaynerMedia and Vishen from Mindvalley.

Today, I’ve jumped back into ghostwriting rather than running a service for it. Because one of the best ways to bootstrap a startup is to do consulting work that’s similar. This way you don’t get rusty; moreover, your learnings can transfer. For me, these learning transfer to my book writing software, Squibler.

Once I was back working as a ghostwriter, I looked deeper into ghostwriting jobs. I asked, “What should I be ghostwriting this time around to make it worth my time?” To understand the answer, I disected the ghostwriting industry in this piece so you can find your answer to the same question, too.

What is a Ghostwriter?

A ghostwriter is someone who writes for others without taking credit. A ghostwriter can be a freelancer or a full-time employee.

The client takes the credit for the authorship of the original work produced by the ghostwriter whether that’s a social media status, blog post, or a book. Ghostwriting can be a lucrative job for the right individual. Many of the most famous books have been ghostwritten. Often these books are about the lives of executives, CEOs, or public figures such as politicians.

For example, GE CEO, Jack Welch had his book Jack: Straight from the Gut ghostwritten by John Byrne. Another prominent example includes The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Even though that book is credited to Stephen Covey, he wasn’t the primary writer – that job was left to his ghostwriter, Ken Shelton.

Types of Ghostwriting Jobs

  • The Social Media Ghostwriting Job

Often ghostwriters will write Tweets, Facebook statuses, and even LinkedIn statuses for their clients. For example, I didn’t write this Facebook post pictured below. A ghostwriter did it for me, then sent it my way for approval. Depending on the outcome of social media status ghostwriting, the cost can range from $500/month to $7500/month for a ghostwriter.

The reason is some ghostwriters like myself can write well enough to keep an entire Facebook Group active under someone else’s name. In fact, I have a ghostwriter keeping my Badass Book Writers Facebook Group active under my name.

  • The Book Ghostwriting Job

This is one of the hardest, but the highest-paid ghostwriting job next to sales copy ghostwriting. Top-notch book ghostwriters can make anywhere between $50,000 – $100,000 per a book they write. They need a deep understanding of the publishing process, often know their client for a year beforehand, and have deep industry knowledge in their client’s profession if it’s a non-fiction book.

With that said, fiction book ghostwriting is much less expensive. These books range from $14,000 to $30,000 to have ghostwritten for you. The reason is you no longer need that industry-specific knowledge. Moreover, you don’t have to sit through many interviews with your client.

  • The Blog Ghostwriting Job

The blog-post ghostwriter can make anywhere from $25 – $2,000 a blog post. It heavily depends on the subject matter. For example, I didn’t write this blog post below. Because I’m paying a writer to write about “writing.” Because it’s an evergreen topic that requires an interest in writing, I can find many writers.

  • The PR Ghostwriting Job

One of the most common examples of this are members who get accepted to the Forbes Council. To get accepted, you need to pay a fee of $1200/year and have, at least, a million dollars in ARR or financing. Once you’re accepted you receive a Forbes writer slot where you can publish content on Forbes. Since most founders are busy, they hire a ghostwriter to churn out these 800-word generic pieces.

Other times, the ghostwriter will be a part of a PR agency. Where the PR agency does outreach on behalf of an individual or company to get them placements on publications and blogs. Sometimes the PR agency will reach out directly from their client’s email account, pretending they’re the client – this is a combination of both ghostwriting and sales.

Other times, the ghostwriter only jumps to action once the publication or blog owner confirms they’ll accept a written piece from the person you’re doing outreach on behalf of.

  • The Sales Copy Ghostwriting Job

There are brilliant copywriters that specialize in writing copy that compels readers to input their emails or buy products. Many of these ghostwriters work on long-form sales pages and email marketing campaigns to cross-sell and upsell readers. If you’re in the top .1 percent of this field, then you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

How to Become a Ghostwriter

The first step to becoming a ghostwriter is having visible work. This may be an online blog you write regularly on or even a social site like Quora. For me, my Quora presence was my first big step in making myself known as a writer. I wrote over 600 answers garnering close to 40,000 followers.

Also, this blog has been a great asset for attracting a particular type of client who’s interested in technical writing around marketing. Rather than rely solely on my blog and Quora for exposure, I’ve written five books on technical marketing and posted them on Product Hunt.

When it comes to attracting ghostwriting clients, you don’t just need good writing, but you need social validation from it. The reason is that’s what the clients want; in other words, they don’t pay you for words, they pay for the result of those words – likes, shares, and an audience that pays attention to them. What I’ve learned, though, is the highest-paying clients work with you because they think they’ll get more customers from your work.

The best proof that you can move these metrics for your client is if you can do it for yourself. When I ran a 7-figure ghostwriting service at our agency, our highest-paid ghostwriter had over 100,000 followers on social media. The second-highest paid writer had close to the same number of followers.

If you can build your social following in a way that says, “I attract great clients with this content,” that’s when you go from a small-time ghostwriter to the big leagues. That means making over $100K, and possibly, over $200K a year.

If you’re new to ghostwriting, then the chances are you still need to establish your online presence. The best way to do this is to read grammar books over and again, and most importantly, write more. Ideally, you should aim to write over 1,000 words a day for your own purposes outside of client work. I recommend keeping the grammar book The Elements of Style: by William Strunk Jr close with you at all times.

Ghostwriting Rates

As I’d written about earlier, your ghostwriting rate highly depends on the outcome you can provide your clients. But more so, it depends on your ability to negotiate and understand industry demand. For example, if you write about writing, then there’s a high surplus of writers whom you’re competing with. This isn’t the best route if you’re looking to “cash-in” on ghostwriting.

To make good money ghostwriting, look into high-demand niches. For example, healthcare technology has few ghostwriters but a significant demand for that talent. In a niche like this, don’t be surprised if you can charge ten times more without clients blinking an eye.

When it comes to negotiation, it’s important to get paid a quarter or, at least, half your fee upfront. For the best ghostwriters, they can demand payment in full before they even begin. The reason for this is that often the upfront work for non-fiction material requires a lot of industry research and even interviews. As a result, there’s an investment of time that’s hard to judge and put into scope.

