Making your product/service/ website discoverable and increasing its visibility is a major challenge for the Entrepreneurs or marketers. Learn a few of the best and proven techniques and growth hacks.

1. Growth Hacking : It’s about being creative, smart and a lot of hard-work!
Making your product/ service or platform discoverable and increasing its visibility across the web is
one of the most difficult yet the most important task for an entrepreneur or a blog owner. The best
way is always to try out all the channels available to you and then gauge the conversions from each
of those channels so that you can invest more time and money on the ones that’s giving you the best
results. The strategy that’s best for you would also depend on your product and the niche you are
operating in. You could split the strategies you could adopt into push and pull or paid and non-paid
strategies.
I’m going to leave out the AirBnB or the Mint.com example which is quoted very often as examples
of growth hacking. Sure, they were incredibly successful with their ideas and execution and I am sure
you have already come across them as well. There would always be certain incredibly brilliant idea
that would apply to your product or niche. Let’s leave those out for now and in this post explore the
generic pull techniques one could employ. Of course these strategies would require plenty of your
time and effort. Nothing comes for free! 
1) Blogging
Blogging is one of the most proven and effective strategies for gaining visibility and establishing
yourself as a thought leader. If used in the right way and provided the quality of the content is
awesome, it could easily be the best channel to drive traffic. You would want to have blog posts that
are read and shared. So ensure that you create quality content, try and analyse what sells or are the
most popular blog topics in your niche. Take note of the ones that’s trending and write your own
version.
One can adopt various Blogging strategies including what the content and theme of the Blog should
be. It’s more important to understand your target audience before you decide on the contents of
your Blog to drive maximum traffic. You could either create your own Blog Page or else you could get
to post a few as a Guest blogger on Blogs having your target audience as readers. I would suggest
you to definitely have your own blog but also try and get yourself a space or two on a few of the
more popular blogs in your niche. The advantage of guest blogging is that you open up your
thoughts, ideas & your product to a large audience in one go. All along try and build a your blog as
well, because there is nothing like having a large following on your blog as you have complete
control over your blog. You don’t necessarily have that control over someone else’s blog and can’t
aggressively push your product or services for an eternity on someone else’s blog. You can always try
and exchange blog posts as well with bloggers in your niche. This Is a good strategy to employ to
grow your audience faster.
The advantages of Guest Blogging are:




Builds natural links
Increases your online authority
Builds Relationship
Opens up your product/ service to a large audience quickly

2. I’m a big fan of Kissmetrics, Buffer & Moz and each of them have taken the blogging strategy to an
all new level to drive traffic on to their service/ product.
Kissmetrics, is an analytics platform. It has its own blog and the contents on the blog are super
awesome and cover a wide variety of posts related to SEO/ Analytics/ Digital Marketing etc. They
have steadily built up an extremely impressive reader base. They also encourage guest bloggers on
their blog page.
Buffer on the other hand grew phenomenally in its early days using the Guest blogging strategy. Leo
Wildrich, co-founder of Buffer admits that using the guest blogging strategy alone, they were able to
acquire 100,000 users in the first nine months. That’s like quite incredible. Two sites that you should
definitely consider for getting guest blog opportunities are MyBlogGuest and Bloggerlinkup.
Moz similarly used blogging as a tool to build an ever growing subscriber base and with it a healthy
base for it’s products.
2) Infographics:
Infographics is a great way to engage your audience and create something that is extremely viral in
nature. Creating one is not that expensive either. You can do it yourself or hire someone on fiverr
who could create an awesome Infographic for as much as $5. They are visual, useful, entertaining
and sharable. This brilliant article from graphs.net lays out the creative process pictorially of making
an Infographic.
And this is a great Infographic created on infographics by Zabisco.

