You want to help build a better world! You have a cause you care deeply about. You want to raise awareness and probably money to support your cause. You can and should avail yourself of the superb micro-targeting capabilities of paid advertising platforms like Facebook as well as others like Pinterest, Instagram and Google’s Adwords.
Most of us promoting our charities, groups, and cause related merchandise have limited budgets for paid advertising. But we need to get people to our websites to hear our message about whatever it is we feel is building a Better World. So we turn to something generally referred to as “growth hacking”. Growth hacking not to be confused with Russian hacking or other scurrilous “blackhat” type behavior really encompasses doing things within legal and hopefully ethical guidelines to get people to notice your brand or offer and answer your “CTA” call to action like buy this or donate here!
Perhaps the first step in the process is to write up a profile describing your desired customer or perhaps donor. What do they tend to read? Are they more of a Buzfeed type reader or a New Yorker Magazine type reader? Where do they go both on the Internet and out in the real world. How old are they? What is their education level? What type of car or transportation would they tend to use? Do they tend to like one type of music more than another? What do they do in their leisure time? What charities in your are of focus might they already donate to or volunteer for? What Facebook groups would they belong to?
Hint: Join a Facebook group or two in your niche/field and keep an eye on the right side ads where Facebook recommends other related groups for you to join. Join them and keep a spreadsheet of them. Participate in them and add value to others as much as you can. Groups are not places to promote your stuff but rather to make positive connections and the best way to do that is offer value to people in need.
So start today! Write your vision or perception of your customer’s profile creating an avatar of them for you to use in planning your growth hacking strategy. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It won’t be. But it is important to do!
Someone very successful and smart once told me “Making good money is just a matter of getting between the flow of things people need and people who need them and being more likable and trusted than others doing the same.” Others have said it’s more a matter of who you know than what you know. And while both statements have a lot of truth I think there’s other elements at play too like:
- Being able to offer more perceived value than others.
- Being persistent in offering things to people who want them.
- Being willing to work harder and do things other people won’t do or try.
- Having a good team working with you.
- Having one or more mentors to guide you and hold you accountable.
- Being around people who are successful at what you want to do.
So here are a couple tactics for generating “free” traffic to your website. I put free in quotation marks because everything takes time and effort and of course as the saying goes “time is money”.
$ Guest blogging: People (lots and lots of people) have blogs that want new content for their readers. So they open up their blogs for guest bloggers to post relevant blog posts on it. In exchange they let you link back to your own site sometimes in your “byline” like this is written by YOU with this linked to your blog. This creates a “backlink” to your website which the Google SEO gods see as justification to increase the popularity of your listing and therefore increases your rankings for a keyword in the search engine. How do you find blogs that want guest bloggers? Google! So here are some google searches you can use to find the pages many blogs put up where they describe their rules and what they want from guest blog writers: Search the keyword “submit a guest post”
Search the keyword “guest post guidelines” Search the keyword “write for us”
Search the keyword “guest post” Search the keyword “guest post by” Search the keyword “accepting guest posts”
Search the keyword “guest post rules” Then check out what you find and see if its related to your niche. This is preferable but not necessary as the more backlinks you get the better. It also generates TRAFFIC that you don’t pay for!!! Do a post a day or hire a VA virtual assistant to do them for you as part of your growth hacking schedule. Good luck! I’ll continue this series of blog posts on cause related growth hacking in the coming days and I hope to hear from you if you have suggestions and or questions. We are all in this together!