In May, AppSumo founder Noah Kagan started a series “Summer of Marketing”, a full course on viral marketing and growth tips. I signed up as soon as it was available: I’ve read some great content from Noah and wanted the learn from the course.

In the interest of learning the most from it, every week or so I’d take out one or two highly-actionable posts from Noah and write them in a notes file. That became the rough outline for this post – I hope it helps you.

Do sign up for Noah’s email list: he puts out great stuff.

Week One – SMART/Goal Based Marketing

In the very first week, Noah sets the stage with a very goal-driven marketing strategy. First, you are encouraged to make a very specific goal. For example, it could be get 100 new signups on your email list at the end of the month.

Personally, I use the SMART model for this. This helps me and my clients set super-actionable goals and meet both our needs. I highly recommended starting with a blend of “quant based marketing” theory as well as the SMART strategy too:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Then work these metrics into the math-based goal setting that Noah encourages. Combine your SMART goal and work backwards to reach your goal. For example, you should know for your website:

• Websites conversion rates
• Overall web traffic
• Best traffic source
• Identify the largest traffic opportunity

Now Work On Your Goals

Work through your problems here. Set your goal by doing carefully measured analysis to find out how to succeed. For example, 100 new email signups means you’ll have to get 4,000 new visitors if your email signup conversion is 2.5%. Now, you can easily work towards that goal with the techniques you’ll learn going forward.

Week Two – Defining Your Customer

In this lesson, Noah shares his initial struggle with selling a new digital product he’d created.

After some tweaking and testing (and knowing his customer better) he was able to quickly turn around sales of his King Sumo Wordpress plugin.

How?

Simple.

Knowing the objections his customers had to purchasing the product.

Truly knowing and understanding your customer isn’t just a “growth hacking” or “digital marketing” technique – it’s the core of your business.

If you know that your ideal clients are 30-50, male, looking for trackable results from digital marketing, are small business owners and read blogs once a month, you can create something amazing to help them out (cough).

But before you go and:

• Create content
• Invest in market research
• Hire new staff
• Change design or copy on your website

You should know your customers. The language you’d use and the benefits you’d sell to a busy executive on a brand new project management system is worlds away from the language I’d use to describe to get people to adopt a puppy. Do your research before you go on and truly know and understand your customers – where do browse the news, what pages they ‘Like’ on Facebook and what industry blogs they read.

Keep in mind

Always remember the problem you are solving for your customers, who they truly are where they spend time online.

Week Three – Growing Your Email List

Your website probably doesn’t convert.

By real-life definitions, nothing online converts. – Seth Godin

And, according to Seth, that’s fine! That really isn’t cause for concern. But, unlike “real life” marketing and advertising, there’s a fun little universal identifier that people use to sign-in and actually agree to marketing messages.

The humble email address.

This (at times frustrating) lovely thing is your key to getting the 99% of people who don’t purchase right away and turn them into loyal, raving fans.

To collect the most email addresses, use better than the simple sidebar opt-ins. You can use pop-ups with enticing copy and make a great offer – people will signup. Use a service like Mailchimp to get email addresses (up to 2,000) for free into a great service that can send out promotional messages.

I highly recommend setting up automated series for new email subscribers – and to do that, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid Mailchimp plan. However, for smaller lists, I just pay for a block of credits ($10 will last you a few months) and start from there.

Don’t worry about annoying people as long as you’re sharing great stuff.

People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them – Jerry Seinfeld

Week Four – Creating Great Free Products

A great addendum to week three, Noah shares the best way to get great email addresses on your list: offer a tasty freebie.

While posting great content is always a surefire way to grow your, you can take this to the next level with freebies. For Noah, he’s used software trials and deals to grow his list – however he does have access to tons of startups who are willing to give him those trials.

For most business owners, great free downloads could take the form of:

• PDF of blog posts
• Audio version
• Video courses
• Ebooks
• Discounts

Adding these elements to your website calls to action for email collection can yield a huge increase in signups. Combine this with the secret sauce of email popups, slide-ups and modals mentioned in week three and you’ve got a great combo to engage with your clients and customers.

Week Five – Using Guest Posts

Despite the warning from Matt (fun fact: that comment link from me sends referral traffic to my personal site to this day), guest blogging is still a legitimate SEO and marketing tactic.

But, finding those super-relevant guest blogs can be tricky. Sure, there are large publications you’d love to guest blog on, but they get thousands of pitches everyday. They are virtually immune to another blogger who wants to post on their site.

Think smaller

Instead, go after guest blogging opportunities that are smaller (but still very relevant). A great tool to do this is BuzzSumo, which allows you to search a topic, site or category and find sites that get tons of social shares. Picking out a few sites to guest blog on will take some effort to reach out, write an amazing post and go through their editorial process. But, it’s totally worth it. You will be putting your content in front of the right people and probably getting some very high quality referral traffic. Including a link is a great way to create some links for your SEO efforts too – just don’t go in there abusing anchor text and you’ll be fine.

Guest blogging tips

Make sure to:

• Find relevant blogs to guest blog on
• Reach out with a great email that shows you are serious
• Connect with the site owner in meaningful ways – follow on Twitter and link to their blogs frequently
• Creating an amazing blog for them that’s totally unique

You may not be able to post every single day with this strategy – don’t stress. Focus on quality – not frequency.

