The Weekly Startup #15

The Weekly Startup #15

Welcome to The Weekly Startup. The weekly newsletter intended to spark your inner fire and build a life you don't need to escape from.

How to find and kickstart your next business

If you've been reading along you've probably noticed my fandom of Scott DeLong and his recent challenge. If not, you can catch up right here.

I've been following his advice and looking to build something beyond my current quote and ad play on Instagram. Today I want to highlight one of the key factors Scott uses for growing his content businesses.

The above tweet sums it up. Basically, a dumbed-down version of kickstarting this would be:

1. Make a list of topics you care about or people in your circle care about.

2. Make a facebook page dedicated to these topics.

3. Make a newsletter dedicated to these topics.

4. Run 20 different ads targeted to the topics you've identified.

5. See what ad brings in the most people (subscribers) at the lowest cost.

6. Spend another 1000 on your winning ad

7. Now you've got a kickstart for your digital business.

Since it's topics you care about it will be pretty easy to drill down and create valuable content around it. The main question when making this content will be: How can I help people who are interested in X.

To grow it further the only thing left is to search for content around your winning topic, rebrand it, and publish it.

First things first, create around 10 valuable guides around your chosen topic. Evergreen content that will work for you in the long run. If you do this, you'll notice different angles you can use to create smaller snippets or content perfectly fit for social media.

Don't underestimate the power of owned media > a website > a newsletter.

If you can gather eyeballs you can create traffic. Monetization comes later.

I'm trying a similar approach for Startup Library. Most of you know me from Instagram, but recently I also launched my Facebook page and grew it to a little under 3000 likes for as little as 11 cents per like. I still need to expand on the next steps but I can tell that it works. I'm also trying it for a good friend of mine with a retail store. In the next chapter, I'll cover the same topic but now from the agency's perspective.

How to use the previous tactic as a service

A good friend of mine owns a comic store and is looking to expand online. He's been working with agencies who (IMO) all offer inferior services.

What I mean by that is the boom of Social Media marketing agencies who offer specific services but fail to look deeper at what's the actual pain point.

For example, think about an agency that offers Instagram growth. If a potential client thinks that Instagram is the way and knocks on their door, they obviously sell their service. Instead one should ask critical questions to find the underlying pain point.

• Why do you think Instagram is the right way for you?

• What are you looking to accomplish?

• How are you currently getting your leads/clients?

It's hard to stay focussed if the internet gives you a new opportunity every day. Lack of focus results in mediocre efforts.

Back to my friend. What I did was a small test of a similar tactic molded for comic geeks.

Instead of dropping an endless stream of products on people's feeds, I've done a little research for well-known meme pages in the Comic niche. I used a tool called Feed Spy to filter their best-performing posts. Then I went and scheduled the posts on Facebook.

The idea here is to create a community. As Scott DeLong mentioned well, Social Media is about Social. Don't bomb people with your products, entertain them.

If I'm into comics and collectibles, I don't go and follow Facebook or Instagram pages. I Google specifics instead, or I visit my well-known websites and do the shopping there.

So the tactic here is to use social media for entertainment. It's part of the culture since we share comic-related memes ourselves as well.

Next, I took 2 of the "Viral Memes" and created an easy ad saying:

Are you a comic geek? Me too. Hit like and join hundreds of other comic lovers from your region.

I tested it for 35$ and added a little over 100 new page likes in 7 days. Now I'm looking to get costs down by testing different variations and slowly raising the budget to grow the page.

The next step would be to create a Facebook group on a very specific topic, invite all Facebook page followers (a feature that is possible) and add an email verification wall on it. Clearly stating that we will add the email to our exclusive mailing.

The only thing left is to keep dropping entertaining content on the page, keep the group relevant to the topic we've chosen, and keep the mailing exclusive.

With the latter, I mean that you shouldn't start spamming people with products right away. Instead, educate them, and offer them exclusive deals no one else gets.

This last part offers me a bridge to talk about my next experience this week. it has all to do with Black Friday deals.

I hope that you see how you can leverage this tactic to build your own business or to help others grow theirs. 2 different angles to use it. If anything is unclear just reply to this email and drop me your questions.

My weekly frustration: Black Friday deals

No way to escape them this past week. And what a mess again. Every year I am disappointed by the companies who go at it and offer deals to everyone, except their existing customers.

I've counted at least 3 services I pay full price for, for at least a few years now, that advertised 50% off to new clients this past week. As I am an emotional creature, I took the moment to cancel all my subscriptions with them.

A friend of mine said that we should maybe just go along with them and play the games. Switch our internet provider every year just following the Black Friday deals. Yet something in me tells me that this shouldn't be the way.

As for marketing, I like to put growth stages into 3 categories.

1. Acquisition

2. Retention

3. Monetisation

Black Friday obviously only cares about the first. Getting people to sign up. And this is often part of any business. We spend a shitload of money to acquire customers. But after we've signed them it often turns dark.

And the fun part. It has been proven that selling a new product to your existing clients is 7x cheaper.

So for anyone out there working on their marketing plans, please, focus on Retention as well. Use your spending wisely.

If you don't have anything else to sell them, you should really do some research into the stages your clients enter before and after buying your product. Get to learn how they use it, what they use alongside it, and what they use as a replacement if your product doesn't fulfill their needs anymore.

A short mention of stage 3. With monetization in this cycle, I mean making more money of your clients without charging them extra. Basically without them feeling it at all. A simple example of this would be to sell advertising space in your packages. If you're into retail and you ship out orders to people with certain demographics and interests, it's a perfect place to include folders or product samples.

It's a short one this week

I wanted to share this specific tactic with you that I believe can help you ignite a new hustle. Some marketing advice along with it. I don't want to waste any more of your time because I got nothing more to say for now.

If you got any questions or feedback I'd love for you to reach out. You can reply to this newsletter, it's connected to my personal email.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a very nice week!

Erwin

How You Can Help Me. (If you like this mailing)

First of all, thanks a lot for reading. It motivates me to create and find more content going forward.

I want this information to be free for everyone. The world will only be a better place if chances are distributed more evenly. Inequality is already growing too fast. It's up to us to tighten the gap.

You can help me grow this educational platform I'm building in 2 easy ways (that cost you nothing).

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