How to Improve Your Ghostwriting Skills

The reason I get hired over other ghostwriters to be the secret weapon of 8-figure CEOs is I’ve been and am a CEO. I’ve built a 7-figure company before in services, I’ve worked at a VC firm, and am currently building another software company, Squibler. Moreover, I’ve written extensively on my life as a founder.

What does this mean?

It means to be an exceptional ghostwriter, it’s important to have had what the author and philosopher Nassim Taleb calls “Skin in the Game.” The result is what we call “empathy,” the ability to understand and feel others’ emotions.

Not every writer has the motivation or desire to become a CEO or step into the exact shoes of whom they’re writing for. Still, it’s important they live their life to the fullest so they can have a big enough arsenal of experiences to be empathetic toward their client’s own experiences. This is often why the most talented ghostwriters are older invididuals – they have a bigger arsenal.

One of the most important pieces of developing your craft as a writer is finding a mentor or a community of experienced writers who can provide constructive criticism. Luckily for me, when I ran my agency, I had the ability to recruit a couple of the top storytellers on Quora and LinkedIn. In turn, we grew much faster as writers by bouncing feedback among each other.

For this reason, as a ghostwriter, sometimes it’s not better to work alone. Instead, it can be a valuable learning experience to join an agency and work with other writers so you have an understanding of your output value. Then when you’re ready – make the jump to go solo.

I like to say the easiest way to find out how good you’re at doing something is to compete or join a team with similar aspirations. If you don’t have any standards to measure yourself against, it’s hard to push yourself forward.

How to Stay Motivated as a Ghostwriter

  • Write for Good Clients

If you’re ghostwriting for a client you don’t like, then you’re on the fastest path to burnout. The reason is ghostwriting, by nature, involves you getting deep into an individual’s life. It’s not like being a digital marketing freelancer where you can take on six to seven clients, then meet with them bi-monthly. A strong ghostwriter may have a maximum of several clients depending on the scope of work, which bring me to my next point.

  • Understand the Potential Scope of Work

If you’re writing the biography of a big-time CEO, then that may be all you focus on. Imagine what Walter Isaacson had to go through when writing Steve Jobs’ biography. To ghostwrite effectively, know that sometimes the work doesn’t just entail you interviewing one individual. Instead, it requires you to interview many of their acquaintances, family, and friends to get a better perspective of the overall story surrounding your client. This goes for social media statuses and blog posts as well, not just books.

  • Sacrifice Your Ego

It’s important to sacrifice your ego in the process. That’s why it’s called ghostwriting – people don’t need to know you exist. If you wanted your name on it, then you should also want to give back the paycheck the client gave you. With that said, it’s easy to sacrifice your ego if your client is worth writing for. For example, if you feel your writing will help drive forward a valuable mission then you’ll feel inspired to do your best work

Why I Love Ghostwriting

The science of storytelling doesn’t change. Moreover, people will be writing books for others in ten years, thirty years, and maybe even in fifty years. Sure, the format may change as it did from physical books to Kindle or from Myspace to Twitter statuses But written storytelling will be vital for success on each new platform.

For the latter reason, ghostwriting is an industry that once you have your foot deep enough in, you can continue making a living from for a long time. Many ghostwriters have been in their careers for over thirty years. The hard part is building a reputation. Once you have that, it’s just a matter of finding the perfect clients. My perfect client? The 8-figure CEO. For you, it may be a politician. You only know once you start writing.

8 Lessons I Learned About Successful 8-Figure CEOs

I got to understand what it’s like to be in the shoes of 8-figure CEOs. It turns out, there are many common factors among them.

  • They genuinely care about a group of people they’re helping

This is often their customer, but some CEOs have an even higher level of care. For example, they’re helping their customer to ensure a successful company so they can help their family.

  • They seek constructive feedback

What I’ve found is they embrace even the worst feedback, then they’ll even thank you for it.

  • They always have some level of stress

There’s always a fire they’re putting out whether it’s big or small. Sometimes they’ll tell you about it.

  • They’re obsessive with optimizing their time

When your call ends – it ends. Use the time you schedule with them wisely. If you think they’ll go overtime, you’re wrong.

  • They all have war stories

Whether it’s lawsuits, bankruptcy, bad co-founders, or investors that meddled in their business too much, you’ll find something.

  • Many have started multiple companies that eventually failed or where they closed up shop to pursue something else

This was the most surprising fact to me. Every 8-figure CEO I’ve interviewed has failed with a previous company. A couple of these CEOs have failed with over ten. What keeps them going is persistence.

  • They realized big gains come from small wins

What I’ve seen is often it’d be one or two things CEOs or their teams would do that would take their company to the next level. In some cases, the jump would be as big as 1 million to 20 million ARR. It’s often as simple streamlining a sales process with a particular outreach message to a particular industry that pulls that vertical growth lever.

  • They have dark humor

You don’t develop an ordinary sense of humor building a startup. These CEOs have been through the trenches. Many times they’ve lost millions and gained millions in revenue in a short span. They’ve seen the downward spirals, maybe have let go of entire teams, and have still found ways to keep their company motivated to push forward. Their humor has adjusted accordingly.

Is Ghostwriting for You?

Ghostwriting is the truest art of empowering someone else’s mission and career. For example, one of my clients is a CEO who immigrated and can’t write especially well in English but has a beautiful story worth telling and a mission involving saving lives.

What I’ve realized is your best clients won’t be looking for fame. Instead, they’ll be mission-driven. If you can find those people to work with, you’ll quickly learn how enjoyable the industry is.

Plus, it’s a cheat sheet to where you want to go.

When I started ghostwriting for CEOs, I learned more about founding a successful company in a short time than I’d ever imagined. You get to ask all the questions you ever wanted and you’re forced to listen. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Ghostwriting is not simply a profession, but the ultimate hack to understanding the people whom you admire and the path to one day fit in similar shoes.

Why I Created a Book Writing Software

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I was 27-years-old running a multi-million dollar agency, but I was tired. Tired of the endless business development. Tired of always having to talk with many clients. At the end of the day, I wasn’t as interested as I’d thought I’d be in devoting my life to selling marketing services. I felt like a cog in a machine I’d accidentally created. That’s why I started Squibler, a book writing software.

