Here's a talk I gave at the iNovia Chief Marketing Officer Summit on how we grew Crew (pickcrew.com) to over 100,000 email subscribers in 6 months with two and a half people. If you're running you're own business, you are short on time. The focus of this talk was how we grew our business by extending the life of our marketing. It's not about doing more. It's about extracting as much value as you can from the things you do. More details on the things mentioned in this slideshow here: http://blog.pickcrew.com/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup/

1. How to 10x your results
from content with the same
resources you have now
Mikael Cho, Founder of Crew
pickcrew.com
@mikaelcho

2. In 6 months:
50,000+ monthly readers
100,000+ email subscribers

3. In 6 months:
50,000+ monthly readers
100,000+ email subscribers
Resources:
Me
1 writer
1 designer/developer (sort of)

4. The best marketing is when
you don’t know it’s marketing.

5. NY Times Study
Practically useful articles are shared the most.

6. “Create marketing so
useful people would pay
for it.”
- Jay Baer, Author NY Times Bestseller, Youtility

7. Crew Blog
50,000+ monthly readers
#3 referral source to Crew

8. Crew Blog
50,000+ monthly readers
#3 referral source to Crew
Volume:
1 post per week for 20 weeks

9. Is writing repeatable and scalable?

10. Is writing repeatable and scalable?
1 post a week for 20 weeks.
Over 2 million views.

11. Crew growth over this
time
30% month over month

12. How
1. Practically useful
2. Relevance scale
3. Evergreen content

13. 1. Practically useful
Article has:
- personal experience
- unique elements of science
- unique examples
- unique takeaways

14. Practically useful

15. 2. Relevance

16. Via: Moz

17. Topics indirectly related but have potential for broad reach.

18. Leads to exposure from major media outlets.

19. 3. Evergreen content
What you make will be just as useful 5 years from now as
it is today.

20. The gift that keeps giving

21. The gift that keeps giving
!
Coffee vs. Beer: Which drink makes you more creative?!
!
!
Day 1: #1 Hacker News
Day 1: #1 Medium.com
Day 7: Frontpage Digg
Day 30: syndicated to LifeHacker
Day 120: Frontpage Digg
Day 180: syndicated: The Next Web

22. How to get distribution when
you have no distribution
1. Publish on your blog
2. Key influencers directly related to topic (people mentioned in the post)
3. Email subscribers
4. Distribution publishing (medium, twitter, facebook, linkedin)
5. Syndication (you must produce excellence to get this consistently)

23. Distribution
If you have less than 50k monthly visitors,
focus on reach not optimization.

24. Accelerate reach with
free tools
Blog takes months to build an audience.
!
How can you go further?

25. Unsplash
Metrics:
100 million photos viewed a month
#1 referral source to Crew

26. How Much To Make An App
Metrics:
1 million visitors
#2 referral source to Crew
25% of projects

27. Overall results from free
tools:
3 of the top 5 referring sites to Crew
100,000+ email subscribers
40% of revenue

28. Repeat utility

29. Repeat utility

30. Winning Search

31. Trust
“People trust us not because of our authority in the
space, but because they relate with the vulnerability.”
!
- Alex Turnbull, CEO Groove

32. ROI of being human
Lifetime Value of a customer from our content is 2.5x the
Lifetime Value of a customer from paid channels.

33. To make a substantial impact in
how your company is growing,
you must create extreme value.

34. That’s it.
Mikael Cho, Founder of Crew
pickcrew.com
@mikaelcho