Piehole.tv, a project we originally started to generate more work for our voiceovers on piehole.co.uk, has taken off. Priscilla loves make the videos. We’ve found some awesome animators to work with and there is something we haven’t been used to before – almost unlimited demand.
Thankfully, technically, piehole.tv requires pretty much zero input from yours truly. We have a great sales team, the website is based on wordpress – so what does that for me to do? The best answer I could come up with was to try and turn myself into a growth hacker, while we attempt to scale up a couple of notches. So what does that mean exactly? Here is my daily schedule right now:
8:00 – 9:30: Warm up the coffee machine, and crack open the analytics while I check the progress from yesterdays endeavours. I check the referring traffic report in google analytics and see if any of my previous days / weeks of effort had any effect. I note down the traffic sources that seem to be working and make a mental note of those that aren’t. I switch over to mixpanel and check out the funnels I’ve set up. I break them out by initial referring domain and see which sources are actually converting. I haven’t figured out how to get from the funnel view to the individual user view in mixpanel yet, so I switch to our internal CRM and see the names of the referred leads. I’ve set up our rails app to track the HTTP referrer and its noted along with new contact details. I check the notes from that were made by the sales team (picking out leads which were fake or had no relevant contact details).
09:30 – 10:30: Adwords. Ugh. You could spend a lifetime in this thing. We haven’t gotten started with Bing or other ad networks, but I close out all my other apps, and just dig into the ads. There is always another campaign you could try or another set of keywords to tweak. I keep track of the changes I make and trawl back over historic changes to try and pick out any improvements. I make a note of the revelent landing pages I want to tweak or create in the afternoon.
10:30 – 12:00: Now its time to start checking for opportunities to interact. For me this means checking Quora, LinkedIn, Yahoo groups and a couple of specialsed discussion groups. I take notes of any interesting questions people are seeking to have answered. These prove as fodder for blog posts or other content I’ll get to in the afternoon. This is not always about finding traffic sources. It is great to take the pulse of what people are talking about in general. Again, watching out for issues or problems we can address is the goal. I cross reference any hittail suggestions with my adwords spend and introduce new campaigns to match them up.
12:00 – 13:00: Of course, it’s easy to get stuck in a local minima. Figuring out some new sources of traffic can be a good ides – as long as this is kept in check. Its easy to get dazzled by the next new fangled conference, widget or social marketing app to appear. I head over to mixergy.com/premium or StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com and check them out lead generation idess. Each episode contains about a weeks worth of setup and ideas so sometimes its better just to refresh a video I’ve watch before rather than dump a whole new strategy in on top of an already busy day. The corollary of taking on a new strategy, is deciding which of the older strategies to dump, or which to outsource.
13:00 – 14:00: Turn off the computer and take a walk. Or, as is the case tomorrow, order some local food delivered via chefsurfing.
14:00 – 17:30: Content creation time. I try and take all that learning (lets hope) from the morning and put it into action. There are a couple of strategies we are using at the moment. They include:
- Info graphics
- Video interviews
- (Guest) Blogging
- Javascript “helper” tools.
- Email marketing
- Hitting the good ole’ telephone.
- Designing a competition
- Promoting to affiliates