My interests always lie in technical marketing and writing. I’d been writing almost every day for seven years. To date, I’ve written over 1,000 blog posts and five books. Wanting to dig deeper into my passion, I thought how could I combine these two interests – that’s when I met Dhaval, my co-founder of our book writing software.

Dhaval was working on software to analyze the emotions of text. I originally came on as an advisor to his company full of A-list team players to push it in the right direction. In a short time, I realized there wasn’t product-market fit for what they created. I also realized Dhaval was a brilliant, empathetic individual who I could work endless hours with.

Tired of dealing with client churn and acquisition, and traveling for business development, I wanted to look for something evergreen. The authorship space simply made sense because I love writing and people will always write books.

I dreamed about building something for the writing industry similar to Canva for the design industry. In other words, a simple product, but providing value to a huge market. It was time for me to pivot my career. At that same time, I just so happen to be working with Dhaval to pivot his startup.

Rather than jump into something right away, which almost never works, we started with research. First, we looked at the existing players in the book writing industry.

The Top Five Book Writing Software

When doing research, I noticed the book writing software space wasn’t overcrowded. Rather it was a bit “old.” Most of the software was still based on desktop and created before 2013. Before we started working on Squibler, these were the top five book writing software programs.

1. Scrivener, a Desktop Book Writing Software

I had used Scrivener before stumbling back on this idea to create a book writing software. I had an awful experience with the product. The learning curve was too steep and the UX and UI drove me a little insane, to say the least. So I never finished my book. What I didn’t know – this was the main alternative to Microsoft Word for writing books. Moreover, they’ve had over 800,000 customers. I couldn’t believe it.

I write technical documentation on software for a living and even I thought this book writing software was complex. The next step was to find out why – so I listened to Scrivener’s founder on different podcasts and read his Medium posts. It turns out he liked implementing lots of user requests. In short, he overbuilt his product because he wanted to appeal to every writer from aPhD student working on their thesis to the romance fiction writer.

Moreover, they lacked the fundamental benefits of being an online app. This includes a better onboarding flow, community, personalizing experiences, and the ability to understand your users’ pain point in their customer journey using data.

With that said, it was still the best alternative. And when you’re the best alternative – you’ll succeed.

2. Novlr, an Online Book Writing Software

When I first came across Novlr, I smiled because it was the closest resemblance of what we were looking to build. In fact, I thought “why build our product if this already exists?” Then, I tried the product and I came across the same feeling of clunkiness. That their UX and UI weren’t attractive and I didn’t feel like it was made by writers for writers like it said on their homepage. Instead, I got the feeling that it was made by coders for writers.

Moreover, I didn’t feel like the founders were invested in the education of writers. I didn’t come across any blog posts, videos, or community where I could learn more about writing. The experience wasn’t personalized to me either. Instead, I felt they were saying, “If you think Scrivener is too complicated, well, we’re the best alternative to them.”

Even though I didn’t enjoy the product – the good news is they validated a lot of the work we were looking to implement. Progress.

3. Ulysses, a Mobile Book Writing Software

Ulysses is one of my favorite book writing software. It’s almost everything I’d want out of a mobile and desktop app. However, they lack some key functionality by not having an online presence and not making the product specifically for writing books.

With that said, they perfected the minimalist design for writing – even better than how Medium did it.

I like Ulysses for taking notes, but I didn’t feel like it offered everything a book writer would need today in order to be successful. They were missing not only the educational component but the community and online onboarding experience that can enrich products. With that said, they gave us the roadmap for a minimalist design when it came to building out our online product. If we were to be like Canva, then we’d need to keep it simple.

4. Microsoft Word, a Desktop App and Online Software for Writing

Microsoft Word is the “OG” of the space. They have a desktop and online version for you to write your books. They have a lot of features to improve your writing and many writers are familiar with the product. The downside is similar to Scrivener, they wanted to be everything to everyone. Moreover, there’s no personalized experience.

As a result, if you’re looking to write a book with the product, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. There’s also little education and community around their product for writers interested in authoring books.

With that said, the product is sharp. I’m a huge fan of Microsoft Word’s online version for writing books. I like Microsoft Word as a book writing software even more than Scrivener and Novlr. In fact, I wrote my first book in Microsoft Word.

Plus, Word has almost every feature you’d need to write books, but they remind me of why people choose Canva over Adobe Photoshop – it’s the shorter learning curve and simplicity that often builds a company faster.

5. Google Docs, an Online Writing Software

I’ve written my last four books in Google Docs. I like the simplicity and that it already integrates with my workspace. But it’s not easy to use. I have to create a new document for each chapter, then have one main doc linking all the individual chapters to keep them organized. The reason I can’t just write the book out in one long Google Doc like in the example below is I need a place for my synopsis and notes.

It’s hard to point out the flaws in Google Docs when it is a free product. You can’t expect the world when you have no skin in the game. In addition, there are many benefits to Google Docs, including easy collaboration with live chat and sharing your document with an editor. It also has a quick learning curve.

What Makes Our Book Writing Software Different?

I noticed there was a HUGE market need for a more seamless software regarding personalization and education. Moreover, an online book writing software that catered to minimalist design demands. The best part: by personalizing the experience, we could provide a minimalist experience while giving book writers exactly what they wanted while helping them succeed every step of the way with our educational component.

You can see the parallels of minimalism between Ulysses and Squibler in this one screenshot:

With a background in SaaS, I had many ideas of what the educational side would look like. Rather than rely solely on my knowledge and that of my co-founder’s, I looked at companies with similar business models. The one that came to mind besides Canva: Duolingo.

Duolingo finds out what language you want to learn and how much time you’re willing to devote to learning that language before you begin using their product. This allows them to create a more pleasant experience for their users.

It’s why we implemented these two questions into our onboarding flow:

By the time a user starts writing in our product, we know their level of commitment and what type of book they want to write. As a result, we can provide them personalized content to succeed.

My favorite part: when the user is going through this onboarding experience, it doesn’t change page URLs so there’s no additional loading time. And because they’re inputting their level of daily commitment, we have a reason to send follow-up emails to ensure they hit it.

Creating a Foundation of Educational Content

One of the main pieces of Squibler is creating a section for educational content where people can learn more about writing books from how to start writing to publishing. Many SaaS companies have what they call “universities” like Webflow where they educate their user and customer base. I see ours as something similar.