Week Six – Be Known In Your Community

Tied to guest posting, but not always if you are posting there, it’s key to know where your audience hangs out outline. No, this isn’t drive-by link posting or spamming – you should truly engage with a community where your customers hang out.

For Noah, this was Growth Hackers and Inbound.org. For you, check out places like Reddit, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Communities, or do a Google Search for online forums. You can quickly find communities in almost any type of business or niche.

Now, the key is to become a regular contributor. Share articles (not just ones that you have written) and comment, upvote, engage and be a member. After a few months, you’ll have a reputation in your community. Now, it’ll be easier to reach out for guest posts, make connections and more. Building your brand is important to securing long-term relationships with your peers.

Week Seven – Use Other Marketing Assets

One of my favorite weeks, Noah talks about clever simple little tips and tricks you can use to collect more email addresses – online and off.

He mentions making your email signature snappy, with a link to a dedicated landing page to encourage people to sign up who you email frequently. A lawyer changed his to encourage downloads to an ebook – you could have it go to a landing page for email signups or other assets like an infographic. You can also:

• Collect email addresses at your physical place of business
• Print a landing page URL on receipts
• Post it on a placard in your office
• Add your email signup page to your physical packaging

You can also encourage likes on your Facebook page, blog engagement, app downloads or encourage new Twitter followers.

Week Eight – Advertising & Retargeting Tips

If you have been online and even thought about purchasing anything, you’ve probably been retargeted. Retargeting is a crazy-good opportunity for a few simple reasons:

• Only target those people who’ve already been on your website
• Target based on services or pages viewed
• Keep your brand top of mind
• Show ads for days – to remind people to come back

One tip I have here (and something I see brands big and small mess up a ton) is to make sure that your remarketing pixel is nullified on the thank you page. Inside of Google, make sure you are excluding those who’ve already purchased from you. This is critical – especially if you are offering promotions or other discounts in your retargeting ads. Customers who have already purchased are unlikely to purchase again right after – wait a month and offer them something similar, but not right after purchase.

You want your brand to be memorable for the right reasons, not because you are frustrating your website visitors.

Week Nine – Giveaways Grow Your Business

Giveaways are usually the cheapest way to get viral growth with your email list. If you are giving away something related to your business, you should be getting at least semi-qualified leads to your list. Of course, anything “free” is going to attract a lot of lower quality emails, too.

But, Noah has seen amazing list growth with pretty low-cost giveaways like Dropbox Pro accounts ($10/month) and a series of books ($100 total). You can also get good list growth as long as you’re using a great landing page. Noah recommends his software King Sumo. Personally, I have used custom created solutions as well as landing page software like Unbounce and have had luck with both – if your contest is easy to enter, you’re going to see good list growth. I encourage you to pick a dedicated landing page – merely hosting on your blog will introduce a ton of clutter that distracts from your giveaway. Read my thoughts on landing page software for more insight into which one is best for you.

Now that you have a giveaway, you can create that page and promote it with Facebook ads, email list, social media posts and reach out to your clients and customers. Giveaways can grow your email list significantly – so trying one can be a quick way to get more subscribers.

Week Ten – Story Telling & Writing

Writing is everything with your marketing. Some of my favorites companies are that way because of their brand messaging, tone and sales copy.

If you can’t write well enough to be proud of your work – then it’s imperative that you improve. Almost all of our communication nowadays is writing – emails, blogs, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook and texting.

Telling a compelling story is the key to engaging your customers. I’m telling a story right now on what I learned from going through twelve weeks of marketing insights – if you’ve made it this far, it must be pretty compelling, too ;).

We can all improve our writing skills – but the key is to put effort into getting better. I have worked with people who claim they are bad at writing without every trying to improve their writing skills.

Telling a story, writing, communicating is too important to not be good (or amazing) at it. Write, iterate and seek to tell an engaging story every time you publish something.

Week Eleven – Live Chat & Qualitative Data Collection

Live chat, or customer surveys are amazing tools for data collection. What better way to peek into the minds of your customers than ask them what they need help with, are confused or want to know as they are looking at your pricing or services page?

You can find out that your writing was unclear, pricing model was confusing or that people don’t get your tiered levels of service. You can learn that customers expect free shipping with your products or didn’t understand your fees.

You can look at Google Analytics all day – but it can’t tell you what people are thinking and how they feel about your site or product. Only their words can do that. Installing a tool like Qualaroo or Hotjar can give you insight into what your customers are feeling and you can adapt accordingly.

Week Twelve – Referrals = Gold

Look, outbound (even inbound) marketing and advertising is hard. You can get thousands of people to your website and get maybe one client from it.

But, by asking 5 of your current clients or customers, you’re likely to get a referral out of it – if you are making an impact of course.

Tap into these sources with pre-written email templates, referral offers and commissions and bounties. Your customers are going to talk about you either way – make sure that they are encouraging others to use and enjoy your services.

Quite A Summer!

Yeah, that was a lot to take in. Noah’s Summer Of Marketing course was very fun and informative to go through and learn. I picked up quite a few things I’ll be testing and working on during the next month or so on client projects. If you are looking for more marketing insight on techniques like SEO, PPC, Email marketing and more, do sign up for our emails.