Open How to read this book

Welcome! Follow these steps or perish!

This book is a step-by-step guide. You start from the beginning (here!) and move on section by section.

Each section builds on the previous and I will be referencing information I used near the beginning, all the way to the end.

That means you REALLY shouldn't skip ahead to a section that might interest you. I know, you might be ready and willing to jump head first into SEO or something else, but I implore you:

DO NOT DO IT.

Here is my side of the deal: I'll try to keep it entertaining as you read, as well as incredibly useful.

I know some of the early sections might sound boring. Who cares about analytics? It's just a bunch of numbers, help me write the perfect blog post, dang nabbit!

So the entertainment will be my attempt to keep you from doing that. I think that is a fair deal.

Oh, and if you follow these directions, your startup will be set up for incredible amounts of growth.

This is a step-by-step guide - not an exhaustive res

Open Who am I to tell you what to do?

Hi! I'm Kole.

Kole McRae specifically. Though not many people have Kole as a first name.

I am a digital marketing consultant who has been in this industry for 15 years now (I just checked! It makes me feel old...)

As a consultant, I have worked with hundreds of startups of all sizes and helped them grow. Some have gone from solopreneurs to international sensations.

On top of consulting, I also teach this stuff at Toronto Metropolitan University, helping students get hands on with digital marketing. Hopefully this means I have gotten good at taking the theory and turning it into something actionable for you.

That's probably enough of an intro, you don't need me to yammer on. Let's get to the actual content - read on!

I also want to answer a question that may be on your mind:

Why is this book free?

If it's as valuable as I say it is, why wouldn't I charge for it?

To that, I want to give you an insight: did you know that a ton of Michelin star restaurants have cook books?

Open Growth hacking is BS

This book will not contain any growth hacks.

This book is about building a sustainable business and giving you the tools and information that will guide you as you make marketing decisions for your business.

That word up there: sustainable. It's important.

When you've been doing this as long as I have (ok, only 15 years, but that's more than a lot of people in this industry) you learn that a lot of "hacks" that look good at first can turn around and shoot you in the foot.

That SEO hack that sent you to the top of Google results for all your keywords can get you kicked off Google all-together or completely disappear a week later.

That referral hack that massively improved your numbers? It's actually just bringing in a ton of bots.

Or maybe a privacy law changed, making the email list you built with a great hack illegal to use now.

On top of shooting you in the foot, the other issue with growth hacks is they often focus on the wrong metric. They usually prop up vanity metrics like

Open Analytics - you better not skip this part

I am forcing myself to write this bit. I am probably like you: I find analytics stuff incredibly boring.

It has also defined my career.

The thing is, if you don't build your startup around a deep understanding of analytics, you will likely waste huge amounts of time and/or money on the wrong things.

You need a direction to spend the limited time you have, and analytics is the guide. Without them, you are driving around without GPS in a place you know nothing about.

Let's begin:

what the hell is digital analytics anyway?

It's mainly gathering data on how users use your website and/or app so you can better understand what the user does. Specifically:

• Where they go
• What pages they linger on
• What pages they leave immediately
• what features they use
• How long they spend
• Where they came from <-- super important
• and a lot more

This means you can look at where users come from, such as your social media posts, and see if those users end up making a purchase or sign

Open Market to FEWER people, not more

I started writing this out in the analytics section, but I think it's an important enough concept that I want to give it a separate place to breath.

Not to mention, some people might skip the analytics section and go straight here, even when I told them not to.

I have found in my experience that the best form of marketing is tailoring the right message to the right people.

The best way I have found to explain it is in numbers, cause that is who I am.

The more people you try to message, the lower the likelihood that your message resonates with them, the lower the CTR and conversion rate of your campaign.

Fewer people to message = higher potential click-through rate = significantly more conversions.

And yes, this does boil down to: tailor a message to a very specific individual, and you will have a very high chance of a click and conversion. Obviously, that isn't scalable.

The reality is that doesn't happen often. The vast majority of the time I find people are trying to get in front

Open Think in loops

What I am about to tell you will feel like one of those growth hacks I said were evil.

It is not.

It is simply a way of thinking that will 10X your growth.

...or maybe not. It's just a way of thinking that I found works. Every single customer I talk to about it get this "AHA!" moment and go on to do really well.

Think in loops

How can you get the people that use your product or visit your website to bring in even more customers?

The answer can be simple or complex, based on your business.

The idea is that instead of a customer being valued as the amount they spend with you, you want to increase that value because they decreased the cost of your marketing.

This can be hard to explain in the abstract, so I am going to use some examples:

Glassdoor

Let's over simplify things a bit: Glassdoor wants more users to come to their website.

Users want to know if their salary is within a reasonable range for what they do.

Glassdoor has built a system where you have to bot

Open Fix your website, it probably sucks

I have a question:

Is there any way you can think of, right now, that would make it easier for people to purchase your product or service?

No matter how small. I mean absolutely tiny.

If you can't, you need to think deep and hard.

Maybe that form they fill out could be shorter. Maybe you can make it one less click to purchase. Maybe you can make it easier to find the purchase button or make it more clear what it is.

I have worked with hundreds of startups, and I can say this unequivocally: all of their websites suck.

Every single startup has a terrible website that gets in the way of someone trying to give them money.

The reason is that founders don't have to purchase their own product.

It can be really hard to see your website from the point of view of a customer, because you simply can never be one.

The website may be sexy and slick. It might have tons of information on the product or service. It may even load fast (this is rare), but often enough, it is an absolute cho

Open Email automation

Most people won't buy big things the first time they visit a website

That is probably an easy sentence to agree with. The bigger the purchase, the more time someone might need to make that purchase.