There are two main players in the education space: Self-Publishing School founded by entrepreneur, Chandler Bolt; the second player is Now Novel, a community around helping authors succeed. Both of them have been a huge inspiration for me for understanding the power of content marketing to support writers. Chandler has mentioned that Self-Publishing school does 10 million in ARR as of writing this. That’s a great sign of how big the market is.

The other goods news: neither are our competitors. In fact, they complement our book writing software, especially if they promote it. Plus, the more people they encourage to write books, the larger our customer base becomes.

Building a Team Around our Book Writing Software

Today, we have eight people working on the software. On our marketing front, we have our community manager, Rachelle; two writers, Steph and Elizabeth, who have a backlog of 70 articles to go through as of writing this; infographic designer, Ivana who’s turning our writer’s work into visual content. For example, she’ll turn a blog post like this one into a beautiful infographic that can possibly go viral similar to the case study I wrote about here.

On our development and product front, we have Oleg and my co-founder, Dhaval. Then we have a kick-ass product designer, Kirill ensuring we keep a minimalist and personalized design.

Lastly, on my front, I’m working on recruiting, creating the product development roadmap, content marketing and distribution.

Where We’re at in Regards to Implementation

To date, there hasn’t been a book writing software operating like a top-notch consumer SaaS company. We’re hoping to be that first one.

As of now, we’re working on the system’s architecture to load everything within the web app faster. This will be done in about a week as of writing this.

Moreover, we’ve been using external code/plugin for our editor. To scale, we’ll need to build a custom version. It’s not ideal since it will take time, but providing a strong foundation for our product is critical to not wasting time down the line because we didn’t solve this problem sooner.

Features we’re implementing soon:

  1. Drag-and-drop scenes
  2. More font choices
  3. A split screen to view your notes with the main editor simultaneously
  4. Grammar corrections

Looking Down the Road

Ideally, when we have a strong enough user base, we’ll build a mobile app and have the data to test heavy-duty features, including one for visual outlining and image searching. These are all still a little far out on the road map, but fun to think about as we move forward to ensure we build the best book writing software.

I hope you’ll follow along on the journey.

How to Create a Viral Marketing Strategy

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Viral marketing is not just hype. It can be used to drive real growth for your company. That means users, customers, referrals, and even evangelists.

Viral marketing isn’t only online marketing. It can be word-of-mouth, too. The best part about it is that it’s often repeatable if you apply the right steps. So what makes marketing contagious? In other words, what makes a message spread?

First, let’s get on the same wavelength of how we think about viral marketing.

The Definition of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a marketing strategy to encourage people who interact with a marketing message then to share it. The sharing effect is based on “K” known as the viral growth rate. Where K = % of users who take a particular action then share that action, which then encourages new people to repeat that same action.

Here’s an example below:

This K factor applies to all marketing messages. For example, a publication called The Hustle had their welcome email go viral many times. Yes, a welcome email which many marketers consider to be the most basic part of a marketing funnel.

The subject line for the email: “Look what you did, you little jerk”

Here are four different publications covering this welcome email as a story. But there are, at least, twenty that I counted that show this email as an example of great marketing.

But what made it go viral? To understand that, we need to strategize how to identify viral content that can effectively be distributed.

How to Create a Viral Marketing Strategy

To create a viral marketing strategy is putting all the right components in place for that “share effect” to take place. To do this, we need to analyze each attribute that can affect the virality of a marketing message.

Cyclical

Viral marketing can have cyclical reasons. For example, Coachella sees the most online activity in April. This means, that at that time, more people care about particular marketing messages that have to do with Coachella. So if you play up a message within or that ties to that theme, you may see more people sharing it.

Viral marketing may also fall in line with one’s premonition about future events (if that premonition is right) or having more factual context than other people about certain future events. The reason is this can lead to a “timing effect.”

For example, the first breaking news story about a subject creates a much larger effect than the 100th one on the same topic keeping all other variables static. A common T.V. example is being the first to find out about that breaking news story because you had more facts, let’s say on a criminal investigation. As a result, you have a timing competitive advantage.

Supply/Demand

Viral marketing is also about the level of content supply and demand (this often plays a great deal into timing as well). For example, using a tool called Ahrefs I can see particular search volumes for different keywords and how much and what type of content ranks for those keywords.

In this example, I plug-in the search keyword phrase, “How to Write a Novel.”

Now I can see whether Google deems the content that ranks for this keyword phrase as good. In this case, the content was bad. I can tell because out of a 0 – 100 score ranking on how hard it is to crack the top ten pieces of content, it’s a 12. I deem anything under a 20 as relatively bad content.

With the screenshot of the tool showing 12,000 searches a month just from the U.S., there’s clearly demand, especially because the search phrase is a “how to.” This means the searchers are looking for actionable advice to solve a problem; in other words, they have strong intent.

To better understand the opportunity, I can look at all the pieces of content that rank for this search. It’s easy to spot what’s missing when you know what an epic piece of content looks like. For the most part, it should solve the problem, but what makes content magical is how it engages the reader.

A piece that solves the reader’s problem, but does it in 2000 words rather than 300 isn’t any better. It’s often worse.

That’s unless the readers enjoy getting to the bottom of that 2,000-word piece. So even though they both solve the problem of the reader, the 2,000-word piece will perform better if it engages readers for a longer period.

So does my competition stand up?

After going through all the content on the first couple of pages, I noticed a lot of well-written text to answer the searcher’s question.

However, I also noticed there’s a lack of visual content. I didn’t see any infographics or videos. This means that one could possibly produce a piece of visual content that could go viral. I’ll explain how I did this later in the post.

Remarkable

A viral marketing strategy needs remarkable content. Remarkable may not be beneficial. It may be novel and exciting. There are many ways to interpret it.

In Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, he refers to “Inner Remarkability.” This is when the content or even the product is so remarkable that it needs little distribution for it to get shared over and again. He also refers to game mechanics, which is code for people getting rewards when sharing whether through monetary compensation or even a unique point system.

