Author: Trevor

Business

Boost your cold outreach response rates by 15% with Ad Pre-targeting

Retargeting, as an ad mechanism, is quite well known these days. Put a pixel on a landing page, send traffic there, and then continue to advertise to the people who’ve seen that page to re-engage them and try to close the deal. But what if you could pre-target your ads—send ads only to your best

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Build In Public

Build a top of funnel test in Twitter

We’ve written previously about how to validate your top-of-funnel test on Facebook. There are a few cases where Facebook isn’t going to be the right channel for you, though: Bot traffic on Facebook can be really bad, especially since the new iOS 14 update. You might want to specifically target people who care about the

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Build In Public

CrowdTamers AI Launch Report: Week 1

I comment often enough when talking to clients or new hires that I have been running growth & marketing for the better part of 20 years and I still get it wrong 70% of the time. The CrowdTamers AI launch is one of the 70%. Initial launch results are all pretty bad, but that’s not

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Build In Public

Launching your idea, from start to finish

I reached out on Twitter the other day to ask what early-stage builders grapple with advertising on social media. If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts about launching your startup, I really like social media ads as a way to test and iterate on ideas quickly, so you learn what the market wants—and

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Business

Grow to Market for early startups

I’ve launched 50 startups, mentored about 200 more, and have taken a dozen startups to $2MM+ in ARR. Successful ones tend to get off the ground the same way. There are 3 distinct phases to go from $0 to $2MM. If you do it right, this can be ~18 months from start to finish: 1.

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Business

Build & manage a Content Marketing Engine of Freelancers

6 years ago, I created a system to manage and evaluate writers at scale. It works so well a local content agency who I’d hired as a contractor ended up paying me $15k to train their team in how to implement it. I’ve built and scaled this to teams of 3 to 40 writers in the

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Build In Public

Build Your Worst Enemy: Testing an already-launched product

Most of the time when CrowdTamers works with clients, they already have a product that they launched already. We talk a lot about Grow to Market and “launch before you’re ready” here, but it’s worth noting that approach isn’t the only way to grow your business. I like launching first, because it lets you validate

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Content Marketing

Book yourself on 4 podcasts a month with 90 minutes of work

For the last two months I’ve booked myself on 1 podcast a week with about 90 minutes of work, total. The process is surprisingly simple: Find a podcast you want to be on. Listen to 2 – 3 episodes or read the show notes. Here’s a quick hack if you read fast like me. Take

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Build In Public

Unsure how to commit to your side gig? Read these 3 books!

The older I get, the more surprised I am that so many people work the nine to five, hate their boss, hate their job, make dark jokes about their significant other, and live lives of quiet desperation. There’s a lot more out there to life if you can come to grips with three key concepts:

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Build In Public

The Why of CrowdTamers

Inspired by a recent Twitter thread of mine, let’s talk a bit about the why behind CrowdTamers I’ve been running a freelance business I’ve called CrowdTamers for about 14 years now, working as a freelancer at companies all over the world. As I’ve had kids and now as I’m fast approaching the creaky old age

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Business

Build & test a million+ 💲 ARR acquisition funnel in 9 weeks

I’ve taken a dozen startups from $0 to $2MM+ in ARR, mentored more than 200 startups and taught thousands. Here’s how I teach building a battle-tested and ready to go acquisition funnel in as little as 9 weeks that will scale from $0 to millions. Note that it’ll take more than 9 weeks to scale

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Business

Building a top of funnel test campaign on Facebook

Need to build a campaign to validate your first startup idea? You’ll want to build a top of funnel marketing test to drive clicks to the new landing page. If you’ve never bought a Facebook ad campaign before, don’t worry: there are just a few steps. There are thousands of blog posts that talk about

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Content Marketing

The Wolf and the Rat: Trading money for time in new startups

A successful startup needs to balance their only two resources—time and money—and the wolf eats money with a gleeful howl. So startups try their hardest to get the most out of every penny they feed that wolf.

