Growth Everywhere is a blog on business and personal growth. On Mondays we interview world-class entrepreneurs and pull out actionable insights to help you grow. Whether you’re an aspiring or current entrepreneur, you’re guaranteed to get value out of each interview. On Tuesdays through Fridays you’ll get ‘Growth Bites’ episodes, which are short segments where I cover topics from hiring, sales, marketing, productivity and much more.
If you like what you hear, you can find us on iTunes or you can subscribe to our list!
I currently run digital marketing agency Single Grain. My background is in internet marketing and I previously ran the growth team at online education startup Treehouse. I’ve also consulted for various Fortune 500 companies and venture backed startups.
I currently take on a very limited number of clients for consulting so feel free to contact me if you’d like help with growing your business online.
Marketing Consulting
We Help Great Companies Grow Their Revenues Online
78% of CEOs Think Marketers Don’t Focus on ROI. We do.
Content Marketing & Social Promotion
Content is the fire. Promotion is the gasoline.
Authority: How to get it, and how to keep it. That’s what content marketing and social promotion are all about.
In the old days, you could slap up a few articles, do one MySpace post, and be the authority in search engines pretty quickly.
The bar’s been raised way up since then. In competitive markets, you now need information – dense content that’s useful and compels visitors to want to bookmark and share it.
As a content-driven digital marketing agency, we know how to create long form, well researched content that stands out from the pack.
Advertising: Facebook, Google AdWords & More
Successful digital advertising is about knowing how to get the most bang for your buck
The good news about digital advertising: You get instant visibility and basically as much traffic as you can handle. The bad news: You can go broke in record time if you’re not experienced and careful.
How do we know? Because 96.2% of our clients renew their contracts with us for online advertising. We're careful to spend ad dollars only when we can see positive, measurable results. Nothing changes faster than this stuff, and we have full-time experts at our digital marketing agency whose only job is to get the most visibility for you at the least cost.
SEO & Conversion Rate Optimization
SEO brings you more long-term traffic, and CRO turns more of that traffic into customers.
There are tons of digital marketing “experts” out there, yet when you Google terms like “Facebook ad agency” and “marketing funnels”, we consistently rank at or near the top, worldwide. Case closed.
We know how to do SEO in tough markets, including yours. We also know literally dozens of ways to take the traffic you get today and turn more of it into buyers. That’s what conversion rate optimization is all about.
Resources
The Importance of that One Key Takeaway
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to teach at USC. I was teaching an entrepreneurship class and I spoke for about an hour and a half. It was good. But did they leave the class with a takeaway?
And then I went to an Entrepreneurs’ Organization event the other day where I got to hear this entrepreneur speak about how he’s been through a lot of different things. He talked about how he’s had crazy experiences (like completing five Ironman events)—basically his life story.
Why You Need to Expand Your Existing Accounts
As a marketer, you’re always looking for ways to grow. Instead of starting from scratch, it’s often easier to look at the customers you already have and figure out how you can expand those relationships.
For example, if you’re selling e-commerce products, you can think about what kind of upsells you can add to increase your average cart value.
The Best SEO Tool to Grow Your Business
People like to say, “SEO is dead. SEO isn’t going anywhere. Google’s market share is declining.”
As of today, SEO is still really relevant. It’s just that a lot of people have started to move away from it, especially those who have poured all this money into it and want a pretty quick return, which makes sense. Comparatively, when you put money into paid advertising, you’re going to get returns faster versus SEO.
With venture capitalists, typically they want things to go, go, go, but if you’re building a business for the long-term, you can really operate at your own pace and using SEO is a good way to go about building a brand. When you combine SEO with content marketing you’ll eventually get a lot of traffic, maybe a couple million visits a month, and then your SEO becomes conversion rate optimization.
How to Prioritize with the Eisenhower Matrix
You’d be surprised at the number of people who don’t know how to prioritize. There have been people I’ve worked with, people who have been entrepreneurs for many years, who are always running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
I’m definitely guilty of this, too. I often catch myself at the end of the day thinking, “Wow, what was I really doing today?” It’s so important to try to lock in and focus on the things that actually matter in order to move your business forward.
Trial Week: Putting Your Candidates to the Ultimate Test
If I had to guess, I’d say that your hiring process goes something like this: you throw a job posting on Craigslist, Monster, Indeed or LinkedIn and expect people to come through. You go through a bunch of resumes, call up some of the better candidates, then invite your favorites to an interview. You might even do some reference checks, and then you make the job offer right there.
Close?
I think most of us can agree that there are ways we can improve this incredibly-important-but-quickly-becoming-outdated hiring process.
So how do you make this old way better? Let’s talk about the concept of trial week.