An example of a viral product because of strong market need includes Loom, a video sharing tool. They hit 1 million users without doing any marketing. You can listen to their story here:

Another example is the product and visual coding platform, Webflow where they’ve grown to over 3 million visitors a month. They’ve done little marketing to make that happen because there was such a strong need for their product. You can listen to their story here

Immediate vs Ongoing

Immediate virality happens soon after the marketing message has been distributed, while ongoing can happen over a period. For example, political stories often have an ongoing virality to them, especially when it’s an investigation and new evidence appears. Keep in mind, even though I use politics as an example, it’s still marketing. As the newscasters for Fox News or CNN need an engaged audience to keep profitability for the network.

Ongoing viral marketing messages need to have the momentum to sustain. The famous Ice Bucket Challenge campaign meant to encourage people to donate to ALS kept momentum because each participant who donated and/or poured water over their heads would then tag another person to do the challenge.

With ongoing virality, there may be a desensitization period where the same viral message can go viral again simply because it hasn’t been seen in a long time. This is why when you browse Reddit, you often see the same content going viral that you did a year ago or even a month ago.

Lastly, there’s an organic play to ongoing viral marketing. For example, for the search query, “How to Write a Novel,” there are 12,000 U.S. searches with this phrase every month. This means that if I rank in the top 5 for this keyword search phrase, I’ll get continuous traffic. And if my content is viral, then I’m sure to rank well.

It’s similar to this post. I’ve put in a lot of effort into making it worth sharing. If there’s enough engagement, then I’ll rank for “Viral Marketing” and get continuous traffic.

Drives Emotions

What Jonah Berger, the author of Contagious found was that the most viral pieces of content ignited emotions. “That the articles that were shared the most in his analysis of the NY Times Most Emailed list were articles that provoked awe, excitement, amusement, anger, or anxiety.”

Does your viral marketing strategy provoke these feelings? If not, then head back to the drawing board.

Example 1: Viral Marketing on Facebook

In the analysis in the previous section, I identified that the keyword phrase, “How to Write a Novel” answered in a more visual way would wow the interested market. To understand the demographics of that interested market, I browsed the other sites answering that keyword phrase question.

With enough analysis, I realized that the size of the market was in the millions. This meant there was a huge potential for my visual piece of content to go viral. But I didn’t just focus on the visual aspect. I included enough information about writing novels to make it useful, “bookmarkable,” and have enough value to where the audience feels a sense of social currency gained for sharing it.

To effectively distribute this piece of viral marketing content, I joined relevant Facebook Groups and posted the images of the infographic in there. Because the audience rather not download each image individually, I included a link directly back to the Squibler blog where they could download all the images together as one PDF infographic. Notice how high the share number is on this post. That’s viral.

Notice how I also included the link to the blog post in the introduction text. I did this because I knew most people would go to the site to download the entire PDF. When they go to the site, I then have more opportunity to capture visitors in our sales funnel.

It worked so well in the first Facebook Group that I posted it in five other ones. Look at that engagement in the other groups!

Moreover, these Facebook posts have a high-lifetime value where they’ll get clicked on over and again as members explore the content in the group.

Notice how large the Facebook Group is below – over 140,000 members. With many members, there’s usually lots of content posted. This makes it hard to stand out with your piece of content.

But if the content is remarkable? Then it won’t just stand out, it will get comments, shares, and possibly go viral.

If your content goes viral in a Facebook Group, then it’s likely to go viral on Reddit. The reason is both Reddit and Facebook Groups represent communities. And there are many overlapping parallels between how users engage in communities.

Example 2: Viral Marketing on Reddit

No surprise when I posted the same infographic on Reddit, it went viral – 760 upvotes and still climbing!

The bad news is that it can be hard to take advantage of virality. The reason is I’m linking directly the infographic. This means people aren’t heading to a blog post where they can explore my Squibler site more and possibly start a free trial of our software.

To combat this, you can have a friend make a clever comment with a link to your homepage or another relevant page. Sometimes it happens more organically as it did here:

For Reddit, I linked directly to the PDF rather than the blog post containing it because Reddit moderators are notorious for taking down content that seems promotional. My workaround? I include a link on each PDF page back to the website.

Because this is what I consider a “bookmarkable” piece of content, meaning people will use it as a reference for future actions, then they’ll likely click this link at some point in time. That means that the viral marketing strategy to create virality with longevity was a success.

How to Outsource Your Content for Viral Marketing

If you have a strong understanding of your market, then you can outsource the content you’re looking to create. That’s what I did.

I outsourced bullet points to be included in the infographic for $120. Then I outsourced the design for $80. That’s only $200 for a viral piece of content that’s driven over 5,000 new visitors in the first three days and well over a 100 new trial sign-ups.

When I did this, we didn’t even have an email list. All we had was one piece of viral content and an organic distribution strategy.

The part most people don’t do? When you find a piece of viral content – double down on it for other areas within your industry.

That’s exactly what I did. A few days ago, I outsourced a similar piece of content except rather than “The Complete Guide to Writing a Novel” like the original, this one is “The Complete Fantasy Writing Guide.”

I’ll let you know whether it’s successful then update this post about viral marketing.

How to Measure the Success of Viral Marketing

To understand whether your viral marketing campaign was a success depends on the KPIs you’re looking to move. For many, that’s the number of customers with high lifetime value. For our campaign is was relatively easy when we used Google Analytics to understand how many new users we had. To do so, we set up Goal Tracking.

With that said, not every campaign is easily tracked. If viral marketing happens through word of mouth then you may have few options for tracking. In that case, having an option during the check-out process of your product or service to mark where the consumer is coming from. This will help you collect the data you need.

Many people would like to believe they can just Tweet and they’ll go viral. That’s not true. In most cases, you need remarkable content, not clever 200 character remarks. So if you want to implement a viral marketing strategy, you need to invest in content. The secret is getting the most value out of the cost you’re paying for it – and the best way to ensure that happens?

Do your research beforehand.

Thank you for reading.

If you have any thoughts or questions, drop them in the comments 🙂

19 Steps to Create a YouTube Marketing Strategy for 2019

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I never thought of YouTube marketing strategy as something that could drive growth for your business.

Or a platform you could learn how to hack.

I’d uploaded many videos in the past with little-to-no effort in optimizing them for growth.

I didn’t want to waste my effort.

