A brand new growth hack useful for bringing FREE super targeted traffic to your website.

I recently have been hired by a hosting company (Templ.io) to bring more highly converting and targeted traffic to them.
It’s relatively unknown but I must admit they do an AWESOME job (this very website is hosted by Templ).

They had 0 budget for this… probably because hiring me sucked away all of their budget 😉

So I asked myself the million dollar question: how do I bring super targeted traffic and already warm leads to their website?
… and even without spending any money?!?

After some nights of thoughts I decided to go with “he bad and the good” technique.

Keep reading ’cause this growth hack will really blow your mind!

 

Phase 1: study / plan

a) Pick a “bad guy” in the same field/industry 😉 Just to create a contrast.
I decided to go with “cloudways” for this role:
– because I have been a client of them… and they really sucks. I mean, platform is kind of good, but the support is crap. Really low quality and incompetent.
– because of their unfair trustpilot tactic they used on trustpilot. To compensate for their negative reviews on trustpilot (honest reviews as you can read), they just emailed all of their clients and give them 2 to 3 months of free hosting in exchange for a 5 star review on trustpilot! This way they “compensated” for the negative reviews making their reputation appear to be super good.

b) Subscribe to their free/trial plan for enough time:
Use that time to study and analyze them. Look to all of their details and try to figure out a singular way to individuate all of their clients.
Can be signature, KB, feature request, testimonials page, anything…
The important point here is that you need to BREATHE THE SAME AIR of their clients.

c) Find a flaw, attack point, weakness or anything to use “against them” to highlight
> don’t invent, be correct and ethical!
In the case of Cloudways, I have noticed that they used a very dirty, unprofessional and unethical technique….  actually, one of the worst I ever seen by a hosting company!!

A very lame backlinks tactic (but smart if you have no ethics) that I explained here.

Phase 2: preparation

a) Research a keyword for ranking on google

Don’t spend money and efforts on big SEO software for that. Clearly Semrush is good and you can get some good insights on your keyword:

But if you don’t have time nor money, just use… Google itself 😉

For me the keyword “cloudways alternative” was the good one 😉

b) Write a killer article around your keyword (step a) about the differences between the “bad” guy and your favorite product that you want to push

With “killer” I mean a 1200-1500 words article (don’t make it too long) full of nice (helpful) images (e.g. infographics, tables, etc) to help the readers to understand your points.
I inserted about 1 link to Templ.io Insert at least 1 hyperlink every 4-500 words. It’s better if you ask help (as I did) to Templ.io it self… they can surely help you to throw light on some details that can make the difference.

c) Shot a video showing the differences (screen record) and just use voice over. If you don’t speak English, just hire someone on fiverr or upwork (it will cost you around 10-20usd). Optimize your video for the proper keywords using youtube buddy.

Integrate the video ABOVE the fold in your article, because this way your users will stay more than 30sec on the page to watch the video. This will help your article to rank higher ’cause Google will interpret that positively, rather than for your users to come back before the 30sec and click on some other result (ie. your Google snippet CTR will be better).

Phase 3: the attack [classical paths]

a) Socials

Thanks to brandmentions, hashtagify,  or any other explained here, decide on the best hashtag and plan a 1-3 weeks posts on different hours and different socials linking your article.

Best would be to specifically research focus group (e.g. on facebook) about hosting (in my case). So to bring the points explained on your article to the attention of the people in the group.

b) Podcast

If you have the ability and the means, also record a small podcast. That is speak lauder your whole article trying to make the points clear for someone that want to go runnning and listen to you rather than reading.

Not only you can make that available on top of your article, but also post that on various podcast directories.

c) Infographic

Post the infographics you created for your article also on slideshare and similar. You will have that extra traffic. Also, optimize it with the proper ALT keywords so to make that appear on google images too.

 

… boooring….

 

Right, all classical stuff that may or may not working 😉

Let’s switch to the JUICE PART 😉

Phase 4: the attack [the growth hack]

Do you remember Phase 1 c) ?

Well, in my case I had this card to play 😉

So I went on google and wrote this query:

Found 14’800 results (Cloudways clients).

So basically with this query above, the lame tactic CW used against their clients (ie. posting a blog post on their websites without them to know to gain backlinks), was turned against them!

I was sure that a huge chunk of those websites/clients had the same problems I had with cloudways. So getting to know how I solved those problems (ie. switching to Templ.io) would certainly help their lives 😉

But how to get in touch with such a massive amount of clients?

First things first.

With SEO quake (FREE) extension I converted this:

Into this:

About 300 (to begin) CW clients’ websites.

I used the following 2 formulas to extract the single domain from the long URL showed on SERP.

=LEFT(A1,FIND(“/”,A1,9))
(removing everything after the final “/”)

=LEFT(B78,LEN(B78)-(RIGHT(B78)=”/”))
(removing the final slash at the end of the URL)

Used delimco free tool to organize this long 300 websites list into a unique big list of domains only separated by a comma.

Finally, I used small program that you can find on our growth shop here, and copy-pasted the comma-separated 300-domains list into the bot…

Booom!!

In a few minutes I got a list of dozen and dozen of emails!

Just got in touch with ten emails at a time only (old style: in BCC) with an ethical, honest and helpful email.

Why?

Because in 2021, emailing a list of people just became an hassle with GDPR and all the crappy email software validations that will ban you immediately…

Bottom line: I told them that I was in their same conditions and listed all the problems they were surely facing with Cloudways 😉 (mirror and matching technique) Pointed them to my killer article saying that everything would have been clear to them once read the article 😉

I won’t reveal the numbers of the converted clients in the following 30 days because I can’t (signed an NDA ;))

But as you can imagine they were an astonishing number!!