3. Check out these great free tools for creating awesome Infographics :
http://www.infographicsarchive.com/create-infographics-and-data-visualization/
3) Social Media:
Social Media is one of the best channels for getting visibility for your product/ service. It’s also very
often the most cost effective and viral of channels. Infographics are content and Social media
provides the best possible channel to make your content viral and with it bring a truck load of traffic.
 Understand that your activity on Social Media is for the long run.
 Build great engagement and brand awareness and slowly you will start seeing results.
 Content is King - Create great sharable content that would in turn enable you to reach more
people.
 Always be responsive to questions or comments from your followers. Build a healthy
community.
 Depending on your content decide on which of Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Stumble Upon,
Instagram, Google+, Reddit, Youtube, Linkedin or any other platform would work for you.
Try and stay active on the ones that give you better engagement and reach based on your
content and niche.
Cracking visibility and engagement on each of these channels is an art in itself. I will cover in detail
the things one should avoid and the things one should follow to build a community on any of these
platforms. ( Check my earlier post on Stumble Upon. Will be covering each of Pinterest, facebook,
Twitter and Instagram).
4) Influencer Marketing:
Influencers are gold! Most of us are quite aware of what Influencer marketing is. Let me explain if
you aren’t aware. Influencer marketing is marketing to influencers in your niche be it bloggers,
journalists, consultants or Industry analysts. And If you spend time and effort there is nothing better
to build credibility and visibility.
The first step is to identify influencers in your niche. There are a number of ways by which you could
create a list of Influencers.
 Relevant keyword search on Twitter or Linkedin would give you a great list to start with.
 PR Tools like Vocus and Cision are also great for finding list of Influencers.
 Google Blog Search and Technorati can be great tools for finding bloggers in your niche.
 Set Google Alerts on keywords that you want to track. It will enable you to keep track of all
new posts related to those keywords and with it identify the person posting the same.
 Try and scan Forums/ Communities in your niche to find influencers and be active on those
forums so that people start noticing you.
 I for once find Mom Bloggers almost always a great way to influence women and it’s almost
unavoidable in niches like Fashion, Interiors, Gardening, Cooking etc. Try Blogher.
Remember that influencers are almost always busy people and it’s difficult to get their attention.
You would have to spend time and effort in building relationship with them.

4. 



Follow them on twitter and connect with them on Linkedin if possible. Share their
content and try and start a relevant conversation on any of their posts. This would
slowly make them take a note of you which you could leverage when needed.
Or else try and email them either asking a question or appreciating them for their latest
content/ post and start a conversation. It might be difficult to get email IDs of
influencers as very often they tend to not put it out in public. Use a tool like Rapportive
to try a few combinations until you get the right one connected to any of their Social
Profiles or read this article to find the best way to find someone’s email ID.
Sending gifts to influencers is another great way to build relationship with them. Brands
in fashion, food categories more often than not send their products to Influencers who
tries them and almost always writes about their experience. It’s a great way to improve
credibility and reach a large user base.
Creating a list of top influencers in your niche by actually ranking them and sharing it
with the masses is a slightly expensive and time consuming exercise but is a great way
yet again to reach out to the Influencers. If possible generate a widget as well so that the
bloggers could use it in their blogs and very often they would do that as well giving you
credible back-links.
5) E-Books & White papers:
Like I mentioned before a lot of the inexpensive strategy would involve your time and effort.
Content is the King in all sense. You can decide if Blogging or E-Books and White papers are a better
option for you. The latter would involve significant amount of time and effort in producing
something of greater value while the former would involve producing a number of shorter posts to
keep improving your visibility and reputation.
E-books and White papers are pretty comprehensive in their content and if it’s a niche you are
interested in then it’s almost always catches your eye and makes you go through it. Check this
awesome collection of blogs on the Kissmetric platform : http://blog.kissmetrics.com/marketingguides/

5. 6) Powerpoint Presentations:
Are you using Slideshare? If you are not, then you are missing out on one of the best lead generation
channels especially for businesses. Slideshare is the world’s largest content sharing community for
professionals.
“With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, Slideshare is amongst the most
visited 200 websites in the world.”
This is not the only reason for you to be on Slideshare. Slideshare presentations tend to rank really
well in Google for certain keywords. Look at the Google search results for startup metrics:
It would do you all so well if you could create your own decks on slideshare. It is inherently viral in
nature. Things to Remember while creating content on Slideshare:
 Create a compelling presentation: keep in mind the quality of the content and
attractiveness of your graphics.
 Understand that your animations won’t be re-produced on Slideshare and that you are not
going to present the deck. So your content should speak for itself.
 Use nicely designed templates for creating the deck. You may use services like SlideRocket or
PhotoSnack slide creation.
 Ensure that the privacy setting is set to [Public] Everyone.
 You can include Youtube videos in your presentations or “slidecast”, meaning you can sync
an MP3 soundtrack.
 Just like other Social Media channels, you can follow people, like their presentations,
download and interact with them. Do that and slowly build a following.
 Ensure that you keep your links in the presentation. It’s helpful not only in terms of driving
traffic to your site but also gives you good SEO benefits.
 Always have a call to action on the last slide and provide contact info. If people have made
the effort to browse through all of your slides, then they definitely are prospects. Try and
convert them.