Because I always thought of YouTube as a place to watch sports and TV highlights. Not a place for a legitimate marketing strategy where you can implement YouTube hacks and tactics to accelerate your business.

Yet, I was proven wrong by the simple fact that a few entrepreneurs were crushing it like Gary Vaynerchuk and Neil Patel.

Curious to understand what they did differently, I analyzed their channels and hired a YouTube marketing strategy expert. In less than an hour, we optimized one of my videos with 100 views which enabled it to get 400 more views over the next two days. I became a believer.

As a believer in using a YouTube marketing strategy to drive growth, I wanted to break down all the tactics and hacks. The same tactics and hacks people are using to optimize their videos to get more views, subscribers, and customers. Best yet, how I copied them 🙂

Create a Compelling Video Thumbnail

Let’s start with the obvious. A good YouTube marketing strategy starts with how the video looks; otherwise, it won’t get clicked.

Have you ever created a Facebook ad that popped? It got tons of click-throughs, engagement, and even drove sales? Well, the chances are it would make for a great YouTube thumbnail.

Take a look at Neil Patel’s thumbnail for his video. It could easily be a Facebook ad if it didn’t have so much text. Neil is smiling which makes it engaging and the text clearly states the benefit. Moreover, the headline is just as good. I’m interested and ready to learn.

Update the Date

On Neil’s video, notice how it was uploaded in 2017, but it says 2019 on the video title and thumbnail. Neil’s YouTube video on SEO is evergreen so he doesn’t need to change the content. Instead, he edits the title, thumbnail, and description. Now it’s ranking for the word 2019 because no one searches for 2017 SEO tactics anymore.

By doing this, Neil doesn’t have to come out with a new video every year. Instead, he can simply make a few changes and he’s ready to go.

Get People to Subscribe on the Video

Did you know you can have a watermark on your video? You can put your company logo on it, then when people click it – it asks them to subscribe. The problem? Who would want to click your company logo? Instead of uploading your company logo as a watermark, use a YouTube subscribe image as Neil has done.

To upload the watermark, go to your Creator Studio, click channel, then select Branding. Here you can upload a subscribe watermark that will appear on all your videos just like Neil.

Congrats! It’s now easier to get subscribers.

Keyword Your Profile

Before you go all in on optimizing your videos, ensure you add keywords to your profile. The keywords should coincide with the content you upload. Once again, go to your Creator Studio, click channel, then select Advanced. Here you can put in relevant keywords next to “Channel keywords.” I recommend putting in branded keywords like your company and personal name. Then add the other keywords you wish to become a thought leader in.


Another keyword secret?

When you upload your video on YouTube, you should use your keyword in the filename of the video.

How to Optimize Keywords for Your Video

Just like blog posts, keywords are fundamental for your YouTube marketing strategy as well.

In the example below, notice that our recently uploaded video of our interview with the Webflow co-founder is ranking near the top when you search “Webflow.”

To do this, we had to do a deep dive into keyword research. That starts with a couple of free Chrome extensions. The first one: “Keywords everywhere” which shows the number of searches/month below the search bar like in the example above. The second one: “vidIQ” which shows the numbers of searches every month for different keywords, keywords a YouTube video is optimizing for, and the keywords a channel is optimizing for.

Using these tools, we conduct our research using search.

First, I type in Webflow as an obvious choice because that’s what my video is about. However, I want to know if it’s hard to rank for this keyword. By taking a look at the videos on the first page, I notice a high view to subscriber ratio. This often signifies a high search volume and low supply of video content relative to this demand.

That means this keyword is perfect to rank for. Now that I know this keyword does relatively well, I can make a couple of hypotheses to test.

#1: Webflow ranks well because they have many users (over one million) which drives search, especially as a software product that requires – to an extent – tutorials to understand.

#2: Because Webflow is probably searched via YouTube for tutorials, my video interviewing the founder won’t be relevant to most related keywords for their product.

Simply by typing in Webflow to the search bar, this proves to be right. Notice that most of the searches are tutorial related. That’s means I’ll need to find other keywords to use. 

Because Webflow is a Y Combinator company, I hypothesize there will be valuable keywords there. One reason, in particular, is Y Combinator is known for founder interviews, so this could be a perfect match. Doing some basic research on Y Combinator related keywords, I noticed two of the top three results for my “Y Combinator Interview” search don’t even include the word “interview” anywhere. Yet, they’re still ranking for this search.

If non-optimized videos can rank for this search, then I can sure beat these videos by making mine a little better. I don’t even have to do much besides adding “YC Interview” to the keywords I want to rank for or in my title and description of the video.

We don’t stop there. Next, we play around with a few more searches like “Founders stories.” I notice this search gets 260 visits/month. That may not seem like a lot to most people, but over two years that could drive another one thousand visits to my video. If the visitors are of high quality and they enjoy the content, then YouTube will push my video out to even more viewers.

When I take a look at the first video, I notice a high view count compared to the subscriber number. Again, this means this keyword search is high quality because there’s not a lot of competing content. The downside? The video at the top “Founders’ Stories: Basecamp’s Jason Fried” is of strong quality having the keywords in the title.

It also has the video included in the ones it’s optimizing for. In this case, it doesn’t hurt to take second place. With that said, because YouTube ranks newer content better than older content (similar to Google with blog posts), I have a strong chance of outranking this video in the future.

With this knowledge, I put together a powerful optimization plan for my video. First, I include the keywords I want to rank for in the title. I have to be careful because I can’t make the title too long; otherwise, it won’t show up well on mobile.

Then I include the relevant keywords in the ones I want to optimize for when I’m editing my video. I add as many keywords as it will allow me to do.

After several days, vidIQ will show you the ones you’re ranking for with their blue outline. I’m currently #2 for “Webflow Founders.”

The result?

A 60.2 SEO score according to vidIQ. I recommend aiming for a score above 40 for all your videos. It’s not easy, but well worth it – to say the least.

Optimize Your Headline and Description

This one is simple.

You get an SEO boost by adding the keywords to the beginning of the title. Find your favorite keywords you want to rank for – then put them there.

