The Characteristics of a Content Hacker

Designing a Content Hacker

Combining the Growth Hacker & Content Marketer

A good Content Hacker is a combination of the Growth Hacker and the Content Marketer. For those of you that aren’t familiar with these terms, growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups to sell products and gain exposure. In July of 2012, Sean Ellis brought the term “growth hacker” to life and defined it as someone whose true north is growth and since then, Google has indexed 32,700,000 pages on the subject. Content marketing is marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media in order to grow and acquire customers. With the two, I give you a Content Hacker!

What makes up a Content Hacker

A Content Hacker is one heck of a guy. He thinks growth and focuses on traffic, content and bottom line. He sees sustainability instead of scale and keeps his eye on the prize by turning contacts into connections in the blink of an eye. He continually measures and manufacturing success and is SEO minded at all times. What. A. Guy. Are you smitten yet?

If the Growth Hacker’s North is Growth, Then the Content Hacker’s North is Sharable Content

What makes content more shareable?

Images alone will get your article 94% more views. Did you know, that 36 of the top 75 stories shared on Facebook included videos? People would so much rather watch a video than read a long article these days and who can blame them? Many of us are visual learners and retain information better and much quicker if it’s in a video format.

Other random facts and statistics that show what makes content more shareable includes:

• 36% of readers prefer headlines that start with the number 2
• Blogs give sites 434% more pages indexed by Google
• Articles with 2,400+ words rank higher in Google Search
• Content creation ranked as the single most effective SEO tactic by 53% of marketers
• 78% of consumers believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships
  

Intelligent & Creative Content Marketing Growth Hacks to Note

Are you the world’s next content hacker?

First up is Hotmail’s smooth move from 1998. Hotmail included the text “PS I Love You” with a link to their homepage at the bottom of all emails sent using their system. Because of this, they earned 12 million users in just over a year. Holy smokes. In 2006, Brian Clark launched CopyBlogger to teach the entire world how to grow traffic with content marketing. Copyblogger.com gained more than 115,000 unique customers. Not too far behind came KISSmetrics in 2010 with the release of 47+ infographics on their blog. Who doesn’t love a good infographic? Clearly 2,512,596 visitors do. I mean, really. In 2013, SAAS provider Groove began blog series documenting their journey to $100,000 a month in revenue which landed them 100,000 unique visitors and 5,000+ subscribers.

2017 is looking for the next Content Hacker. Who will it be? You?