Quick Sprout

What’s the easiest way to grow your company? Acquire customers, right?

I used to live by that philosophy when I first became an entrepreneur, but acquiring them can be very expensive when you are first starting out. Plus, how do you know what customers you should be acquiring?

Starting up a Google AdWords campaign or some Facebook ads may sound simple, but if you don’t know exactly what kind of customers you should be acquiring, you’ll end up losing a lot of money. And even if you do know what customers to go after, you can still lose money.

So if you are just starting out, focus your energy on manufacturing customers… not acquiring them. So how do you manufacture them?

Well, manufacturing involves 3 steps:

1. You choose your market carefully
2. Fulfill your promises
3. Add your secret sauce

Here’s how you can manufacture customers:  [click to continue...]

If you aren’t sharing your content on Facebook, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Why? Because they have over 1 billion active users!

Now by no means are you going to be able to reach 1 billion users… over even 1 percent of them. But the beautiful part is, if you even reach .01% of their total user base, that’s still a huge number.

So how do you increase your odds of grabbing the attention of those 1 billion users? Well, you need to write great status updates. Here’s how you can do so:  [click to continue...]

Have you considered allowing guest posts on your blog? We grew the KISSmetrics blog to over 400,000 visitors a month, which mainly came from guest author contributions. And we grew the Crazy Egg blog to over 100,000 visitors a month within a year… from the same strategy.

What you may not know is that search engines might start penalizing sites that accept guest posts, or discount posts made by specific authors because a lot of junk content is being guest posted on the web. Even high authoritative blogs such as the New York Times or Huffington Post, are allowing guest posts, and many of those posts are filled with mediocre content and spammy links.

Here’s what Google thinks about guest posting…

Now this doesn’t mean you should not allow guest posts on your blog. But instead, it means that you need to be pickier. Don’t just accept guest posts because you think it will increase your traffic, but more so accept them because the content will benefit your readers.

Here are 7 rules you should follow if you plan on accepting guest posts:  [click to continue...]

Although I’ve co-founded a handful of companies, I didn’t really create my first startup till 7 years ago. The first one was Crazy Egg, which helps make websites more useable. And it wasn’t till 4.5 years ago till I co-founded my first venture-backed startup, KISSmetrics.

As they say, the startup life is a roller coaster with ups and downs. So if you are looking to start one, hopefully this blog post will help you.

Here are 11 things I wish I knew before starting my first startup:  [click to continue...]

You know content marketing is essential for you business, so why don’t you do it? If you are like me, you probably don’t have enough time in day to focus all of your energy on content marketing.

So what should you do?

Sadly, you don’t really have a choice but to leverage it. It’s such a powerful marketing channel; it will actually change your business. For example, at KISSmetrics, our content marketing strategy has resulted in our blog achieving 82% of our overall traffic and 70% of our leads.

And to top if off, content marketing is our cheapest channel marketing. That’s not too bad considering that those leads generate well into the millions of dollars in revenue for us each year.

So what should you do if you don’t have that much time to spend on content marketing? You should focus on these 3 tactics that provide the biggest bang for our buck:  [click to continue...]