6. 7) SEO:
In the earlier methods we have tried various content creation and distribution strategies and all of
those add to your SEO efforts. Let’s break up the SEO strategy in to on-page and off-page SEO.
Remember Content is the King, always be creating content that’s valuable.
Refer this representation of the various factors influencing your SEO strategy:

8. Highlighting the various steps one could take to improve the on-page SEO:
 Valuable content and be hyper-relevant to a specific topic
o
o
o




Include subject in title tag
Include subject in URL
Include subject in image alt text
o Specify subject several times throughout text content
o Provide Meta description and meta keywords.
Crawler/ Bot accessible
o Make sure there is no duplicate content.
o Don’t block bots.
o URLs should follow best practices around length, being static vs dynamic, and being
included in any appropriate RSS feeds or XML Sitemap files.
Phenomenal UX
Make it easy for your users to share the content. Shares on Social media sites act as strong
signals for search engines.
Multi-devices ready.
And for your off-page SEO:
 Share your content with your friends circle on all major Social networks.
 Keep Blogging and if possible do guest blog on major blogs in your niche.
 Engage on forums in your niche. Ensure that you add value to the forum and just not
another spam backlink generator. Contrbuting to discussions in the group will establish you
as an authority in your niche.
 Submit your websites to the topmost quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory,
ZoomInfo, One Mission, Pegasus, etc.
 Social Bookmarking is yet another technique. Search engines love these sites and often track
them. Ensure that you submit your contents to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious etc.
Also ensure to tag the contents properly.
 You can try exchanging links with similar blogs.
 Video promotions. Submit your videos on all major video upload websites like Youtube,
Dailymotion etc. They are quality sources of traffic and helps you with your off-page SEO.
 Contact Review sites to review your product or offerings.
 Use Press Release service providers like PRMac or PRWeb to issue press releases. Gives you
backlinks and in cases where the press release excites people, you might get a lot of
additional coverage as well.
 Get active on sites like Yahoo Answers, Cha-Cha, Answer bag etc.
These are in brief the few on-page and off-page SEO techniques you could employ in making your
website more search engine friendly and with it gain significant amounts of traffic. Remember,
always be creating content that’s valuable and extremely viral in nature.
8) Go Mobile:
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that you should go mobile just for the sake of getting more traffic to
your website. With the smart phone explosion it’s suicidal if one is not on mobile. It’s so very

9. important in terms of not losing your existing users, making their experience better, improving user
retention, in being connected with the users 24*7 and all of this adds to your growth. It’s a call you
need to make if you need to be on mobile as a native app or as a mobile web app based on the
product/ service you provide. There is some amount of resource you would need to spend on
building a native app and you would need to understand the returns it would give you to take a call
on. At Zoomdeck, this was a call we took and we did not even think twice. For a social network like
us being on the app marketplace was a no-brainer both in terms of increasing our user base and also
in terms of increasing the engagement our users would have with our app. The ability that an app
provides to be in constant touch with your users is phenomenal. One wouldn’t want to spam the
users, but an efficient use of the push notifications will go a long way in improving user retention.
A market place like the app store, google play or the amazon store opens up an entirely new channel
for users to discover your product or service and engage. People spend crazy amounts of time on
their phones and any product wouldn’t want to miss out on this. I have covered in detail the tips and
tricks you need to employ to gain maximum from your appstore debut.
Few other articles on app store strategies:
 Mobile App Retention
 App Store Optimization
9) Contests and Give Aways:
If executed properly Contests and Give Aways are a great way to engage your audience and build
base. It’s very important to understand the exact reason you are running a contest. If you aren’t sure
on that you would probably drift from the core thing you want to achieve and more often than not it
would not give you a good ROI. You could run a contest:
 To increase your social authority : Get Facebook likes or twitter/ pinterest followers and so
on.
 To drive more sales and with it revenue.
 To build awareness and buzz around your product.
 To collect email info and other customer information.
 To generate new leads.
 To engage you existing audience base.
Before you start a contest clearly define your end result and measure. Now based on the end result
you want to achieve, create a very creative contest plan. Few examples of cleverly crafted contests
are:
(i) Vera Bradley is fantastic at visual social media marketing and they created this awesome contest
on Instagram. The contest asked people to post as many Instagram photos as they liked showing
them wearing or carrying a favorite Vera Bradley bag. Submitting was as easy as including the
#VBStyleShare hashtag when posting images to Instagram.