For example, if you want to rank for “Webflow Tutorial,” then have it at the beginning of your headline – “Webflow Tutorial: How to Design Beautiful Landing Pages”

Next, are your video descriptions. The more optimized your description, the higher you’ll rank. To optimize your video, include keywords in the first 25 words, make the description at least 250 words, and include your keywords 2-4 times. As a result, this SEO-optimized description helps tell Google and YouTube what your video is about making them more likely to rank you better.

Lastly, include timestamps (i.e. “11:15 How viral loops work”) to guide the viewer and increase audience retention. Here’s an example below:

It’s as easy as typing in the numbers and YouTube will automatically link the sections for you.

Create a Compelling Outro

This YouTube hack is easy to do but critical for getting subscribers. When someone gets to the end of your video, they’re at their pique point of becoming a subscriber. After all, they just consumed an entire video of your content. This is where you want to add a subscribe image which is often just your YouTube profile picture and another annotation that leads people into another relevant video of yours.

To do this, go to your Video Manager section, then click videos. Here, select the relevant video you want to edit, then click End screen & Annotations. I recommend adding annotations to the last 15 – 30 seconds of your video. That way it’s not intrusive to them completing it.


To get these elements on the video, click “Add element.”


From here, select either “Subscribe” to get your channel image on the video and “Video or Playlist” to get your “Most recent upload” or “Best for viewer” video uploaded.

And that’s it!

Ask Your Current Fans to Subscribe

This is one of the easiest YouTube marketing strategies to put in place.

There are two ways to do implement this YouTube hack:

#1: In your video, when you’ve given a lot of value to the audience, simply ask them “Hey, if you’ve received a lot of value from this video, please hit subscribe.” You’d be surprised at how many people will do this in return.

#2: The second one is to send out your channel link to your current fan base whether through email, Messenger, or social media.

Except don’t use the regular channel URL. Instead, add a ?sub_confirmation=1 to the end so it looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC84KURVo9eUQo7lwGP8N7-Q?sub_confirmation=1

Now when people click through, they’ll see the pop-up to Subscribe.

This is an easy way to transfer your audience from other platforms to YouTube.

Optimize for Google Search

Google likes to rank videos on top of its search results.

Here’s an example:

For the most part, Google uses video results for these types of keywords:

-How-to keywords (“how to shave a cat”)
-Reviews (“beats by Dre review”)
-Tutorials (“Setting up WordPress”)
-Anything fitness or sports related (“Cardio kickboxing”)
-Funny videos (“Cute animals”)

So if you optimize your video around keywords that don’t have video results, you’ll only get organic traffic from YouTube. However, if you optimize for a Google video keyword, then you’ll also attract traffic from Google’s first page of search results.

To find these keywords, start with what works on YouTube, then plug those keywords and phrases into Google. You’ll see which ones have videos.

Once you’ve found a Video Keyword, it’s time to see if there’s any search volume for that keyword. Otherwise, you might rank in Google for a keyword that only gets 20 searches per month. That’s not worth it.

Dive into your AdWords account, click on Tools, then Keyword Planner.

Here, you want to identify a video keyword phrase that gets between 500-1k searches per month in Google depending on your niche.


If you can get the corresponding video to rank in Google, then a lot of those searchers will click on your video in the results. This will ultimately lead to a better ranking for your video on YouTube and, ideally, traffic to your site.

Say Your Keywords

YouTube has an advanced transcription for videos. This means they know whether your video’s content is related to the subject you put in your video’s headline, description, and keywords.

So if you don’t say your keywords, then guess what?

You won’t get ranked.

I recommend saying your keywords as often as possible without diluting the quality of the video. The reason is even though YouTube’s transcription is advanced, it’s not perfect.

I’d also open your video with the keywords to make it easier. To do this, remind people of why they clicked on the video. For example, let’s use the backflip video from earlier. Here’s how I would open it:

“Hi, my name is Josh. I’m here to teach you how to do a backflip.”

That was easy.

Promote Your Videos via Quora and Your Blog

The days of sharing your YouTube videos to Facebook and LinkedIn to drive traffic…those days are dead. Facebook and LinkedIn don’t want you promoting other platforms on theirs. So they’ll penalize your content’s reach. Ouch.

The good news is there are a couple of sites that encourage you to upload content. The first site is Quora.com. Here’s an example from Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko.com where he uploads a YouTube video that answers a question.

Now, I recommend taking this one step further by answering related questions. For example, if I want to better rank my interview about growth hacking with Sean Ellis, then I’ll link to it in answers for relevant questions.

One of the biggest problems in writing on Quora is finding good questions to answer. By “good,” I mean questions that will bring you views and send you traffic.

A tip, I got from Si Quan Ong is if you set up an Ad account, select “Targeting by Questions.”

It will prompt you to enter a relevant keyword. When you do so, it will show you questions with the number of weekly views/week (you don’t even have to run ads). 

To take advantage of this, you want to either link or embed a video in your answers similar to how Brian Dean does it.

For example, for the top question, “What is the best way to learn Growth Hacking?”

I embed my Sean Ellis interview:

Now I have a consist 20 – 60 impression every week seeing this video. If I can include it in another 4 – 5 answers with relevant traffic, this video will receive enough views to tell YouTube whether it’s worth ranking or not. Now that’s an easy YouTube hack to run with.

Optimize for How People Consume Your Video

I don’t expect people to watch my 30-minute plus video interviews.

I expect them to listen to it.

I expect them to hit play, move the tab to the side and work on their projects. The reason for this is nobody wants to put in a lot of effort to consume content. They want it to be easy.

Ask yourself, “Where do they get the value?”

For my interviews, it’s not in looking at me and the interviewee.

It’s in what we say.

If you’re learning to do a backflip, then you’d rather watch.

Because it’s not enough for someone to say “do this one step” and you have the confidence to jump in the air backward and land on your feet. Context matters.

Knowing these facts, I can better optimize my video. I’ll put in less attention into my video cuts for the interview to keep the viewer’s eyeballs on it and more attention into the quality of sound to keep them listening.

It’s easy to see what works. By diving into your YouTube Studio, you can click on any of your videos. From there, you can see an overview of the analytics. Audience retention is by far the most important.

Here you want to test what videos work for you to retain eyeballs and listeners. If you’re uploading music, then you can expect a lot of people to switch tabs.