The thing is, even small purchases might take some time.

The issue is that the smaller the purchase, the more likely it is that someone might forget entirely that your product exists.

Which is why you need to remind them.

You need an email automation strategy.

Where to start

I generally recommend you ask people for their email at the very beginning of a purchase flow. Either in a multi-stage lead form or when they are literally making an ecommerce purchase.

In that stage, get their email (following all local laws of course) and then ask them to opt in to email messages from you.

From there, you should have a strategy of reminding people of your product or service.

There are some questions you need to answer, though:

How often do people want an email?

Likely they

Open A/B Testing - the colour of a button doesn't matter

One of my earliest customers was an education institution. They brought me in to build a culture of testing for them and see if I could somehow improve their conversion rate and help them get more students.

I was able to double their conversion rate with a single test.

How?

I go big with my tests.

Before I jump into why, let's talk about A/B testing in general.

The usual advice given around A/B testing is that you should always be testing new ideas to try and increase the conversion rate of your website.

Often, people will mention that simply changing the colour of a button can increase your conversion rate. This is a true statement. I can say for sure that you might increase your conversion rate with a tiny change.

If you constantly test small changes, the theory goes, you'll end up with constantly higher conversion rates.

That theory would be sound except for a small truth that people don't want to talk about:

Most tests fail.

The vast majority of the time, the chan

Open In summary

When it comes to digital marketing, almost all the advice is about getting traffic.

I argue that since 95% of visitors to your site will never return, you should focus on conversion rate and the funnel users must take before purchase first and THEN look at what might increase your traffic.

Every person that sees an unoptimized site is a lost opportunity. Fix the leaky funnel, then get the traffic.

Open SEO - Okay, we can talk about it now

Let's start with a hard truth

SEO can easily take a year to get any results.

Even if you do everything right, you can get nothing out of it.

Doing SEO well takes up an enormous amount of resources.

Any SEO hacks you do to overcome the above can get you banned from Google.

All this to say: SEO is REALLY hard, will take up all of your time and could get you nothing. Which is why I am about to go over a ton of research you need to do before you even begin.

You are going to spend 500+ hours on SEO, you need that time put in just the right place, or it will be wasted.

An important question

With everything, I just described, is SEO worth your time as a startup? Can you focus somewhere else and do SEO later?

The answer is... sort of?

When done right, it can lead to incredible growth for a company. It's also technically "free" in that you can do it without spending any money. Instead, it uses your time.

What I generally recommend to my clients is to do SEO in separate parts.

Open Become the expert

This can be its own section because it accomplishes two things at the same time:

• What I am about to go over will be marketing in its own right
• It builds links, quite organically
• The more you do it, the more marketing and links you get (remember the loops?)

You need to become the expert in your field

Yes, YOU, not your company.

It's common to want to make everything about your company, but in this instance it's important that the expert is human. People want a person they trust to be the one giving advice, not a company.

A simple example is that people trusted Rand Fishkin in the SEO space. Sure, he did everything for Moz, but people saw it as his advice. He was the expert.

That expertise followed him to SparkTorro that is doing well now.

You need to become that expert in your specific niche.

Sure, that makes sense on the surface, but HOW do you do this?

Hopefully, you have a niche. So there aren't already hundreds of other people claiming the same expertise. Then

Open Content beyond blog posts

Everyone says you need to do SEO, then they say you need a blog. It gets kind of exhausting.

The old advice used to be that you needed to write blog posts almost daily, really long ones too, and do that consistently for... well forever.

You're the founder of a startup. How in the hell are you supposed to have time for all that?

Not to mention, when you have to write that much, how can you possibly make sure it's unique and helpful in a way that is better than the millions of others doing that?

You don't.

So here are some options for content outside of blog posts which can still help with SEO (and other things!)

Make a podcast

I have this weird feeling that people might overlook this one, cause it kind of feels like bullshit. It has a "jumping on a trend" vibe that I am generally trying to avoid here, but seriously, podcasts work well.

A podcast works on a few different levels:

First, when you properly transcribe it (which you can do with AI and then just edit by hand) it serv

Open Paid marketing

This section is right near the end for a reason. You should only ever pay for traffic when you know that you have the highest likelihood that the traffic will convert and not just disappear like most traffic does.

It is time to talk about paid marketing.

I recommend that startups do their paid marketing in three steps, that must be done in this order:

1. Paid Search Ads - bottom of the funnel, get them where it matters

This is first because it's the easiest. You need to capture anyone that is searching for your exact service or product.

You will find the exact right people AND find them at the exact time they are looking for a solution that you offer.

You are shooting to get people at the bottom of the funnel here. They are literally typing in what your service does into Google or Bing - you just make sure you show up for it.

On top of being in the right place - make sure you have the most efficient spend here as well. Every paid search tool has an AI based bidding option that us

Open Conclusion

The main takeaways I want you to hear are this:

Most digital marketing advice out there is about getting traffic.

Instead, I challenge you to build a proper foundation first:

• Build out robust digital analytics before anything else
• Market to fewer people, not more
• Build a culture of A/B testing everything
• Become the expert in your niche
• Make content beyond blog posts

From there, you are set up to grow an incredible amount as a startup.

If you are interested in having someone build a plan using these principles but customized to your business and industry, feel free to reach out to me: Kole@KoleMcRae.com. Consultations are always free.

A big thanks to my wife Shawna O'Flaherty for ideas and all the support!