Become a Growth Hacker for Your Startup or Small Business

Growth Hacker Background

At this point, I am sure most of us have heard of a growth hacker, growth hacking, sales hacking, or life hacking. Maybe, in the past when you see growth hacker or one of the other terms, you ignore. Maybe you don't know what a growth hacker or think it is a tech business thing? It is time to pay attention. You have a website, twitter account, facebook account, and other social media. You have profiles setup with travel organizations and local business organizations. These are all tech. It is time to start becoming a growth hacker for your small business or startup right now.

To become a growth hacker, you need to take advantage of readily available tools, tips, and tricks that are quick and easy execute. Topics cover a broad range of areas including sales, marketing, and productivity. A great growth hack can be completed in 15 minutes or less and improve one of these areas. String a bunch of these growth hacks together and you can achieve exponential growth in your business.

A business hack can be as simple as a productivity hack that changes your thinking so that any action you can get done in 2 minutes or less you do now. Or can be a more complicated process you can follow to increase twitter followers by 100% in 3 weeks.

Growth Hacker Invite

If you want to become a growth hacker or get better at it, have we got a deal for you. Sign up for the Business Hacking Newsletter for FREE and get the Business Hacking Toolkit. The Toolkit includes:

• 35+ Page eBook on Business Hacking that includes life hacks, productivity hacks, and growth hacks. See the preview, Business Growth Hacking Tips Roundup.
• Scarcity Email Marketing Audiobook with extra content not available in the article - How to Create Scarcity Email Marketing Campaigns in 3 Easy Steps.
• Business Hacking Newsletter - a weekly newsletter with more great free tools to help you grow your business.

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Is Howard Stern SiriusXM's Walmart

Can high revenue concentration cause future problems for SiriusXM Satellite Radio provider? A lesson in Pareto (80-20 rule) and revenue concentration.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn on December 1st, 2015. If you want to leave a comment or prefer reading on LinkedIn, you can go here - Is Howard Stern SiriusXM's Walmart

There are a lot of big names in the title of this article:

•      Howard Stern - the "King of all Media"
•      Walmart – retail store giant
•      SiriusXM – the premier satellite radio provider in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico

Each of these giants has taken different paths, but all have seen meteoric growth to become the giants they are today.  Walmart opened its first store in Arkansas in 1962 and a little over 50 years later has over 11,000 stores in 27 countries.

Howard Stern started out on college radio at Boston University in the early seventies and after traveling from station to station; found a home in New York City, first with NBC Radio, then K-Rock, before ending up at Sirius. For more info on Mr. Stern’s early career, watch the movie “Private Parts”. Sirius does not release listener data, but Mr. Stern’s listeners were estimated at 12 million prior to moving to Sirius and with Sirius growing at 11% a year, it is safe to say he has at least that many listeners.

Sirius launched in 2002 and had grown to almost half a million subscribers prior to signing Howard Stern in 2004. Subscribers would grow to over 3 million prior to Mr. Stern’s first day on the air, and by the 2008 merger with XM, subscribers hit 8.3 million. Today, according to the SiriusXM Corporate Overview on their site, they have “more than 28.4 million subscribers”.

For those Howard Stern fans out there, we are within 2 months from the end of a five-year contract. At the end of this contract, Mr. Stern will have been with SiriusXM for 10 years. When he signed on the dotted line in 2004, I was already a Sirius subscriber. I was living in New York City and rock radio in the city was on life support, plus buildings affected the radio signal in my apartment. At the time, Internet radio and podcasts were not a great option as they were fledgling industries. Also, I was not a New Jersey Giants or New Jersey Jets fan. So the combination of a reliable signal, NFL games, and a variety of music stations had me sold.

Where does revenue concentration fit in? Read the rest of the article on Eagle Strategy Group to see.

Three Free Productivity Tools I Use Everyday

Canva, Evernote, and Dropbox are free business tools that are really free and really great!

Here are three free productivity tools that I use every day and they are really free. These tools don’t have free trials and you pay up in a few day if you want to keep using. They have free versions with enough features that you can get real work done right away.

Free Productivity Tool #1: Canva - Amazingly Simple Graphic Design

As far as free business tools go, Canva is a new discovery for me. It was recommended to me by a follower on Twitter a month ago and I only recently gave it a try and was hooked.

Canva is the easiest web-based design tool that I have run across. It takes two minutes to setup an account, go through the tutorial and start designing your first project. There are tons of free templates and design features, but it is not overwhelming for first time designers. There is also a catalog of free graphics and paid graphics for only $1 each. You can even upload your own pictures. The "3 Free Business Tools" banner at the top of this article and the Scannable sidebar were created in Canva. Start using Canva now.

Read the rest of Three Free Business Tools I Use Everyday on Eagle Strategy Group. 

How Social Media Reshaped Communications

I watched this web cast live on Wednesday October 6, 2011 and think it is worth the 50 or so minutes for you to watch the replay.  The presenter is Chris Bogan, President of Human Business Works.  Here is the teaser for the web cast:

One in eleven humans on the planet have a Facebook account. Social networks are now the #1 most visited site category on the Internet. Not since television in the 1950s has any one shift in the technology landscape driven such a large raft of behavior changes. Businesses are grappling with social media on several fronts: how do companies manage the use of social media internally and externally by employees? How do marketers and sales teams and customer service teams use social media to build relationships of value? Which policies and practices keep everyone operating in a safe-but-smooth zone? And how do we make value for everyone from these tools? Join Chris Brogan for a discussion of how to build a new dialtone in this environment.



View the web cast on the BrightTalk web site: How Social Media Reshaped Communications

Get More Followers on Twitter - Fill Out You Profile

I am in the process of going through the new followers for my Twitter account - @SMBStrategy - as well some accounts that I monitor for clients and still cannot believe that businesses setup a twitter account and do not fill in the profile. 

I am looking at a car wash/detailing business that is following me to see if I should follow back.  To decide if I want to follow back I go to their twitter page to see their profile, location, and tweets.  They have spent the time to setup a background that looks clean and professional, their tweets are almost all about their services, and their profile is not filled in.  Why spend the time to create a background and not the minute it would take to add a profile?

I will not follow... why?
1.  Their tweets are primarily about their services, so they are not providing me with other valuable information that I want to know.  They do have a couple tweets on salt damage, but that's it.
2.  Issue #1 would not be bad if they were near me and I like getting my car washed, but they have not put their location on their background or profile, so I have no clue where they are.  One can make the argument you can follow one of their tweets to their web site and see where they are, but isn't part of the draw of Tweeter getting info without going to other sources...

Other than my rant, there are other reason to fill out your profile completely.  Your Twitter profile is crawled to deliver search results within Twitter and through 3rd party applications.  This is one of the ways for followers and potential customers to find you.  Also, include you full domain in your profile for SEO purposes, not a shortened redirect link. 

Good luck setting up your account and happy tweeting...