The video example below is of me writing a viral post. It’s very visual which means it will be harder to rank if it’s bad content.

Notice that you can see which videos contribute to your subscriber growth. In this case, this video provided 32 new subscribers. For a new channel that’s quite a lot.

Looking at the numbers, people really liked this YouTube video. With that said, it’d be hard to reproduce just by the nature of the content.

Hook the Audience for Retention

“To know how to rank #1 on Google you must watch this whole video. The last two tips are the most important.”

This hook gets the audience curious enough to stay through the entire video. As a result, your audience retention increases and YouTube ranks your video better.

For a great example, watch the first ten seconds of this video and listen to what Neil Patel says: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB_TC92I8w

Another way to do this is to put a snippet of the best clip from the video in the beginning or use an image of it as the thumbnail. Here’s an example:

The Yes Theory team also does an excellent job of this:

All these are super clickable images.

It’s not necessarily a YouTube hack, but these smaller details make a HUGE difference in your channel growth.

How to Growth Hack Interview Questions

If you’re uploading an interview video, an easy hack is to ask the right questions. To do this, conduct your research beforehand on what questions would make sense.

Let’s say I’m interviewing the founder of Webflow, I can ask “Why Webflow vs WordPress?,” “How would you review Webflow?,” “What makes Webflow a great CMS?,” and “Where do I find the best Webflow tutorials?”

It’s easy to find these questions – I just pulled them from the initial search drop-down.

By asking a YouTube optimized question, I can edit out the relevant cut to that question and make it it’s own YouTube video. Then I can tag the video accordingly for the keywords I’m ranking it for.

Run Ads to Your Videos

TrueView ads are a great way to reach your target market.

They’re low-risk –

You’re only charged when viewers opt to watch your entire ad, view it for at least 30 seconds, or interact with the ad in some way. 

This can make it a high ROI YouTube marketing strategy to implement.

Because although 76% of consumers reflexively skip these ads, you can at least be sure your budget is being spent on interested viewers.

The second best part –

TrueView ads are opt-in, you aren’t restricted by time limits.

This means that you can experiment with different creative formats such as product demos, testimonials, or how-to videos.

For example, Grammarly has used testimonials and product demos in their TrueView ads to great effect. In fact, a massive 54.4% of their social media traffic comes from the site.

What’s more, according to Google, when brands use TrueView, they can see views of existing content increase by up to 500%.

However, TrueView ads often lead to low retention rates on your video if not optimized properly. This can hurt your SEO score. It’s important to use YouTube Search ads as well because they have stronger intent which leads to more retention.

The downside is they tend to be a bit more expensive. Go figure.

Engage, Engage, Engage

YouTube recognizes whether you engage with your commenters or not. If you do, they rank your videos better. I recommend engaging with them not just liking their comments, but responding to as many as you can.

Try to be clever because it can escalate into many more comments.

Yes Theory does this well:

Yes, that’s 500+ more comments because of a simple question.

Optimize Your Video Cuts

A top-notch YouTube marketing strategy if you have basic video editing skills, is to create edits that keep viewers engaged. This often means cutting your videos to create the appearance of subtle surprises. I recommend having, at least, a couple of cuts in every minute of your video to keep your viewers’ attention.

Here are some example cuts below –

The sidecut:

The introing-a-subject-matter cut:

The presenting-a-subject-matter cut:

The zoom-in cut:

The show-what-you’re-working-on cut:

The speed-up-slow-down cut:

The magically-appear cut:

The change-up cut:

Check Your Analytics for Actionable Insights

The secret behind optimizing YouTube videos for SEO is focusing on growing your subscriber number and retention rate analytics. To analyze retention, go to your YouTube Creator Studio Classic, then click on Analytics.

Here, you can dive into Audience Retention to see if you’re improving over time. This is the primary determinant of if your YouTube channel is on a successful track. Keep in this in mind for all your YouTube marketing strategies.

You can track the retention by individual video as well. Best yet, you can see if you’re running effective ads. Here, you can see that ads actually negatively affected my video by hurting my watch retention rate.

The idea is to test many different types of content for getting subscribers.

When you find something that works, then double down on it. But don’t double down on content because it has a large number of shares, likes, and views. It’s a distraction from building your number of subscribers.

Watch time has the highest correlation to more subscribers so we want to double down there.

To see where this watch time is coming from, you want to analyze the traffic sources: Suggest Videos, Channel pages, and YouTube Search. If you can find out how people found you through YouTube, then you can optimize for it. Analyze the number of views compared to average watch time. Then, look at how many subscribers those videos attract.

Next, we want to understand what keywords are pushing traffic through the highest performing channel. Now, we want to optimize for those keywords. Ensure to pick the keywords that lead to subscribers and a long video watch time.

How do we optimize for these keywords?

Put the best keywords in the title of your video and descriptions.

To take it one step further, I like to include an email address with an autoresponder thanking them for their inquiry and asking them to sign up on my list. Lastly, I include a link straight to a landing page to collect emails. Sometimes I use the link to my Facebook Group instead.

Next, find out what videos are referring you traffic and subscribers (maybe your own), then optimize for the keywords in the video title names and channel names. For example, if Justin Bieber’s channel is sending me a lot of traffic along with one particular video of his, then I’ll insert his channel name and video title name into my keyword list when optimizing for traffic.

If you’re looking to optimize your videos for SEO, remember subscribers and retention rate are your two most important metrics. Always optimize your videos for these metrics when uploading them and later when you have data on where your video’s traffic is coming from.

Record Your Screen for Tutorials

If you’re making tutorials, an easy way to set them up is to use QuickTime Player. With QuickTime Player, click File, then New Movie Recording.

From there, drag and shrink the video to the top right corner of your screen.

Now, click File again and select New Screen Recording. Here, you want to record the appropriate area of your screen. Then click the button in the middle “Start Recording.”

Now you have a tutorial video with a picture of yourself in the top right.

Next Steps

This YouTube marketing strategy will give you a great headstart in using YouTube to scale your efforts to drive more awareness, users, and customers. The next step is to implement it.

I recommend taking it piece by piece. Don’t feel the need to do everything at once; otherwise, you may never start. Once you have one step down, then move on to the next YouTube marketing strategy tactics.

From there, you’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll.

 

 

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