The other resource—time—is consumed quietly by a thousand small rats in the basement. There’s nothing loud and showy about how this vanishes, nibbled away in meetings and false starts, in projects half completed and deals left unfinished.

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Content Marketing

This 2,000 year old trick is crucial to improving your growth experiments

Whether you’re fixing a broken funnel or just trying to improve a marketing campaign, it’s important that you have tools to think about your core value prop and find different ways to present it. Fortunately, 2,400 years ago, Aristotle figured out common different ways to persuade people, so we don’t have to. He invented the

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Branding

Your Brand Sucks (If you don’t do these 5 things)

For the last 6 years, I’ve taught a workshop in various forms that I now call “Your Brand Sucks (if you don’t do these 5 things)” on 3 different continents. It’s usually a 4 – 6 hour workshop, but I recently recorded it as a 30 minute webinar for marketing / agency networking community Communo.

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Business

Fix your broken funnels!

Key to a good growth content marketing experiment is building a funnel which will drive audience into leads and leads into customers. If you’re not building (and testing) funnels to make your content perform for you, then you’re not doing anything I’d call growth content marketing. Let me lead with TL;DR for the impatient: TL;DR

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Business

Launch your thing today

Let me tell you the #1 growth hack I know: Launch your thing today. For any B2B or B2C or B2B2C startup idea out there, there exists a way to find an audience who looks like your buyer persona and spend a few hundred dollars buying traffic to a landing page and seeing if it

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Branding

How to position your brand wrong in 3 easy steps

Almost everyone I talk to has positioned their business incorrectly. This sounds crazy, right? What are you doing in business, if you don’t have a unique position to your company? In the last 6 months I’ve gone on deep dives with more than 30 companies, talking about their market positioning, what makes their brand special,

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Business

PIER and ICE scoring for growth tests

One of the hardest things to do when you’re spinning up a growth content process is figuring out what to tackle and in what order. The most important foundations for any business are its positioning, its audience, and its message, but there are dozens or hundreds of ways to test and improve all of those

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Business

Building a retargeting content funnel

When you’ve created content, you’ve done about a third of the work of content marketing. The other two thirds comes from distributing it widely after you’ve made it. The best content with no audience is nothing but a wasted opportunity. I’ve already talked about that a bunch, so I’m not going to drive that point

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Branding

Tell a story if you want to sell

I had a late night chat with a founder last night. (Well, technically this morning. My daughter kept me up ’till 2 am. :P) He was struggling to figure out how to sell his product. He is in the conversational UI space, and he was able to get leads from LinkedIn and Facebook easily enough,

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Productivity

Digital Bullet Journaling as a daily scrum

The strongest force multiplier you can apply to being more productive with your day is to take 10 minutes at the start of your work day and plan out what needs to happen. For years, I used a paper bullet journal for that. Every morning, I’d plan out what I needed to write down in

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Business

The Growth Hacker’s Content Publishing Flowchart

I’ve been doing content marketing with a focus on using it to drive revenue for over a decade now, and one of the most crucial lessons I’ve learned is that while it is very hard to make good content, it is much harder to distribute the content well after you make it. What I mean

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Content Marketing Playbook

Growth Hacking with Snov.io

Snov.io is a great tool for sending outbound cold prospecting emails, but I like to use it for more than that. The fundamental way it works is you spend a “credit” to get access to a contact’s email address & other info. Once you’ve spent that credit, though, there’s a lot more you can do

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Business

Publishing content on Facebook and Twitter

Whether you sell B2C or not, the reach and the power of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are too immense to ignore. But almost every brand makes the same rubbish posts for their content: link, image, repost 2x a week and call it done. Consumers see too much of that, and it all gets lost in

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CONTENT IS GROWTH

I’m gonna give the key idea to CrowdTamers as a business away here as a thanks for reading this far. You can boil all good marketing down to 2 ideas: content and growth. CrowdTamers specializes in using content to discover how to build a growth engine. Sound interesting? Let’s chat!