10. The Vera Bradley Instagram contest was short – just about 4-5 days. At the end, 10 winners received
5
a free wristlet.
(ii) Contiki Vacation’s “Get on the Bus” Promotion : Contiki, a travel firm that caters to the 18
18-35
year-old demo, dropped a promotion in mid-February that let winter-weary web surfers imagine
old
mid
weary
their perfect vacation. The winner got one of eight vacations worth around $25,000.
the “Get on the Bus” promo challenged fans to get a crew with four friends together, choose a trip
and then try to get as many votes as possible in order to win. the effort, which ran from February 23
through March 31, garnered 8,000 Likes for Contiki and generated more than 10 million ad

11. impressions through Facebook shares, Likes, tweets and blog coverage. One reason for the success
was a feature that let users and their friends create a bus, which incorporated music, movies, Likes
and interests that users had in common via their Facebook profiles.
Summing up a few pointers to remember while running a contest:
 Plan your contest based on the end-result you want to achieve.
 Give meaningful prizes to your audience.
 Always include more than one prize if possible. You could have one major prize and a few
consolation prizes.
 Always use multiple channels to promote your competitions so that more people see it and
participate in it.
 Try and keep the entry simple so that you get maximum participation. Have different levels
in the competition that would increase the chances of people winning the competition.
 Decide on the duration of your contest: I would say for a simple straight forward contest - 3
weeks would be ideal as it’s not too long or too short for you get good engagement. It would
also depend on the type of contest you are running.
 Do blog, tweet, make a facebook post, share across different platforms on announcing the
winner. Experiences are the best form of give aways and always capture the winners
moment. Creates an instant connect.
Check a few of the incredibly successful & awesomely creative campaigns but of course they all had
a bit of budget as well. Never know, they might encourage you to try something really creative and
innovative but not expensive though
(i) Heineken’s departure roulette was brilliant. It was expensive but made an instant connect with
the audience. They set up a board at JFK's Terminal 8 and dared travellers to play "Departure
Roulette"—changing their destination to a more exotic location with the press of a button. They had
to agree to drop their existing travel plans—without knowing the new destination first—and
immediately board a flight to the new place.

12. (ii) Or this brilliant campaign from TNT, this was incredibly viral :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIkPeZKP-d4
(iii) “The Old Spice Guy” campaign was just phenomenal; its viral success is something that hasn’t
been matched In the short history of Internet. Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Guy, was able to pump
out hundreds of hilarious videos at alarming pace in response to Old Spice Video commentators.
They even had a Reddit thread to respond to others.

13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
This one has more than 46 million views. Incredible.
(iv) Hugh Macleod is a professional cartoonist and his idea of releasing a succession of Daily Biz Cards
was just brilliant.
In his campaign he creates cartoon in which he targets a particular individual, a random person, a
celebrity but always someone. His market is pretty huge and he would of course need a lot of
visibility to build his business. He relied on the ego and the influence of several large names on the
internet who would circulate or share the cartoon with their tribe giving him greater visibility.
Brilliant stuff.
(v) Red Bull’s Stratos Space Jump vowed the world and is one of the most brilliant campaigns
executed ever. Dubbed "the mission to the edge of space," it featured Felix Baumgartner making a
freefall jump from 24 miles above the earth last October. The jump broke five records, according to
officials at Guinness World Records, and Mr. Baumgartner became the first human to break the
sound barrier without engine power. Mr. Baumgartner's feat captured consumers' attention the

14. world over. TV stations, news reports and journalists all referred to the event as "Red Bull Stratos"
rather than shortening it to simply "Stratos," as is so often done with branded events.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I
The event was carried on nearly 80 TV stations in 50 countries. The live webcast was distributed
through 280 digital partners and racked up 52 million views, making it the most-watched live stream
in history.
There are plenty more of such brilliant and creative campaigns that’s been incredibly successful and
pulled in a lot of visibility and conversions for the brands. The essence of the success of anything you
do to leverage “Pull ” is to create quality content and to tap in to all channels to reach the audience
who would get excited by it. Be smart, be creative and put in a bit of hard-work! Focus not just on
getting traffic, but also focus on retaining your existing users and delighting them always! 
Contact Info:
Email : amaranth.vannarath@gmail.com
Twitter : freaks007
Blog : amarnath14.tumblr.com